« A black Republican in Baltimore has an awesome campaign video | When American universities taught common sense »
August 18, 2020

Democrats' virtual convention was embarrassingly bad television

By Thomas Lifson

The political party that has a near-lock on donations and endorsements from the entertainment industry could not muster a tolerable video feed to take advantage of the two hours of free television coverage available to them last night.  The series of pre-recorded video presentations offered as a substitute for an actual Democrat political convention was so tedious that even one of the runners-up in the Democrats' contest panned it in a tweet.

Plenty of others on the left, such as N.Y. Timesman Charles Blow, shared her disappointment:

Kaylee McGhee, writing in the Examiner, shared my bemusement at the gigantic fumble:

The convention began with the National Anthem, sung virtually by singers whose faces twirled and rotated across the screen in such a way that I almost wonder whether a middle schooler who just discovered Microsoft Powerpoint was put in charge of the layout. Then, it became obvious that most of the interviews were prerecorded, which makes the entire convention feel more like a telethon than a significant political event.

If the Democratic Party was aiming for a conversational tone, this is not it. The monologues sound rehearsed and forced, and the sudden concert breaks are distracting. Surely, someone, somewhere, among the Democratic Party's many Hollywood connections could have helped them avoid this.

To be fair, there's only so much you can do virtually. It would have been impossible to recreate the energy that accompanies an in-person political event. But the Democratic Party could have at least tried not to squash what little excitement remained. Truly, anything would have been better than this.

Twitter users were far less polite, including many Democrats who were disappointed, even outraged at the incompetence.  There are collections of amusing-to-scathing tweets at The Daily Wire, Breitbart, and of course  Twitchy (multiple pages).  A sample:

 

The always delightful Mollie Hemingway was appalled:

As the snoozefest droned on, Mollie got a little desperate:

Mollie also sees that Trump, the most successful reality television producer in the history of the medium, already has shown that he and his team better understand what makes for interesting TV: spontaneity and genuineness.

 

More Mollie here.

Trump-hating Republican John Kasich came in for a ton of mockery for his segment that made the point that America is at a crossroads by standing at...wait for it...an actual crossroads.  I wonder what genius came up with that concept!  (Plenty of mockery here.)

Twitter screen grab

There's the postman's son, all by himself, alone out in the country addressing a party whose base is the cities, with nobody following his lead.  But the thing that struck me as really odd is the specific choice of the crossroads, with the branch going off to the left seriously bent, while the main road, that continues slightly to the right, is perfectly straight.  That's a message all by itself that works on the brain entirely apart from the words chosen by the ex-governor and Fox News host.  It perfectly sums up the aims of the Democrats to bend the nation and our institutions sharply to the left, with a growing list of radical changes, from forced low-income housing in the suburbs to blackout-prone "green" energy and defunded or abolished police forces, for example.

Republicans have the opportunity to watch and learn from the Democrats' failures.  But as Mollie H pointed out, with Trump in charge, they already have someone who understands the medium better than the Hollywood pros, in exactly the same way he understands politics better than the swampy pros and diplomacy better than the globalist pros who have been deindustrializing America and building up China for decades.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com