Democratic National Committee

Milwaukee is a victory for Silicon Valley’s shadow state

The real venue for the Democratic National Convention will not be Milwaukee, but the online platforms that will facilitate and stream it: Zoom, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and so on. Necessity is the mother of symbolic invention: Democratic politics and Big Tech have been merging for some time. Now COVID has rendered a political party indistinguishable from the Silicon Valley shadow state. Barack Obama, who will speak to the convention on Wednesday, made a sustained effort to connect Washington DC to Silicon Valley throughout his time as president. One measure of his success is that many former members of his administration have migrated to the tech industry. David Plouffe, a key campaign adviser, went on to work for Uber and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

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How delaying the DNC helps Biden

Joe Biden keeps getting more unconventional. It started when he delivered short speeches and one-word answers like 'yes' or 'no'. Now he and the Democrats are becoming even friskier, declaring that they want to push off their grand jamboree, the big enchilada, the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee to August, a week before Trump holds his own shindig in Florida. Smart move on a number of fronts. For one thing, the original mid-July date simply allowed too much time to elapse between the Democratic and Republican conventions. Trump would have pummeled Biden relentlessly during those weeks. A let-down after Milwaukee would have been inevitable. Trump would have reveled in the build-up to his own convention.

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Democracy in danger

The corruption of its democracy is one of America’s oldest yet most surprising habits. Edgar Allan Poe, it is believed, died after the ordeal of ‘cooping’: an informal exercise in getting out the vote, in which an often forcibly inebriated man was marched from booth to booth and made to vote for the same candidate each time. The voters of Massachusetts’s 4th District, compelled by a party machine to endorse Joseph P. Kennedy III, will know the feeling. Indeed, John F. Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 elections is said to have depended on the stuffing of ballots in the Chicago of Mayor Richard J. Daley — and possibly on the intervention in Cook County by the crime boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy went on to win Illinois by 8,000 votes and to take the White House.

democracy

The DNC would rather lose than nominate Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard is arguably the most interesting woman in American politics today. A combat veteran from the Iraq war, the Hawaii Democrat’s beliefs were forged not only in the desert wastelands of Iraq but also by the wastefulness of America’s permanent bipartisan fusion party. Having served in the US Army National Guard in a medical unit during the darkest days of pre-surge Iraq, Gabbard was forced to question all of her pre-war assumptions. From that point, she entered politics and quickly rose to prominence as one of the few voices of restraint and reason among Democrats now infected by the warmongering ruling class. Since then, the four-term congresswoman has been lampooned by the leaders of her own party for her troubles.

tulsi gabbard