Over the past month Americans have encountered challenging and shifting political storms. We were leaving the country for two weeks when I wrote that the media’s inconsistent narrative selection and framing around the presidential race between President Joe Biden and former president Trump was helping kill our democracy. A friend who is a retired broadcast reporter, anchor and producer at NBC and NPR wrote an email in response to say he had encouraged those he knows who are still in the various newsrooms where he worked “to shed their lifelong election coverage habits,” but to no avail.

We boarded a plane for Oslo the day the political world shifted. Biden announced he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president and thirty minutes later he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. I was an overseas observer while the election dynamic dramatically changed. As we touched back down in the U.S. on August 1st, President Biden and Vice President Harris showed what real leadership could accomplish when they pulled off a multi-country prisoner swap to secure the release of political hostages unjustly held in Russia. The country celebrated “a very good afternoon” while Trump fumed in his Mar-a-Lago bunker that he could have pulled off a better exchange if he were president. It was a claim that rang as true as one of his innumerable and ultimately laughable announcements of “infrastructure week” during his disastrous presidency.

Shortly after we returned, Harris secured enough delegates to claim the nomination, and she selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—a midwestern Progressive in the historical sense of the term—to be her choice for Vice President.

The joy that Harris and Walz brought to a campaign bogged down by worry and angst was obvious and cleansing. Huge crowds were showing up for rallies in swing states, even with last-minute shifts in venues—as in Detroit—when the original location could no longer hold those who wanted to attend. Donations surged and polls shifted. Harris led by 2.5 points in Saturday’s 538 national poll tracker. Large numbers of volunteers were being recruited at each rally, one of the key reasons for holding in-person events at this point in a campaign.

Perhaps most importantly, the Democratic ticket was talking about a positive vision for America.

• It is a message of economic fairness for all, ending the disaster that trickle-down economics has been for the middle class and for the country as a whole.

• It is a message that everyone matters and should be treated fairly, no matter where you were born, the color of your skin, your gender, or who you love, ending the politics of racial and class division that only benefits some of our citizens.

• And it is a message of the value of community and picking each other up, so that we all rise together, ending the disingenuous myth of the rugged individualist, a story told by the wealthy to disguise the stealing of community wealth by a few oligarchs.

The media is having as much trouble adjusting to the new reality as is Donald Trump, who recently called reporters to Mar-a-Lago for a self-described press conference. He served up “his usual banquet of lies,” leading conservative writer Tom Nichols of The Atlantic to note that Trump appears to have gone entirely off the rails. “The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.”

And the concerns include the entire Republican ticket. Election expert Marc Elias wrote that “the nicest thing one can say about Trump’s VP choice is that he is weird. Vance makes Texas Sen. Ted Cruz seem charming.”

Interestingly, the journalists who clamor that the candidates must speak to the media did not ask the former president about the recent bombshell report suggesting that Egypt poured $10 million into his 2016 campaign, an action that is certainly illegal and perhaps treasonous.

And after journalists had begun to complain that they did not have enough access to Harris, “she came to them directly on the tarmac at the Detroit airport and asked, ‘What’cha got?’ All but one of their questions were about Trump and his comments; the one question that was not about Trump came when a journalist asked when Harris would sit down for an interview.” 

As media critic Margaret Sullivan wrote in the Guardian, when Harris interacted with reporters “as in that brief ‘gaggle’ in Detroit, the questions were silly (emphasis added).”

Silly.

Sullivan did not frame this interaction as “unimportant or ill-thought out or missing the mark or poorly framed” observed one online commentator. Just silly. “Sometimes, it’s just one well-chosen word that sums things up the best.”

In previewing an upcoming economic speech, the New York Times wrote, “Harris Is Set to Lay Out an Economic Message Light on Details,” adding that she is expected to tweak Biden administration themes “in a bid to turn the Democratic economic agenda into an asset.”

“The United States economy under Biden and Harris has been the strongest in the world, and now that inflation seems to be under control as well, Harris needs to turn that record ‘into an asset’? Political journalist James Fallows wrote: ‘Now they are all just trolling us.’”

Although Sullivan called for the Vice President to do more interviews with the media, how can you blame first Biden and now Harris for not bothering with access journalism or the courting of established media after those sorry, silly performances? Instead, as historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, the Democrats have “recalled an earlier time by turning directly to voters through social media and by articulating clear policies that support their dedication to the larger project of American democracy.”

Singer, songwriter, and poet Carrie Newcomer recently recalled the words of author/activist Valarie Kaur. Speaking at a gathering of concerned citizens, Kaur said, “Perhaps this is not the darkness of a tomb, but rather the darkness of a womb.”

In travail something new can be born.

As we stand on the cusp of the Democratic National Convention, it does feel as if we are seeing a new era in American history alongside the birth of a new Democratic Party, one based on three distinct people and community-based movements in our past. In an illuminating history lesson, Richardson wrote of this combination of Joe Biden’s New Deal commitment to economic fairness, the 1950s and 60s roots of the civil rights activism of Kamala Harris, and vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz’s life-long embrace of the community principles of midwestern Progressivism. In this shift “we are seeing the creation of a new, national program for democracy.” 

Perhaps the darkness is finally lifting, a darkness we have been living in since the Republican party threw in its lot with what Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona—a lifelong Republican—called “extremists that are committed to forcing people in the center of the political spectrum out of the party.” As Mayor Giles told those in the political middle as he was endorsing the Harris-Walz ticket, “You don’t owe a damn thing to that political party . . . you don’t owe anything to a party that is out of touch and is hell-bent on taking our country backward. And by all means, you owe no displaced loyalty to a candidate that is morally and ethically bankrupt.” 

It won’t be easy to win, but let’s work hard these last few weeks before the election for a new, national program for democracy. And for America. While we’re at it, let’s have some fun and revel in the joy. *

Our country deserves it.

More to come . . .

DJB

---

*For a thoughtful view on all that could go wrong between now and Election Day, read Marcy Wheeler’s take from Saturday.

---

Photo by Patti Black on Unsplash