Thousands of Democratic delegates, alternates, party activists, and their cheerleaders in the national media are in Chicago this week to serve as the live studio audience for round after round of speechifying interspersed with cameo appearances from celebrities to liven up an event that is devoid of its basic purpose, that is to officially nominate their candidate for president.
That became moot weeks ago when the Democrats held a virtual roll call to officially tap Vice-President Kamala Harris with the dj’d musical spectacle on Tuesday being more showmanship and celebrity posturing than anything official.
They may as well have slipped in Milli Vanilli for the state and territorial run down as it was all fake. Keeping in that spirit the sundry special interest and identity politics patchwork of party bosses should’ve lipsynced their comments.
But then even the “phoned in” delegate vote tabulation wasn’t the most egregious aspect of the show.
For the first time since 1968 a major American political party nominated a presidential candidate who did not win a single caucus or primary that year.
As America from that point forward began the “small-d” democratization of the process we select presidents in the aftermath of RFK’s assassination minutes after claiming victory in the California primary, the “big D” Democratic Party has completely ignored the votes and voices of over 14 million citizens, constituting 87% of the total votes cast in the 2024 Democratic Presidential Primaries and awarding 3904 out of a possible 3949 delegates to President Joe Biden.
But wait there’s more to the “historic” nature of Kamala Harris’ candidacy.
Harris is the first party nominee to have not received a single vote in a contested primary since 1924, when John W. Davis of West Virginia secured the Democratic nod on the 103rd ballot. Harris had run for president in 2020 but was such an abysmal candidate and ran a campaign that raised numerous questions about her competence that she didn’t even make it to 2020, scuttling her candidacy in early December 2019.
Biden himself did his own number on “small d” in the “big D” Democratic Party vengefully tearing up the primaries and caucus in advance of his own later sudden departure when he punished Iowa and New Hampshire for embarrassing him in their respective contests in 2020 under the guise of lack of diversity (i.e., he couldn’t get a machine to sway the results as he did in South Carolina courtesy of Jim Clyburn).
For years we have been pelted with incendiary tripe that served as motivational talks for would-be congressional and presidential assassins that “Donald Trump is a threat to democracy,” yet in Chicago they had a literal dance party to celebrate their dismissal of over 50 delegate contests and the arbitrary awarding of a presidential nomination to someone who has never received a single vote as an active presidential candidate.
That the party honchos saw this brazen subversion of the Democratic process as an expedient necessity speaks volumes as to the true condition of the enfeebled man with the nuclear codes and further raises suspicions about why the Democrats pushed for an unprecedented early debate prior to the official nominations…even the one handled via Zoom call.
Unless they planned on the contingency of having to execute their Brooks Brothers and pant suit Beltway insurrection.
That Harris has been spared any kind of testing or vetting as a presidential candidate in the 2024 primaries and was sprung as a last second nominee 100 days before the national election makes the hyperbolic headline of the Washington Post laughable when you had a renominated sitting president given the hook while his press conference averse sitting vice-president is elevated in the blink of an eye.
And not to spare the GOP side from their share of unintended complicity but I don’t know how Team Trump did not anticipate the obvious prospect under the circumstances of a clearly diminished President Biden and the unique timing of the square off?
Beyond this particular chapter of a weakened democracy in America are the potential consequences of the precedent set and normalization of this practice.
Nothing on this scale happens in a vacuum.
Chicago might not be burning as it did in 1968, but after decades of progress to shift power from the brokers to the hoi polloi the democratization of the manner we choose presidents has been scorched by a party whose very name is a false advertisement.