A memo went out Thursday night
An old speaker’s trick at the end introductory applause is to settle one’s hands on the sides of the podium to quiet an audience and signal time to begin speaking. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tried that on Thursday night, the cheers seemed for a moment as if they might subside. But Democratic National Convention delegates packed to the rafters in Chicago’s United Center were not having it. The cheers swelled anew, and louder still. Overcome with emotion, Warren pulled back from the podium a half step and wiped away a tear.
Warren’s ovation was the loudest and longest of any speaker save for President Joe Biden’s hero’s welcome late Monday night, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s on Thursday as the Democrats’ presidential nominee. President Barack Obama’s matched Warren’s welcome in length but not in intensity. It was immediate and rapturous, as if springing from delegates’ hearts and souls.
Joe Biden’s and Nancy Pelosi’s legacies will not be fully appreciated until historians weave together how their personal stories and battle scars, legislative accomplishments and deep political skills, built the country this generation’s children will inherit.
Nevertheless, what we witnessed in Chicago was not only a generational passing of the Democratic Party’s torch from Biden to Harris, but the passing of an entire generation of Democratic establishment, though they may not yet know it.
The term netroots gained traction in the early aughts as a label for progressive bloggers and activists who found each other and built community on the Internet. The annual activist conference that became Netroots Nation sprang from that community in 2006. (Warren has been a regular speaker since before becoming senator from Massachusetts in 2013.) A running joke was that the Democratic establishment considered them “dirty hippies.” DFH is the family friendly acronym the community adopted for how establishment Democrats really saw the upstarts without saying so out loud, at least in public.
As brusque congressman and then Vermont senator and presidential candidate, independent Bernie Sanders championed their progressive policy goals. But Warren’s ovation reflects how firmly her warmer populism has taken root in the wider party and won Democrats’ hearts.
The DNC convention’s message was clear, US editor Betsy Reed writes this morning in The Guardian: “this is Harris’s party now.”
But is it?
Democratic Socialists of America candidate, former bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then 28, came from nowhere in 2018 to upset Rep. Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in his Bronx and Queens district after outraising her 10-1. The veteran Crowley, leader of the local Democratic machine, was seen as possible next in line to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He’s gone. DNC delegates chanted A-O-C when she took the stage on Monday night.
Harris has moved left since arriving in Washington, but despite Donald Trump’s branding her far left, she is not. But if Warren’s stunning welcome was any indication, Harris may be lagging somewhat behind the party she now leads. If progressive politicos are DFHs, the United Center was filled to the brim with them on Thursday night.
This is no longer Sens. Chuck Schumer’s or Dick Durbin’s Democratic Party, nor even Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s. Did they get the memo?
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