Here is a de facto libretto to help you translate — and maybe even make sense of — the soap opera that has made this year’s presidential conventions quite unconventional.
Campaign 2024 produced two very different conventions, with two diverse themes. We aren’t talking here about those old familiar Democrat vs. Republican differences. We are talking about differences that redefine the core principles of two-party politics.
Whether your party and its leader are all about American patriotism or about creating America-dissing division and hate just for political gain. Whether your leader is saying things that will Make America Great Again or Make Americans Grate Again.
This past week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago formally launched a presidential campaign that made clear Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is very much all about the former. We all saw that former President Donald Trump seems frantic and panicked and perfectly willing to just make us grate, again.
Back in Milwaukee, we realized Trump had built his campaign mindset upon a one-plank platform: Beat Biden. Always attack. Too old. “Crooked Joe.” Blah blah. So, even though he had just survived an assassin’s ear-skimming bullet, he kept interrupting his staff-scripted teleprompter to blast us with his same-old fire hose of beat-Biden attacks.