The convention no one's talking about

The second convention is usually a rebuttal of the first; this time there's nothing much to rebut

In 1996, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, then the oldest first-time presidential nominee in US history at 73, sought to address the age issue at the Republican convention:

“Age has its advantages,” he said:

Let me be the bridge to an America than only the unknowing call myth. Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith and confidence in action.

And to those who say it was never so, that America’s not been better, I say you’re wrong. And I know because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.

It was a nice bit of conservative rhetoric. And it was also an invitation to Bill Clinton, re-nominated two weeks later, to pose himself as a “bridge to the future,” one of the enduring themes of that election and of Clinton’s second term.

This was a pretty typical setup. One of the advantages to having the second convention, usually the position of the party in control of the White House, is that it can rebut the earlier one. Sarah Palin mocked the Greek columns on Barack Obama’s stage from a week earlier in 2008 to make him look like a vapid celebrity. When Walter Mondale sought to display his honesty in 1984 by vowing that either he or his opponent would raise taxes, Ronald Reagan rebutted that by devoting a great deal of his acceptance speech to criticizing taxes and Democrats’ love for them.

What stands out about this week’s Democratic convention is the almost complete lack of mention of anything that occurred at the Republican convention last month in Milwaukee. (Okay, sure, you could view John Legend and Sheila E. covering Prince as a way of dunking on the Republican star power of Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan, but that kind of imbalance was going to happen anyway.) Yes, convention speakers are going after Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, but mostly because of things they’ve said and done publicly outside the convention.

The Republican convention this year had two main themes: 1) Joe Biden is incompetent and should not be running for president; 2) Donald Trump showed heroism in the face of an assassination attempt. The first theme is no longer operative, and no one really cares about the second one anymore. It’s really quite striking that what was a pretty well-run convention, at least by the standards of the Trump-era RNC, had such a short shelf life.

One slight exception to this is more of a decades-long distinction between the parties, and that is the matter of inclusion. An important sub-theme that came up several times at the Republican convention was immigration, with several speakers and the RNC delegates calling explicitly for mass deportation. J.D. Vance’s acceptance speech inverted the old concept of “America as an idea” and said that America is a specific place to which some people do not belong.

Democrats have hit hard in the other direction this week. Michelle Obama talked about those left out of the privileged classes: “[Kamala Harris] understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.” Poet Amanda Gorman proclaimed, “What defines a patriot is not our love of liberty, but our love for one another.” Tim Walz ran with that theme:

Growing up in a small town… you learn how to take care of each other. That family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do. They may not love like you do. But they’re your neighbors. And you look out for them. And they look out for you. Everybody belongs. And everybody has a responsibility to contribute.

Again, this isn’t specifically a conversation between conventions, but more one between parties. The fight over who counts and who doesn’t is one of the oldest ones in this or any other nation. And it’s one on which the parties are increasingly staking out very different views.