I booked the trip to Chicago on a whim.
That this year's Democratic National Convention would be held in Chicago had initially piqued my interest because (1) Chicago's my hometown and (2) there's no better time to visit the Chi than in late August, when the DNC was scheduled to take place. Any time is good, really, between early May, when the city's on the brink of summer, and the still-warm autumn days of late September, when driving up to the Long Grove Apple Fest and picking up a brown-bag apple pie is a must. Visiting Chicago in April or October is a crapshoot (the weather forecasts completely severed from reality), and flying in during the five long months of winter, when even the rats and roaches pray for spring, is crazy.
There was the historical aspect, too: a chance to experience a major-party convention ahead of yet another pivotal presidential election. (Four of the last six have been crucial.) Chicago has held 14 Republican and 11 Democratic conventions, including the 1860 Republican convention that nominated Lincoln, plus the "Bull Moose" convention in 1912 that tapped Teddy Roosevelt. (Second-place Baltimore has only held a total of 10 conventions.) And even though we all knew this year's Democratic convention would be crammed to rafters with celebrities, especially after the Republican one featured Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan — plus Hollywood is the capital of the liberal world — I've never been the type to go out of my way just to lay eyes on someone famous or powerful. So attending the DNC didn't interest me much.
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That is until Biden gave a shockingly pathetic performance in his debate against Trump on June 27, looking and sounding like the residents I used to sit with at the old folks home where I worked . . . in the dementia ward. It was sad and upsetting to watch, Biden supposedly being the leader of the free world and the person meant to keep Trump from returning to power with a vengeance. But any sympathy I had for the old fart quickly turned to anger when he put ego above country by stubbornly refusing to step aside and let his party nominate a fitter replacement — telling George Stephanopoulos "I don't think anybody's more qualified to be president or win this race than me" — even as the chorus of Democratic heavy hitters calling for him to bow out continued to grow.
With RFK Jr. and his consistent 20 percent approval rating among Democratic voters presenting a not-insignificant challenge for the party's nomination (and even though he had suspended his campaign back in October), the Democratic convention scheduled in August was now promising to be not so conventional.
Then came the assassination attempt on Saturday, July 13, in Butler, Pennsylvania. I was one of probably 100 million American voters who assumed the failed attempt on Trump's life had cinched his reelection, especially with him rising to his feet the way he did, fist in the air, blood streaming from his ear, him mouthing the words "FIGHT! . . . FIGHT!" In that moment, Trump appeared beyond presidential — he looked heroic. No one could imagine Biden doing anything like it.
"Biden's the first president you can punch assassinate," goes a Shane Gillis bit from a few years ago. The bit begins with Shane saying that, "of all the presidents, I think it's fair to say, Donald Trump would be the funniest one to see get shot. . . . The noise he would make when he got hit."
Shane has probably retired that one . . .
I took an assignment from The Latino Newsletter to cover UnidosUS's annual conference at the MGM Grand here in Vegas the following week, mainly since Biden was set to speak on the third and final day, Wednesday, July 17. He flew into town that Tuesday and spoke at the NAACP's convention over at Mandalay Bay, before shaking hands with shoppers at Mario's Westside Market in a historically Black neighborhood. He apparently woke up the next morning with a bit of a runny nose and a slight cough, though that didn't keep him from shaking more hands, this time with diners at The Original Lindo Michoacan on the Latino side of town. Only after that visit did Biden's doctor administer a COVID test, which came back positive.
Catching COVID was the straw that broke the back of Biden's reelection. Too old to be president was one thing, but too sick to even run was too much. And yet, even then, a few more days would pass before Biden finally faced the music. "It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President," read a statement posted to his Twitter account on the morning of Sunday, July 21st. "And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term."
Less than 30 minutes later came a second tweet, this one a photo of the president and Vice President Kamala Harris laughing in the White House Rose Garden. After saying that his tapping Kamala as his running mate in 2020 was "the best decision (he's) made," Biden threw his "full support and endorsement for Kamala" as the party's nominee, ending with: "Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this."
The flood of enthusiasm for Kamala was unlike anything seen since Trump's own run in 2016. People, especially Black, Gen Z, and centrist liberals — the same crowd that had been amped for Hillary — were now ecstatic. "Joy" became the buzzword around the Kamala campaign (still is).
Her replacing Biden on the ticket uncovered a sense of dread that had pervaded the Democratic voter base over the previous few months, but especially since that disastrous debate. It appeared as though Democrats had backed Biden mostly as a stopgap against Trump's return, even while many of them quietly feared that Biden might not be up to the task of beating Trump in the election, much less steering the country for another four years.
I'd heard and read people say something to the effect that "even if Biden can't finish his second term, Kamala's there to replace him," which to me seemed to subtly imply that she wasn't capable of winning the presidency on her own. I guess these people remembered Kamala's half-baked run for the White House in the last election, which showed an early spark during a debate in June 2019, where the future VP blasted her future boss on his racist record in the Senate, before her campaign fizzled out by January. Or maybe they figured that a candidate who had been such an ineffectual and practically invisible Number Two for the past three and a half years wouldn't inspire much confidence from the public if and when she took a shot at the top job.
But all of that — the memories and the doubts — went out the window when Biden bowed out and endorsed Kamala. Now, it was like the Democratic Party's most able statesman since Bill Clinton and its greatest champion of the people since Bobby Kennedy had been right under their noses the whole time. In the two or three weeks after Biden's endorsement, then the Obamas', the Clintons', AOC's, Bernie's, etc., it seemed as though only an act of God could keep Kamala from becoming the next president of the United States. The history was already written, the movie already in the can. All that was left was for America to watch it play out. It was October 2008 all over again, when the Obama presidency felt inevitable.
The outpouring of excitement and, yeah, sheer joy for Kamala's candidacy left me stunned, disgusted, distraught, and, as with any kind of mass stupidity, thoroughly entertained. I saw through the masquerade as though I were watching an elaborate magic trick from both angles, the audience's and the magician's. Actually, the closest comparison that comes to mind is when a desperate, love-hungry single lady on one of those dating shows tries to convince herself that she's truly in love with a guy who she finds attractive but boring as fuck. Her brain tells her that he's who she should be with, though her gut tells her run. And so, ignoring her gut, she forces herself to smile and laugh at his lame-ass jokes, and chokes down her ick to kiss him and receive his affection. But it's the shit-eating grin and panic in the eyes that give her away. (We all see you, lady.)
The talking heads on Fox News saw this, too. I remember one of them describing the energy around the new Kamala campaign as a "giddiness bubble" that would eventually "burst." Granted, they were only doing what they're paid to do by raining on the Democrats' parade, but this time the propaganda came pretty close to accurate reporting. (In my chats with dozens of people in Chicago during the Democratic convention a few weeks later, I would get the sense that the bubble had already popped, at least within a sizable swathe of the Democratic base.)
It was also shaping up to be 1968 again, too. Just as in that chaotic, world-shifting year, the incumbent president nearing the end of his first term had decided not to seek reelection — Johnson because the war in Vietnam was so unpopular, Biden because the war in Gaza is so unpopular and his physical and mental abilities seem to be fading fast. In fact, Biden was the first incumbent not to seek reelection since Johnson, who had entered the office on the death of his predecessor; same with Truman, who was the last incumbent not to seek reelection before Johnson. Biden, though, had already won the primaries, while Johnson had only won the first (narrowly) before dropping out.
As with this year, when Johnson dropped out in '68, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, soon became the new frontrunner. And like now, Humphrey didn't have to compete in a single primary but more or less "inherited" Johnson's delegates.
As in '68, not only would there be a Democratic convention in Chicago in late August this year, but questions swirled as to what would happen: whether a candidate or two would challenge Biden's VP and handpicked successor — just as the antiwar candidates Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) and Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) challenged Humphrey — and whether Chicago PD would crack the skulls of protesters outside the convention (though, even three years after Selma's "Bloody Sunday," such brutal police tactics were still shocking back in '68).
This was right around the time I booked my trip to Chicago. I wasn't sure if I could get a press pass to be on the convention floor, but I knew I had to at least be in the city. I wanted to get as close as I could to whatever was gonna happen. I prepped myself in my usual way, reading and watching whatever I could about the convention in '68. I started light with CNN's 1968: The Year That Changed America and David Farber's Chicago '68, before wading into Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago. As a sort of primer (or oppositional research) ahead of the election, I was already listening to Maggie Haberman's Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America during early-morning walks with the dog.
As for how the Democratic nominee should officially be chosen now that Biden was out of the race, I was one of those in favor of seeing a messy convention. I also liked James Carville's "superdemocratic" proposal of having the party hold a handful of town halls with candidates in the lead-up to the convention. "Town halls — high-stakes job interviews for the toughest job in the world — would surely attract television and cable partners and generate record numbers of viewers," Carville had written in a July 8 op-ed for the New York Times. "Town halls will give Americans a fresh look at Ms. Harris and introduce them to our deep bench of smart, dynamic, tested leaders. In addition, Democratic delegates will get to further grill and stress-test these leaders in public and private meetings before a formal vote of all the delegates at the Democratic convention."
But within 32 hours of Biden dropping out, the Kamala campaign had already won enough of his 3,905 pledged delegates to secure the nomination, the magic number being 1,976. Her nomination became official when the DNC's roll-call vote ended on August 5th.
Understandably, the sudden excitement around Kamala and the way she quickly secured the Democratic nomination without a single public vote cast specifically for her left some voters with a bit of whiplash and a sour taste in their mouths. The Democratic Party, it seemed, wasn't behaving very democratically.
If I was more into conspiracy theories, I might swear that the party had been planning to replace Biden with Kamala since before the first primary was held in January. After all, those closest to him must've realized his unfitness to run long before the rest of us saw it in that debate. The president's wife, for one, seemed to know her husband wasn't the skilled politician he used to be, sounding like a preschool teacher as she praised Old Joe after the debate for doing "such a good job!" "You answered every question! You knew all the facts!" . . . Give him a sticker.
With Kamala's nomination confirmed, the Democratic convention in Chicago was again going to be another standard ceremony. But my roundtrip tickets were already booked (and I didn't feel like canceling them for an airline credit), and Chicago in August is still Chicago in August. My mom and siblings were excited to see me, and my grandma promised to cook something special. So I shifted my sights to the protests being organized for that week.
Admittedly, I hadn't followed the election much till the Biden-Trump debate — I just couldn't be bothered with the whole spectacle. But I had been hearing about something called the Uncommitted Movement. The Uncommitteds were a group of about 40 delegates threatening to withhold their vote if the party's nominee (first Biden, then Kamala) didn't press Israel for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 40,000 people, over half of them women and children, have been bombed to dust — all in retaliation for a Hamas attack last October that killed 1180 Israelis and saw another 200+ taken hostage. This vastly disproportional response makes Israel's "defensive" actions seem much less like justice and a lot like revenge (or worse).
In support of the Uncommitted Movement, a coalition of more than 200 groups, mostly anti-war, pro-worker, and egalitarian, were organizing four days of rallies in Union Park on the Near West Side, just a few blocks from the United Center where the Democratic convention would be held. Dubbed the "March on the DNC 2024" and led by the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, the Chicago Anti-War Committee, Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition & Solidarity, Students for a Democratic Society, the Federación De Clubes Michoacános En Illinois, CODEPINK, and others, the plan was to rally at the park during each day of the convention and then march toward the United Center. A vigil for the Palestinians killed since October was set to take place outside the United Center on Tuesday, and the biggest march was scheduled to coincide with Kamala officially accepting the party's nomination on the final night, Thursday.
With other demonstrations taking place in other areas throughout the week, the City of Chicago was bracing itself for an influx of angry radicals. (CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling would say on the first morning of the convention that his officers had been undergoing First Amendment training for months, which I think should be a yearly thing in all police departments, just as sexual harassment sessions are in corporate America.) In the weeks leading up to the convention, protest organizers and the City battled in federal court over the exact route the march would take, with the organizers wanting to come as close to the United Center as possible to make sure their voices were heard and their anger felt. The route they demanded would have marchers pass within two blocks of the United Center and continue west down Washington to Western Avenue, before looping back down Lake Street two blocks north. The City argued that, for security reasons, two blocks was too close. The tug-o-war would last right up to the convention, a federal judge ruling only five days beforehand that the City's compromise route, which veered one block further north from the United Center, down Maypole, satisfied the marchers' First Amendment right to protest "within sight and sound" of their intended targets.
March on the DNC spokesman Hatem Abudayyeh, who's also head of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, promised to appeal the judge's decision on the day of the ruling, his main bone of contention being not only that the City didn't approve the marchers' preferred route but that the route was too short to accommodate the "tens of thousands" of people expected to join the march. Speaking to reporters in the lobby of the Dirksen Federal Courthouse that Tuesday, Abudayyeh would not say for sure whether the protesters would comply with the judge's ruling.
Right after I bought my plane ticket to Chicago, I let the editor of The Latino Newsletter know that I would be in Chicago during the week of the convention. Julio told me he'd be happy to publish whatever I sent him, and later sent me and another reporter a 16-minute video on how to maintain physical safety while covering a protest. The other reporter, Carlos, who's based in Puerto Rico, told me he was bringing his helmet stamped with the word PRESS on it in bold white letters, just to be safe, which prompted me to order a black ball cap and a white t-shirt both printed with the word PRESS on them.
"Be careful!" said my sister-in-law who lives a few blocks from Union Park. "They're telling people who work downtown to stay home if they can cuz it's going to be CRAZY that week."
I'd find out soon enough how true or not those warnings were.
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