THE ANNOUNCED THEME of the DNC night 3 was “Freedom,” and speaker after speaker did hammer home the freedom threatened by the MAGA/Trump agenda — the “real freedom,” as Josh Shapiro put it, to love whom you choose, worship how you choose, and build a family as you choose.
But in the parade of people across the DNC stage, the words chosen, the emotions displayed, there was also a more visceral argument: that an inclusive, multi-racial democracy is as American as apple pie. Normal. Friendly. Respectful. Neighbors helping neighbors. “Commonsense, not nonsense,” Oprah said. And, damn, it just feels so, so good.
Think, for example, of Pete Buttigieg’s word picture of his lively kitchen table, with Chastain and their three-years-olds getting ready for dinner, “when the dog is barking, and the air fryer is beeping, and the mac and cheese is boiling over” on the stove.
“This kind of life,” Mayor Pete said, “went from impossible … to almost ordinary in less than half a lifetime,” letting the LGBTQ part of the story stay implicit. Ordinary. The antithesis of weird.
Hyphenated America wasn’t harped on, Red America wasn’t demonized — OK, they’re different, we might think, but it’s just our neighbors down the street.
With Kamala Harris in the White House, the implication was, maybe, just maybe, we can all just chill.
Nothing too weird for a wager
In the look forward to Harris’s speech Thursday, Polymarket, a prediction market that claims to be the world’s largest, offered an opportunity to bet on whether particular words or phrases would appear in her speech. For example, a gambler could bet whether she would say the word “inflation” more than three times in her speech. (A yes bet of 13 cents returned a dollar if she did.)
It’s a thin market as these things go; as of Thursday evening, the total bet on all words available for betting was just under $2.4 million, with “Not Going Back,” “Ceasefire,” and “Abortion” drawing the largest wagers.
The bet on “Weird/Weirdo” had attracted $185,688 in wagers.
The rules provide that in determining whether a bet is successful, the reference document will be the video of the Harris speech, and make clear that “any usage of the word regardless of context will count. … Compound words will count as long as ‘weird’ or ‘weirdo’ is part of the compound word and references the meaning which refers to a person who behaves unusually or oddly.”
The market at one moment offered an opportunity to make a buck for a 32-cent wager, a return of 200%.
Of the reporters on this story, David Paul said he’d pass the bet because “politically it would be a really stupid thing to use the word ‘weird’ and I think she will be too smart to do that.” Joe Dworetzky went the other way because “it fits the campaign’s core message of being confident enough to permit Harris and Walz to be seen as youthful and joyous; I like the odds.” Jay Harris took the bet, but only because it’s just 32 cents.
Aloha from Marin
Brian Colbert, a San Anselmo Town Council member and an elected delegate to the DNC from District 2, always wears Hawaiian shirts.
Colbert grew up on the East Coast, but after Chicago Law School, a stint on Wall Street, and a sojourn teaching international law and political theory in Turkey, he moved to San Francisco in 2007 to work in tech. But there was an issue: When he traveled to tech conferences, people often mistook him for a security guard. He’s tall and Black, you see, and stuff like that still happens. So he wears Hawaiian shirts.
Which is an agreeable way to deal with that awkward issue. And that tactful, friendly inclination may well be a factor in his success in Marin County politics.
According to a librarian at the Marin County Free Library, Colbert was the first African American in the history of Marin to serve on a city or town council, elected first in 2016 and re-elected in 2020. He did a term as mayor of San Anselmo in 2021, and this November he’s in a runoff in the race for Marin County Supervisor for District 2.
Colbert and his family moved to San Anselmo in 2013. Not long after, he decided to run for town council. At the time, he says “Our downtown was really in the doldrums. We had a lot of vacancies and a number of closed restaurants. And I thought with my interest in policy and my private sector background, there was a way to pull together a number of stakeholders in the private sector with our really active commissions, and then with some leadership from Town Council, we could create the kind of downtown that frankly we have today.”
He’s proud of the changes he’s seen. “We have, I think, the most vital downtown in all of Marin County. It’s family friendly. We’ve got a robust, healthy local economy. We close our streets on the weekends. We have a number of bands. It really is sort of what people had always wanted to be in San Anselmo.”
In his campaign for county supervisor, he and his team have been knocking on doors, talking to voters — thousands and thousands of doors since before the March primary, he estimates.
He says, “People really appreciate the personal touch. They’re like, are you really a candidate coming to my house to … learn and understand what I care about? … A commitment to the community really matters.”
“People really appreciate the personal touch. They’re like, are you really a candidate coming to my house to … learn and understand what I care about? … A commitment to the community really matters.”
Brian Colbert, San Anselmo Town Council member and DNC delegate
At the front doors, Colbert speaks with people about issues close to home, from wildfire preparation and prevention to housing. “Many constituents are talking about how we can figure out how to (increase) affordable housing because our teachers and firefighters and first responders deserve to be able to live here in the community they serve.”
From all those front-step conversations, Colbert believes he’s heard a willingness among Marin voters to tackle an issue that has bedeviled cities around the state.
“I think there’s a recognition … (that) we’ve got to figure out a way to build housing for those groups I spoke of. We’re trying to figure now how can we do that in a way that still allows each community to retain its own unique sense of character and allow Marin to retain the open and urban spaces that make us special.”
He’s excited to be attending his first political convention, hoping to connect with others in the state and around the country facing similar challenges and opportunities. Meanwhile, he says, “Boom! There’s this new dynamic.”
“I’ve knocked on over 5,000 doors in my campaign, talking to the voters. And the enthusiasm for Kamala is real.”
Asked what he says to Californians who think their vote for president won’t make a difference, he counsels, “Well, don’t forget about your local races. You can have a direct impact on the life of your neighbors, yourself, and your loved ones.” But he knows some people would like to do more.
“There are ways that you can thoughtfully connect with those voters in swing states. If anybody wants to get involved, they can always directly reach out to me. I’m happy to figure out what their personal passion is and point them in the right direction so they can make a difference.”
London Breed is in the house
Dressed in the all-white outfit that women delegates were wearing Thursday night to give homage to the suffragettes, San Francisco Mayor London Breed was sitting on a gray couch for a live podcast taping called “Pantsuit Politics.” To her left was A’shanti F. Gholar, a political strategist and the president of Emerge, an organization dedicated to recruiting and training Democratic women to run for office.
Breed told the interviewers that Kamala Harris is one of the reasons she ended up running for Mayor. Like Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker, Breed said that Harris was generous with her and gave her great advice and encouragement.
Breed said that Harris’s advice seemed like what Breed used to hear from her grandmother, “Just stay the course and stay focused on what you are trying to accomplish and rise above it. Rise above the circumstance.”
Breed added, that is exactly what Harris has had to do under all challenging circumstances.
Breed then said that she knows something about challenging circumstances.
She said, “I got four guys running against me, and it’s cool. I love the men, don’t be alarmed. But it’s interesting because they are saying everything I have done or am doing or plan to do. They get attention for it differently than I did. And it’s so interesting to see that play itself out in politics.”
Breed said, “I have to do exactly what my grandmother and Kamala said to do. Control what you do. Rise above. And be lovely and live in your truth. Living your truth. Don’t let anybody steal your joy. Because if you’re in this world and you’re doing this work … you really want to have a positive impact on people’s lives.”
In a subsequent interview with Bay City News, Breed responded to questions about what things a Harris/Walz administration would do to help San Francisco deal with some of the city’s challenging problems.
Breed said that Harris’s elevation of the need for housing — particularly affordable housing — and the need to eliminate bureaucratic red tape, to the national stage “will be a game changer for us.” She said the Biden/Harris administration has provided financial support that had already allowed the City to move people out of SROs into better housing situations. Breed said that under a Harris/Biden administration “I know housing is going to be a big one … because all roads lead to housing.”
On the city’s homelessness problem, she said, “If we have more housing opportunities, we have more chances to get people indoors.” But she quickly added, “as it relates to homelessness, it is so complicated because it’s not just a roof over someone’s head. There are services for people who struggle with mental illness and substance use disorder.”
To illustrate the point, she described a man who “has his own place, but still sleeps in a particular doorway every single night. … So as much as it’s about a roof over their heads, it’s also about the services and the reform around mental health and the things that we’re doing to address the issues around fentanyl in particular.”
On the nature of power
At the tent where CNN and Politico were hosting speakers, Anita Dunn appeared Tuesday for a casual, low-stakes interview. Dunn is a political strategist with deep democratic connections going back to the Carter White House. She was communications director on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and one of his most senior advisors. Before stepping down at the end of July, she served as a Senior Policy Advisor to President Joe Biden.
During the otherwise routine questioning, she was asked about a recent get together with White House staff in which she shared some observations about politics and power derived from her long life in politics. None of the material was secret, and Dunn repeated some of her remarks with relish.
She began by saying that she told the staffers that, while some of them think the best movie or series about politics was The West Wing or House of Cards, that was a mistake. In her judgment the best was the Godfather. (And All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, by far the best book on politics).
She explained that while the Godfather wasn’t directly about politics, it was about the central issue in politics — power and the use of power.
She called out particular lines from the movie.
Reading from her phone to get the wording right, she said “Never hate your enemies; it affects your judgment.”
Dunn paired that with another line that she called “very close to one of the greatest lines of all time.” Slightly paraphrasing, she recounted the famous benediction: “You know, it was never personal; it was always business.”
For Dunn, the two lines teach that “if you’re making a decision from an emotional place, you are making bad decisions in politics, okay? It is not personal, it’s business. Treat it that way and don’t hate; it affects your judgment.”
She also likes the line that revenge is a dish best served cold. She said, “I told the staffers you don’t need to go get your revenge right away. Take the time to wait your moment.” But she also said that if you wait, you may well decide that revenge is not the best course.
She mentioned the famous scene when the Godfather tells Michael that the person who approaches him to set up a meeting with the head of the rival family will be the traitor.
She said that scene was just like what she has observed over several decades in politics: “The person in the meeting who is yelling loudest about a leak is almost certainly the one who leaked the information.”
A ticker for Democrats
Brian Potts is a thin, wiry, intense man, seemingly in his late 30s. He said he is an environmental lawyer, but he is at the convention to talk about DEMZ.
DEMZ is the ticker symbol for an investment fund that allows an investor to invest in a bucket of companies — about 40 — on the stock exchange that have been selected from the larger pool of companies that made more than 75% of their political contributions (and their senior executives’ political contributions) to Democratic candidates and Democratic Political Action Committees.
The fund was launched on Election Day in 2020 and stock holdings in the fund are currently about $40 million, which is still a small fund.
The idea is that the fund allows Democrats to invest in companies aligned with their political values and of course test whether democratically oriented companies do better than their peers.
Potts said that while it seems intuitive that a Trump victory would be better for his fund he doesn’t think that it is true. He said in the nearly four years since the launch they haven’t seen much correlation with political events.
Asked if he has a similar fund for Republicans to invest in, he said no, but added, “Now we might; we are working on it.” (Point Bridge Capital already offers a GOP-focused fund under the ticker symbol MAGA.) Potts said he has a company that collects the data that powers the investments and it is non-partisan.
According to the stock charts in Bloomberg, DEMZ was trading at $35.03 when the market closed Thursday, up from $21.69 at launch. According to Potts, DEMZ was outperforming the broader market.
Snippets
Carlos Eduardo Espina, a handsome, energetic, 25-year-old influencer, was given a prominent three minutes at the DNC podium Tuesday night, telling the crowd (and, more to the point, his social media following): “If two decades ago, when my parents immigrated to College Station, Texas, you told them that one day their son would reach 14 million followers on social media, graduate law school, and speak at the Democratic National Convention, they might not believe you.”
Forgive the guy his youth. If someone had told his parents 20 years ago that “followers on social media” — whatever that might be — would outrank a law degree on their son’s resume, they might have thought he’d been smoking weed.
Thad Smith of Chicago came to the convention to sell honey. He grew up in Chicago on the Westside and learned to take care of bees there. He named his operation Westside Bee Boyz.
Because he was going to be a solo vendor at the convention in a large vendor gallery with the awkward name DemPalooza, he wanted to do something that might call attention to his merch.
His solution? A wooden box with a clear plastic front — roughly the size of two shoeboxes – filled with live bees.
When asked if he needed a permit for live bees, he said he didn’t know, he just brought it in with his vendor gear. Nobody said anything when he brought it in on Sunday as vendors were setting up. He said it might have been harder on Monday when the security got much tighter.
But he wasn’t sure. He said a security official passed by his table during the week, saw the box and asked if those were real bees inside. Smith said they were and then trotted out the line he was using with frequency, “I want to get some buzz.”
The security officer laughed, shook his head at the ingenuity of it and moved on.
Chicago designer Rhonda Hardy makes “Bronzeville Babies,” soft-sculptured dolls whose stories mirror those of the Great Migration.
Hardy’s parents moved north from New Orleans to Chicago in the first half of the 20th century, and her creations pay homage to those generations of Black Americans who made the trek. (Bronzeville is an historic Black neighborhood in Chicago.)
Exhibited at the DNC’s DemPalooza, the line of eight dolls includes Eddie Travels, “a family man who has a prestigious job working as a Pullman porter,” and Alice Suell, “the church lady (who) concentrates on making better opportunities for her four sons.”
And finally, a cartoon:
Bay City News staff writer Joe Dworetzky is in Chicago with fellow BCN reporter Jay Harris and correspondent David Paul to report on the daily drama and curiosities at the Democratic National Convention. Learn more about their work here.
The post Day 4: Baking the new American Pie — Dems serve up freedom with a scoop of inclusivity appeared first on Local News Matters.