Monday, August 17 (Day One of the Convention)
I ride my bike to the convention hall, I take the Lakefront Trail south. The city looks perfect from here: the sky is beautiful, the path curves and you can see the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Field Museum. It is windy today—the good kind of windy—our fabled Windy City presenting itself to the delegates. Only, this wind is nothing like the nightmare wind of winter, how you walk home and all you can think about is being cold and how long it will be until you are not cold. I bike over Navy Pier, I see the water taxis rocking in the water, I forgot how long it has been since I’ve been on a water taxi, which costs not much more than subway fare to ride, get off in Chinatown for lunch, and get back on again home. But no one is on the boat today, which looks rickety and fragile in the waves. Red flags are flying, a beach hazard day.
Past Navy Pier, there are touristy commercial cruise boats, and, above the river, I bike over one with a deck full of convention delegates, standing in what I’ve begun to recognize as DNC attire—dull business casual suit jackets and blazers. The lanyards give it away. This subsect of convention goers is treated to a lunchtime cruise on the Lady of the Lake, an expensive ride, nothing like a water taxi. Another way of saying Here is Chicago! though it is not Chicago—but why would they want to see anything else? Or, more to the point, why would the DNC let them. Why would Chicago let them. Welcome to the greatest city in the world! (I wouldn’t go that far, but OK.)
My bike only takes me so far, I am allowed through a perimeter fence because I am trying to get to a Divvy station to drop off this bike, for which I’m being charged by the minute. I get off at 18th and turn onto Indiana. I walk the many blocks remaining to the hotel entrance, adjacent to the McCormick Center. The hotels and the convention hall are linked by pedestrian walkways, once in here you don’t have to leave. I find a stand selling merch, mostly buttons: AEROBIC INSTRUCTORS FOR HARRIS. UNCENSORED EDUCATORS FOR HARRIS. PRO-CHOICE VOTERS FOR HARRIS.
I am sharing a press pass with my writing partner, Jeffery Renard Allen, and so today, while he’s inside, I make my way to the painfully named DemPALOOZA! I can’t get there from this lobby without my credential, and so I leave the hotel again and walk the surrounding streets with some volunteers and a pack of traveling poets. They are named Ars Poetica, and wear matching denim jeans cut into fringes; they have traveled here from Kentucky. Soon a family of four joins us, the eight-year-old son holding a sign: STOP US MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL. A young mother wears a keffiyeh as a scarf and her daughter wears hers wrapped around her waist, a fashionable mini-skirt. I see them cross to the other side of the street before we come to three young men and one young woman holding Israel flags. One wears a GENERATION ZION t-shirt. A content creator is asking them for an interview: “We have heard the other side of this story,” he says, “and now we want to hear your side.” They seem happy to oblige. I move on.
I follow the Palestinian family, the poets by my side, and we make it to the second security perimeter.
DemPALOOZA is rather empty; it’s late in the day. Undeterred, Ars Poetica sets up their stand. A gospel choir performs on a small stage. I check out the booths: here you can buy essential oils, here a Kamala calendar. I talk to a lawyer at the booth for the Westside Justice Center; he gives me a collapsible water bottle and tells me about their work, which includes helping the formerly incarcerated find employment and housing. His side gig, he explains, is as a Chicago tour guide. The first stop on his tour is the plaque near Grant Park that marks the 1968 riots. When he hears that I am a writing teacher he tells me he went to the University of Iowa and majored in creative writing. “Nothing has been more important to my work as a lawyer,” he says.
Across from Westside’s booth, you can get a manicure. There are two stands, and the longest line in the hall.
It’s time to go home, and as I walk through the first perimeter, I hear one cop informing the others: “Just so you know, the perimeter has been breached at the United Center.” I walk south on Michigan Ave., waiting for a bus home, but there aren’t buses here inside the second perimeter, and so I walk some miles north, in the middle of the street. Somewhere around 12th Street I get on a bus that takes me as far as Millennium Park, where I see more convention goers, wearing bright blue dresses and flats. I pause when a stream of cops flies by, sirens on, black cars and then police cars, minivans I can see inside, rows of cops in riot gear, lined up with helmets on, reminding me of my Fisher Price plastic people, my favorite childhood toy, I loved putting the little helmet-headed people in a bus. My aunt bought those little people from Sears, the department store, the name of the famous skyscraper which you can see from here. Only it’s not the Sears Tower anymore. And the store is long gone.
My feet hurt so I find another Divvy bike, head west on Randolph and turn right on Dearborn. I bike over the Chicago River and all the way home.
Tuesday, August 20 (Day Two of the Convention)
Gwen Walz is telling a story.
Joan Didion wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The message from the democrats at this convention might go something like this: We tell our stories in order to win!
“I am going to tell you a little bit about me,” Gwen says. “So you can get to know me.”
Narrative is political strategy. At DemPALOOZA I saw a booth offering lessons on effective storytelling in political messaging. Gwen Walz has had some training, I imagine someone has helped her write her story. But what I like is how uncomfortable she seems, how hard she has to try to be one of these speakers who seem born for self-promotion, who know their stories so well they’ve come to believe it. Gwen is a teacher from Minnesota. She is tiny. I had forgotten Tim had a wife. All I know of her is from what he’s said: she’s a teacher and she’s been through IVF. Gwen tells the story of sharing a room side by side her husband, Tim.
“His classroom was much louder than mine,” she giggles. She has a soft, gentle voice. She is feminine in a way I recognize, trained to be quiet because it is not feminine to be loud in the Midwest, in her generation, which is mine too. “Just do the work.” And she has done it, the life of a teacher, which is a life of service.
She is talking about Tim now, how he believes that each student is an individual. She tells another story about a boy named Waylen. This is good storytelling, I think, if apocryphal. Gwen is an English teacher and she understands rhetoric: State your claim and support it with evidence. But as we hear Waylen’s story, I find myself wanting to know more about Gwen. I recognize the way Gwen has deflected or redirected the impulse to talk about herself. She is what people mean by Minnesota nice. Gwen talks about her mom, also a teacher, and I realize who Gwen reminds me of: comedian Maria Bamford, another Minnesotan, who does impressions of her own Minnesota mom. Maria Bamford’s Minnesota nice is Gwen Walz unhinged. What Bamford knows is what I know, having spent much of my life here. The problem with Midwest nice is that there is always something just below the surface, and it’s definitely not nice.
Tuesday morning, I take a shuttle to the convention hall. I arrive early in order to make the Women’s Caucus meeting scheduled for 9:30 a.m. There are only six of us on the shuttle, everyone was up too late listening to Biden’s speech the night before.
“Are we in Chicago?” asks a woman from New Jersey.
“Yes, this is Chicago.”
“They cut James Taylor last night.”
“Biden went on too long.”
“But he deserves it.”
“Poor James Taylor.”
The bus is comfortable. It is not a city bus. The seats are soft.
I’m trying to answer the woman from New Jersey’s question, which I like. A good question is one that makes everything familiar strange again. This is Chicago. I decide. This is Chicago on the map. This is Lake Shore Drive, this is Oak Street. This could not be anywhere else. That’s the Hancock Building—right there—that’s Navy Pier.
But then I understand why she is asking: she has been here twenty-four hours and shuttled from one hotel to the convention center to the United Center and back to the hotel. No, this is not really Chicago, I’ve changed my mind. Let’s call it ChicagoWorld. In ChicagoWorld you see the flowers on Michigan Ave., the legacy of Maggie Daley, former first lady, determined to beautify the city—if only parts of the city, if only superficially. ChicagoWorld keeps you east, and a little bit north, where everything is manicured and managed. There are no homeless people or encampments in ChicagoWorld. There are police everywhere in ChicagoWorld, but they are friendly police and they greet you (it helps if you’re wearing your DNC lanyard) as you come and go. They are simply here to keep you safe. ChicagoWorld is evident in the brightly branded DNC logo mounted on the street lights—CHICAGO WELCOMES YOU. But don’t look too closely, as I did, waiting for the bus, at a sticker prominently pasted on the glass, if fading and partially scratched out: DEMOCRATS CRIME CREATORS, KIDNAPPERS, RAPIST, ROBBERS & CANCER UPON USA (Ineffective storytelling, I’d say.) Next to that, another sticker, bold in green and red, and with a clear narrative: MARCH ON THE DNC. CRASH THE PARTY!
Never mind that, because visitors to ChicagoWorld will not wait at actual bus stops for actual buses. In ChicagoWorld there are always ten buses lined up, waiting to take you here or there. And you don’t need to pay the fare.
In ChicagoWorld you might hear that there are protests going on somewhere nearby, but you won’t see them.
Here’s a conversation you might hear inside of McCormick’s Hyatt, ChicagoWorld headquarters:
“What’s going on with the protests?”
“Pretty controlled.”
“About 1,500 people.”
“Not as many as expected?”
“Well yeah, they know they’re going to get beat up by the cops. Ha ha.”
“Well Kamala did a good job containing it, you know she met with the Uncommitted group in Michigan.”
“And that masterstroke—she refused to meet with Netanyahu a few weeks back, when Biden did. Genius.”
It’s 9:15 now and I’m worried I’ll be late for the Women’s Caucus meeting. I’m worried I won’t be able to find it, but it turns out that everyone is going to the same place; it’s the only caucus this morning. I follow the women, reading t-shirts: DELEGATES FOR FLORIDA; TEXAS BATTLE BORN AND BATTLE TESTED. Cowboy hats. A man wears an elegant scarf stitched with the words “Democrats for Palestinian Rights.” A man passes by wearing a straw hat with a button: SAME PATRIARCHY, DIFFERENT CENTURY.
No need for worry. The caucus meeting starts forty-five minutes late. In the meantime, I listen to a ten-year-old DJ, and I take in more outfits: pink pantsuits; Ruth Bader Ginsburg leggings; red, white, and blue silk scarfs. Sparkles, sequins, rainbow-colored leis. More buttons: HOOSIERS FOR HARRIS. MONTANA DEMS. Canvas hats in red, white, and blue.
DJ Lily Jade is playing Stevie Nicks, Kool and the Gang, Bruce Springsteen, and Beyonce. Hard not to be thrilled by a poised, confident tween, the youngest attendee by decades, wearing her sequin jacket, working the crowd, taking up her mic, shouting out to the “girl bosses” in the crowd.
I’m a writer and like most writers I know, I often feel myself to be an outsider. Particularly when it comes to crowds. We feel outside of conventions, uncomfortable to be in a group of people cheering and chanting. We don’t want to be members of clubs who would have us.
A writer friend who lives in Rogers Park, far from ChicagoWorld, texts me: “Is it like AWP?”
“It is not like AWP,” I say. Because at AWP the stakes are not this high, and the guests do not wear red, white, and blue, and there is not so much cheering, and there is certainly not one shared goal. “No, definitely not like AWP,” I say.
But then a few hours into the convention, I find myself noticing all the ways it is like AWP—the familiar loneliness of wandering around a soulless corporate hotel, wondering if you should go to another panel or caucus meeting, having conversations in an enormous convention hall with terrible lighting. And then there is the familiar mark of the modern convention, where you know a friend or friends of friends will also be in attendance and you will spend so much time wandering a hall looking at your phone, that exhausting attempt to meet up with these friends or friends of friends, the endless deadening texting back and forth: I’m here now. Where are you? Let’s meet here. I’m in the lobby. I’m in Room 27. Come to the second floor. Stay there, I’ll come to you.
I rarely go to rallies or get excited about politicians, but it’s not long before I find myself moved by the Women’s Caucus, which starts finally, nearly an hour past the scheduled time. The chairwoman talks about 1980, about Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm. She quotes Fannie Lou Hamer, and the crowd joins in: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Fannie Lou Hamer, whose doctor gave her a hysterectomy without consent. “That’s what they did to Black women’s bodies.” There are film clips: Geraldine Ferraro accepting her nomination, the Clintons testifying to her legacy, the first woman on a national party ticket.
Over and over, there are reminders about messaging and strategy: “Democrats win when we run on hope and joy!” Cheers and applause. I realize, not for the first time, that this is training. Messages to take with you: 1. We vote for public education. 2. We support reproductive freedom. 3. Donald Trump is responsible for ending abortion access. 4. We are fighting for freedom.
Next we have Congresswoman Underwood, Senator Escobar, Senator Gillibrand. I’m most moved by Ai-jen Poo, who isn’t campaigning. She speaks to her cause, which is about care, soberly and carefully. It has been her life’s work. The work of care is essential. “Other countries have safety nets and the US has women.” she says. Women do the underpaid care work. We have to put care at the top of the agenda.
Ai-jen Poo’s message is overpowered by the unlikely surprise guest of the Women’s Caucus: “Coach Governor Tim Walz!” The crowd stands up cheering, chanting, “Coach! Coach! Coach!” I’m wondering about this choice for the Women’s Caucus and Walz, perhaps anticipating this, begins: “Someone told me a little story: ‘You know why Governor Walz has been so successful in Minnesota? There’s two reasons. He surrounds himself with talented women and he listens to ‘em.’”
A minute or so later protestors wearing keffiyehs run into the hall pulling out Palestinian flags and unfurling a banner that reads: STOP KILLING CHILDREN. They shout “Stop supporting genocide!” The security guards are around them in seconds. They don’t fight. Four or five women in all. Walz ignores them completely, going on with his messaging about something, I don’t know anymore, I’m watching how easy it is to silence these voices, these outsiders. The women around me start yelling at the protestors “Hush up!” over and over again. And someone starts chanting “USA. USA.” I don’t mind a maternal “hush up” every once in a while, but the “USA” is too much. What is “USA” if you have to be Midwestern nice all the time.
The Disability Caucus is where Gwen is telling her story—and hers does not include a self-aggrandizing story about what other people have said about her. The meeting is in a smaller room with a small crowd, full of attendees with visible and invisible disabilities. Tammy Duckworth talks about the challenges to the ADA. The head of the Hotel Workers Union tells the story of room attendants: Cesar Chavez would say that room attendants are the farm workers of today. They get on their hands and knees, clean toilets, eight hours or more of work; they may be disabled from this work. I am overwhelmed by every speaker here, by the stories of disability injustice and disparate treatment in healthcare. Disabled veterans. I’m in tears and then humbled by the work these people do, which is what matters, which makes being cynical seem too easy.
While I’m thinking about this, listening to Gwen Walz, the Secret Service shows up, seemingly responding to a woman who came in late, wearing a keffiyeh. She walks down an aisle, head bowed, sits by her friend. The women whisper. At least three Secret Service men are staring her down, something like Kamala’s stare to the protestors in Michigan. One is dressed like he just came in from the golf course. He walks up to the woman with the keffiyeh and her friend, stands next to them in the aisle, looks down at the woman’s phone, reads what she’s texting. None of us are listening to Gwen any longer, her soft voice, her forced mom humor. We are watching the men watching the texting women, the hovering man’s confidence, the way he takes up space, and the woman putting her phone away. Eventually the man walks away, back to the corner, looks around. Soon the Secret Service detail leave. The women next to me exchange looks.
“You know it’s serious with the SS shows up!” the chairperson says, trying to reconvene. But for me it’s time to go, I haven’t had lunch, I’m due on the next bus in thirty minutes, the shuttle to ChicagoWorld’s great spectacle: the United Center. And tonight we’ll see—everyone is talking about it—the Obamas.
I find a seat at 4 p.m. on Level Two, unassigned press seating. There are a handful of people here, and they assure me that these are the best seats on this level, just to the right of the stage, you can look down right into the patch backstage where the speakers prepare. It’s true: later I’ll see Common bouncing up and down, and Obama’s shiny shoes peeking out of the shadows. At the time, I’m not sure I believe them, but it’s not worth moving now, as the place quickly fills up and soon the festivities begin.
The speakers are varied and mostly brief: some bright like Jimmy Carter’s and John F. Kennedy’s grandsons. State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta is a star, holding up Project 2025, all nine hundred pages, and offering some highlights. When Patti LaBelle appears, my neighbors are screaming.
Next is the roll call, which takes forever but is occasionally charming. Many around me come and go for snacks. It’s at the end of the roll call when our seating area is completely full; there is some tension around saving seats. There are people in the aisles who are scolded by volunteers. The volunteers pass out signs, with unclear instructions on when to wave them.
I haven’t had dinner (I’ll be here from 4 p.m. to nearly 11 p.m.) but I’m not leaving for long, afraid I’ll lose my seat. The two women next to me work in campaign finance. They are here from Indiana, helping their candidates. They tell me Jessie Jackson’s son got them credentials to be here on this level.
“I hope you don’t mind us shouting,” the woman warns me. “We are going to be cheering.”
“No, I love that,” I say, because I do. I’m not a sports fan but I recall taking pleasure at a friend’s house not long ago, among a group of Michigan fans watching a big game. Their happiness moved me. Such a simple thing.
Bernie Sanders is up, his charming, forceful, one-note cadence. His calls to action, including higher salaries for public school teachers. This seems almost as likely as ending the war in Gaza, but it wakes me up. The guests with saved seats arrive just in time to hear Michelle Obama. When she comes out, everyone around me stands up and screams. Some bow, some take selfies. She is gorgeous, glamorous in a way she wasn’t in the White House. Her long acrylic nails, long braid, jumpsuit, and heels. Her speech is all substance, and the women around me respond to her calls, arms waving, bodies shaking in laughter at her jokes, nodding in recognition. We are in church, and I love this part of it. This is why I stuck around, what I’m always looking for. In a church like this, I’m not cynical, I set it aside. This is the church of hope.
This is a church of mothers, too. This morning Gwen Walz spoke of her mother, and tonight Michelle Obama is speaking of her mother. She is comparing her mother to Kamala Harris’s mother. The lesson of these mothers: Don’t complain, do something! I start to question myself. Have I spent my whole life complaining? Why haven’t I done something? Perhaps my mother would’ve said the same thing. Don’t complain, do something. I am here in church and I want to do something. I want to shake in my seat the way my neighbor is shaking. I want to take these messages to the street, to make the phone calls, to join the protests, to organize the care workers, the hotel workers, the nurses. My mother was a nurse. She was doing this work. On the bus I hear one nurse tell another about a candidate trying to get their endorsement.
“Does he support Medicare for All?”
“No,” she says.
“Then, no. It’s a dealbreaker. Tell him that—a dealbreaker.”
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