Thursday August 22 (Day Four of the Convention)
McCormick Place, 10:00 a.m.
I am once again at the Women’s Caucus meeting, where Nancy Pelosi, wearing a pale pink suit, is speaking. Like many this week, she notes the excitement in the air and reminds the crowd not to become complacent. It was just one month and a day ago that Kamala became the candidate. Anything can happen. There is work to do. Pelosi offers her three nos: “No wasted time, no underutilized resources, and no regrets.”
Despite the clear enthusiasm for the octogenarian former speaker of the house, the real stars this morning are Uzo Aduba, an actress who played Shirley Chisholm in Miss America, a television show about the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and Sheryl Lee Ralph, who leads the crowd in a song: “We’re not going, we’re not going back; we’re not going, we’re not going back.” Ten-year-old DJ Lily Jade is here, and Ralph invites her up to the stage. Lily Jade wipes her tears away, her ten-year-old fists rubbing her eyes as if waking from sleep. She did not expect to meet one of her heroes today, she explains. DJ Lily Jade is one of the most genuine people you will find around here. Her tears somehow remind me that I have been waiting for something. This is day four and we are all waiting for something.
Today I sit at a table as if I’m a real reporter. I’m sitting next to a content creator from Atlanta. Many of today’s attendees are wearing white. After Jade, more singing and chanting and cheering. “It’s just a pep rally today,” the creator says. At the end of the meeting we are all invited to a lunch at Carnivale, sponsored by the Victory Fund. “Are you going?” I ask my neighbor. “No, it’ll be more of the same,” she says.
12:17 p.m.
“Mayor Daley was a horrible mayor, but he brought bees to Chicago.”
Thad Smith, beekeeper and the founder of Westside Bee Boyz, is explaining something called hive hierarchy to Van Johnson, the mayor of Savannah, Georgia. They are kindly letting me listen in to their conversation.
“We want to get bees to Savannah,” Johnson tells Smith.
This is Smith’s passion and it’s hard not to be thrilled by it. It has been his mission to bring beekeeping to urban centers. I am back in DemPALOOZA, moving from booth to booth: I pass two opportunities to make friendship bracelets before I come upon Smith, one of many Black entrepreneurs invited to the vendor-fair. I ask the men for a picture and say goodbye. There’s a crowd forming near the stage. I watch Hiplet Ballerinas and then M.A.D.D. Rhythms, tap dancers.
The beekeeper and the dancers are highlights of my week, and yet still this feeling that I am missing something. A tug. I’m afraid I wasted the morning in the Women’s Caucus, so I make my way back to Level Three. Today’s schedule includes meetings of the Youth Council, the Rural Council, the Veteran and Military Families Council, the Poverty Council, and the Interfaith Council. I don’t know the difference between a caucus and a council but I’m not long in the Poverty Council meeting before it’s clear. Unlike the Women’s Caucus, there aren’t celebrations here: no nostalgic film clips of the Clintons. No guest celebrity appearances at the Poverty Council. It is poorly attended, and sad. Arriving here feels something like going into a university English department, housed in the oldest and most run-down building on campus, after you’ve spent the morning in the business school or the new student athletic center.
“Yes, the rent is too damn high,” one frustrated speaker shouts into the microphone, “but the pay is too damn low! We need higher wages!” She goes on: restaurant workers are paid so poorly that they can’t afford the gas it takes to drive to the job. She explains that tipping was created after emancipation as a way to get free Black labor. The Pullman Company, founded here in Chicago by George Pullman, was a famous example of this, employing formerly enslaved Black men and keeping them overworked and underpaid. Another speaker refers to the National Restaurant Association as “the other NRA” for the ways they have lobbied to keep tipping practices and therefore maintain below minimum wage salaries for restaurant workers.
Mr. Charles Brown of Chicago’s Standing for Equity takes the podium. “I am the son of Milton Brown,” he introduces himself, before quoting Alice Walker: “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” Brown explains something of the history of Chicago to the audience, the many ways Black people have been systematically denied homes, schools, grocery stores. Black male unemployment is fifty percent. He talks about charter schools, how Paul Vallas pulled the best students out of the schools in this city, started selective enrollment schools—my son attends a selective enrollment school—and then closed 160 schools in the city. Don’t be fooled by the charter industry, which is about white people, he tells us. Stop the privatization of schools, he demands.
Representative Barbara Lee arrives to briefly address the Poverty Council meeting.
“We have to use the p word,” she says, “and Kamala has used the p word.”
Lee is hopeful about Harris: She cares about poverty. She’s talked about child poverty. In Oakland, where Harris is from, the rent is off the scale and the Supreme Court has criminalized homelessness. “Remember,” Lee says, “elections have consequences.” She is trying to bring the pep rally vibe to the Poverty Council.
The final speaker at the Poverty Council meeting didn’t show up so we move into the Q&A.
“How do I read this Project 2025?” an attendee asks.
“You can find it online.”
“It’s on Kamala’s website.”
The question surprises me because if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that Project 2025 is a nine-hundred-page book that looks cartoonishly top-secret, the kind of book you’d see as a prop in the production of a children’s play. The book would be carried by the villain, the evil character, and it would contain plans for world domination and global destruction.
Since being here, I’ve learned that The Book contains the Republican plan for 2025 and beyond, a design that includes cuts to government funding for healthcare, housing development, childcare, climate, immigration reform. Gun control. Reproductive freedoms.
“Any issue you care about,” one guy adds, “Put it into Google and then add Project 2025. See what happens.”
3:45 p.m.
Things are simpler on the bus. More women in white. People are talking about parties.
“How’s your convention been?”
“Great! But not so great for my liver, ha ha. I’ve been out till 5 a.m. every night. It’s Coachella. It’s totally Coachella!“
“How was the meeting?”
“Classic DNC. Complete chaos and disorganism.”
We are on the highway heading west, it is rush hour, and I begin to wonder how long I will be on this bus. A woman behind me sighs.
“It is so pretty here.”
“It’s because they have alleys.”
“We don’t have alleys in New York. The alleys here keep the garbage out.”
. . .
“Let me take your photo on the bus. The lighting is so good!”
“Did you see what someone posted: ‘Why did no one tell me that the DNC will bring you to the brink of death?’”
“Ha ha, so true!”
“I’m only posting funny cool things.”
. . .
“I feel like I can give an honest assessment of which hotel is the nicest.”
“Is it the Waldorf?”
“I like the Blackstone.”
“The Westin is not. I’s dark and, literally, there’s nowhere to sit.”
“I felt like I was in a mausoleum.”
“And then I went to the Park Hyatt and that’s where Kamala is staying.”
“How is it?”
“Nice.”
4:08 p.m.
We are now a few blocks away from the United Center. The distance from McCormick Place to the United Center is approximately five miles. Our bus turns onto Jackson Boulevard and passes Damen Court Apartments. Residents sit on porches, watching the buses go by.
“Oh wow, people live here!” someone says.
At Jackson and Damen, we stop for the first security check. We turn a corner and stop again. Nothing happens for a long time.
“Why aren’t we moving?”
“They’re waiting to unload.”
“They’re sniffing the buses.”
“How long does it take to sniff the buses?”
Lately I’ve been thinking about James Baldwin’s insight that when we are faced with a big problem in our lives, our minds decide to focus on some minor problem, like what to wear to a funeral. It’s something I find myself doing a lot these days; becoming obsessed with small problems, hoping to ignore the big ones.
My big problem at this point in the day is that I will have nothing to write about on this the last day of the convention, because nothing has happened. I have gone everywhere, looked everywhere, but I have not found it. And instead of focusing on that problem, I am focused on the smaller problem of being stuck on this bus. I focus on the problem of getting a good seat in the United Center. My focus on this small problem comes with some regret—if I had left the Poverty Council meeting earlier, I would already be inside the United Center, not here on a not-moving bus.
5:10 p.m.
I will not say more about the hour that we spent not moving on the bus. I will not say more about waiting in the security line once we were off the bus. I will not say more about waiting. I will say that my fellow passengers included three bricklayers from New Jersey, two steelworkers from Houston and a delegate from North Dakota.
“I didn’t know anyone lived in North Dakota!” the steelworker said.
“Ha ha, yup. There are about five of us.”
“And if anyone did live there, I’d guess you were all Republicans!”
“Nope, five of us are Democrats.”
I will not say anything about the kind of brief forced community you might find on a bus in a line of buses waiting to get into the United Center, where you join thousands of others waiting for the big show, the big night, the headliner. The most important speech of his career, I kept hearing yesterday, in anticipation of Tim Walz. And that is certainly true for Kamala Harris tonight, but I’m trying not to think about it.
I will say that that community quickly disappears when you realize where you will be seated once inside the United Center, and when you find out that your compatriots from Texas or North Dakota are special guests and you are not.
I will say that once you make it through security, there is a line of volunteers with pom poms, and they are cheering, and this is something of a relief. You need their energy because at this point in the day you would be forgiven for wondering if this is worth it, or if, as the content creator had the right idea when she told me this morning, “I’d rather be home and watch it on TV.”
I will say that once seated I understood what a great seat I had on Tuesday for the Obamas, because tonight that section is closed to me. That section is reserved for Walz’s extended family. I make my way to the next level and finally find a seat between three French journalists, two Bloomberg reporters, and a student group from North Carolina. We are mushed in like sardines. I will make a trip to the bathroom three times over the next five hours and each time I will have to stand up and walk that tight walk you must do in stadium seating, trying to be thin, brushing against strangers anyway, everyone hating it no matter how nice and understanding they all seem to be. I am going to try not to leave yet because there is a rapidly growing tension around seating.
“Is that seat taken?” Tonight you will not save a seat.
“Why does your camera need a seat?”
“But I have nowhere else to put it.”
No one in my section, save one volunteer a row below and a group of young women behind me, will be cheering tonight.
More waiting. The young women are talking about Beyoncé. “That’s why I’m here.” The students in front say they’ve been going back and forth about it all week: Will it be Beyoncé or Taylor Swift? I’ve heard this so often that I, too, have come to believe I’ll be attending a Beyoncé concert tonight.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that before every act is introduced tonight, one of the young women behind me will whisper, “It’s Beyoncé!” When Rep. Marcia Fudge calls out that weird Oh-io call and response chant, one of the women will exclaim: “Oh that is so grating to my ears!” When Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy comes out, one of the women will cheer, “Yay lesbians!”
6:31 p.m.
Elizabeth Warren appears and the crowd cheers so long and loudly that she can’t speak, and I love it and I want them to cheer forever.
6:35 p.m.
I have begun counting the number of times this week I’ve heard a politician say some variation of:
“Now let’s be clear-”
“Now let me be clear-”
“Well let’s be clear-”
What’s clear is that we are cheering for Elizabeth Warren and she is crying and we are crying, because all week we have been reminded of these women who came this close to the White House and we remember how hard it is for a Very Qualified Woman to be in the White House at all, and now I realize that what I am waiting for is in fact for that VQW to be in the White House and it is not at all a sure thing.
9:21 p.m.
“Ugh, where is Beyoncé?”
“They are ahead of schedule, which is making me suspicious.”
9:30 p.m.
I don’t have to tell you that Beyoncé did not show up. Pink did. The Chicks did. Other celebrities. Still, we are surprised when Kamala takes the stage at the very reasonable hour of 9:30 p.m. If the women behind me are disappointed, they don’t say so. After all, we’ve been waiting for this moment, this leader. We weren’t waiting for Beyoncé, it turns out. Everyone is standing now, even the Frenchmen, and we are cheering and there is something magical here, however highly produced and choreographed. It is exciting to have a shared goal. It is better than watching at home on TV. When Kamala Harris speaks, I am relieved—but I am terrified, too. Because now the Big Problem has become clear and the Big Problem is that she could lose, and if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that the Big Problem is not just that she could lose, but that Trump could win.
Standing there in the spotlight, down there on that stage, we remember that she is one person. She might be nervous—who wouldn’t be? There is some vulnerability or fragility to her, as there is to any single human being. Maybe I notice it when she pushes her hair away from her face, that familiar-to-me move, her well-styled hair parted to the side, a section of it falling forward. I have never seen a presidential candidate do this, lightly move her hair away from her face.
I am projecting, I know. I am a woman looking at another woman and I am not used to it. That’s all. I am not used to my leaders being beautiful women. Elizabeth Hardwick dared to say: “I have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man.” The young women behind me will very likely not inherit this particular internalized misogyny, and that moves me beyond measure because—and this is shameful to think and shameful to write and yet it is true—right now, Kamala Harris on this stage accepting the nomination for the President of the United States, is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.
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