An in-person event might have exposed conflicts in the Party, but it also might have offered a chance to address them.
Last week, when the Democratic National Convention, in its virtual state, nominated Joseph R. Biden as its Presidential candidate, Donald Trump decided to let his supporters in on a secret. “Joe, look, he doesn’t know where he is,” the President said, leaning toward a microphone that had been set up in front of Air Force One, in Yuma, Arizona, where he had come to accept the endorsement of the union representing border-control agents. Biden, he said, wouldn’t be able to resist the commands of “his new boss,” Bernie Sanders. In Yuma and elsewhere, in speeches that grew darker and stranger as the week progressed, Trump pounded on the same theme: Biden was “a puppet,” a “Trojan horse for socialism,” the smiling, cognitively unsound prop of a left-wing mob intent on tearing the country down. Trump seemed desperate to persuade Americans that what they were seeing in the Zoom squares of the Convention was an illusion. That Trump would try this gambit wasn’t surprising, because the reality of Joe Biden was looking pretty good. The risk of a remote Convention was that it would feel as if it were taking place anywhere or nowhere. But Biden appeared to know exactly where he was: Delaware, the state he represented in the Senate for more than three decades. Standing onstage in the empty Chase Center, on the Wilmington waterfront, he spoke with groundedness, delivering remarks that were both genial and forceful. Trump, Biden said, had put America on a “path of shadow and suspicion.” Instead of protecting the country, he had subjected it to his divisiveness, his bigotry, his selfishness, and—in his botched response to the pandemic—his deadly incompetence. “It didn’t have to be this bad,” Biden said. What was striking was how careful many Convention speakers were not to disparage voters who had thought, in 2016, that Trump himself wouldn’t be this bad. Michelle Obama, the former First Lady, said that he had been given “more than enough time to prove that he can do the job,” only to show that “he cannot meet this moment.
