Out of many, One. Locked down, isolated and fearful as a pandemic fractured national bonds and the power of community, America got a sudden, startling look at itself on Tuesday night as the Democratic National Convention’s virtual roll call vote whipped coast to coast and around the globe.
It was the surprise highlight of an evening showcasing the party’s past and present, including two aged former presidents, the young star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, more Republicans speaking in support of the nominee, and his wife, Jill Biden. And it might just have given the nation’s flattened tourism industry the kind of publicity money can’t buy. State-by-state roll calls — an academic exercise now that political consultants have consigned contested conventions to history — drag when parades of grandstanding delegates grab their moments of fame in crowded, hot convention halls. Not this time. An advertisement for America The virtual tour played out in short recorded videos, and live shots became a tantalizing glimpse of a vast and fertile land that is out there waiting once the current nightmare — in which more than 170,000 people have died, millions lost their jobs and tens of millions have been cut off from friends, coworkers and loved ones — finally abates. The ultimate outdoor Room Rater moment served up stunning backdrops from rocky crags in Colorado to the Bering Sea in Alaska and Arizona cacti. It swept from American Samoa, with a verdant mountain vista, to a farmyard in Maine and on to Michigan’s delegation in the Motor City, standing like salesmen in a local TV ad in front of three gleaming new vehicles.
