Obama, Harris, and an Unconventional Convention

H. L. Mencken, a columnist who gloried in the sweaty pageantry and funny-hat hokum of early-twentieth-century nominating Conventions, would surely have savaged the two-dimensional Presidential campaign of our pandemic summer. Mencken lampooned the quadrennial bacchanals of his day, but he clearly relished their madness. Writing of the 1924 Democratic National Convention, a sixteen-day affair at Madison Square Garden, Mencken wrote, “There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging.”

That Convention, which required a hundred and three ballots to settle on...