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 the doomed candidacy of John W. Davis, a corporate lawyer from West Virginia, featured the influence of the Ku Klux Klan (as did the same summer’s Republican Convention) and Franklin Roosevelt’s eloquent, yet futile, attempt to promote the Presidential bid of New York Governor Al Smith, “the Happy Warrior.” This was an event without television schedules or air-conditioning. Imagine the tedium, the hovering clouds of cigar smoke and B.O. And yet there was Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, pounding his typewriter with happy derision.
“It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming,” he wrote. “One sits through long sessions wishing all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell—and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.”
In the absence of such lurid attractions, how would the candidacy of Joe Biden survive the impatience of the voters, much less the pitiless gaze of a Mencken? In a campaign without travel and a Convention without crowds, how could a masked and socially distanced candidate, whose most pronounced quality is an outsized capacity for empathy, find a way to connect? And with so much on the line—the survival of democratic norms and the rule of law, the national health and the future of the natural world—how could Biden and the Party leadership conceive a nominating Convention that would not fall as flat as the screens on which it would be projected?
