Joe Biden acceptance speech. August 27, 2008. Democratic National Convention. Pepsi Center, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Jon Winet.

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

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The Machine

I’m writing to you from inside a machine for producing words and images. If anything happens here at the Pepsi Center that is not recorded, it is a wasted act, a kind of sin. Everyone here is divided into use-groups, indicated by the colored tags hanging from their necks. Security forces check the tags constantly to insure compliance.

First, there are the Politicians, the stars, the reason we’re all here. Some of them are so important that they don’t even wear tags. Their images are so ubiquitous and recognizable that they transcend the need for secondary identification.

Next comes the Designated Crowd, also called delegates. Their job is to dress extravagantly and react enthusiastically to everything the Politicians do. They must act as if they’re on-camera at all times, even in the most supposedly private of moments, because when you become part of the Designated Crowd, you sacrifice your identity and image to the greater Image.

The Press is here to record and interpret every act and gesture of the Politicians and the Designated Crowd. The Press is divided into Word People and Image People, and in this setting, the Image People have the upper hand. The Press is also divided into the Mainstream Media and the Bloggers. The MSM have whole buildings (called Media Pavilions) dedicated to their every need or want. They have lounges and cafes and bars. And they have degrees of unlimited access. Some of them have such recognizable images that they have themselves become stars: Wolf, Anderson, Katie, Cokie, Matt. One sees them on the Floor, perfect and motionless, until the cameras roll and they spring to life.

The lowest caste of all is the Bloggers. They are image-less drones, crammed into crowded warrens in tents, outbuildings, and basements, plugged into their pitiful terminals, eating scraps falling from above. They exist at the outer edges of the Machine for Producing Words & Images, closest to the Unwashed, the Irrelevant.

Tonight, the Machine moves.

Filed on Thursday, August 28, 2008, after the third night of the DNC.

August 26, 2008. Hillary Clinton speech. 2008 Democratic National Convention. Pepsi Center, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
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The Fallen

The principle drama of the conventions is the relation between the press (now, the MSM) and the politicians. This entire spectacle is built for and caters to the media and the media cannot get enough of it. This year Wolf Blitzer and CNN have set themselves up in the middle of everything, right down on the floor rather than suspended above it. CNN pundits James Carville, et al. wear black Madonna headpiece mics so that they can hear themselves and each other above the din. They look like astronauts in New Guinea.

After eight years of Bush/Cheney-style bunker mentality and press blackout, the conventions are orgies of access, and the MSM is bleary-eyed and gooey with the surfeit.

Last night, the stage belonged to the Clintons, and they showed (if anyone remained unconvinced) how masterful they are at this kind of stagecraft. Chelsea introduced her mother with a film that almost managed to make Hillary look hip, and Hillary gave the best televised speech of her life, artfully intercut with close-ups of weeping women delegates and extreme close-ups and reaction shots of Bill Clinton (often even in splitscreen) laughing, loving, earnestly rapt, and tearful. The words said “Vote for Obama,” but the images said “Look you now upon the President and First Gentleman who could and should have been, and weep.”
Filed on Wednesday, August 27, 2008, after the second night of the convention.

August 25, 2008. Democratic National Convention. Pepsi Center, Denver, Colorado.
Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective via daily dispatches from the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

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Isn’t She Lovely?

For a mere voter, it was frustrating to watch the overdetermined and utterly predictable Spectacle that is the party’s nominating convention lumber to life tonight in Denver. Our excitement at Barack Obama’s rise, from his incandescent keynote speech at this convention four years ago, to his unlikely early victories and impossible triumph in the primary, led us to believe that something, everything, had changed, and that perhaps even this hapless ritual might be transformed into a better version of itself. But it was not to be, at least not yet. Just as the opening ceremonies of the Bejing Olympics went all North Korea on us despite extraordinary individual feats, the first night of the Democratic National Convention insisted on Ken Burns without realizing that it had everything it needed in Malia and Sasha Obama.

Something felt wrong from the beginning; not just the self-conscious mawkishness, but something deeper, lurking under the deadend of identity politics. It was as if the worst tendencies of 1980s had come out to make one last attempt to stifle the future. Race vs. gender. And the hall was haunted by other spectres of past failures: Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Howard Dean. I’m sure we’ll see Al Gore soon. There is something inside American liberalism that forgives too much and gives up too soon. A compensatory, defensive liberalism that refuses to win. Is the Obama campaign a real political movement, or just another empty promise? Having gotten our attention, will Obama Democrats, like their predecessors over the last 30 years, find a way to lose?

This time, the stakes are just too high. Barack and Michelle Obama realize this. They are real leaders, not empty vessels that must be filled up with platitudes, and tonight showed that the Democratic establishment hasn’t yet figured that out. Watching Michelle Obama give that speech was like watching a great miler run through tapioca. I think she came through anyway, but why put your best through that?

If American voters again decide that they want someone in the White House who appeals to their worst selves, who they can feel “comfortable” with, the Obamas will lose. But if they agree with Michelle Obama that “the world as it is just won’t do,” then this spectacle is just a distraction. In his speech at the convention in 2004, Barack Obama invoked “the true genius of America” without irony or cant. If that genius survives, it needs to rise now, and push aside the party faithful. “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Filed Monday, August 25, 2008, after the first night of the Democratic National Convention.