I didn't see all of this, for various reasons. I didn't see the 13-year-old stutterer, who is said to have been inspiring. I didn't see the opening, which resulted in my walking in to the tv room in the middle of one of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's monologues and not recognizing her, because I hadn't seen her since Seinfeld went off the air. I didn't think too highly of her lame jokes, like attempting to mispronounce "Mike Pence," not in the context of all the inspiring stuff elsewhere in the show.
Stuff like: Lots of ex-rivals telling us what's good about Biden, most effectively and believably from Bernie Sanders. Lots of stories about Biden phoning people out of the blue, or taking half an hour to talk to some random citizen he just met. (If he does things like this all the time, as implied, he wouldn't have time to get anything else done.) So many tributes to Beau Biden and John Lewis, it was as if they were the stars of the show. The award for worst failed attempt to be inspiring goes to the young couple who quizzed their little girls about current events for an agonizingly extended period of time. Sometimes, "mouth of babes" is not a guarantor of wisdom.
Biden's speech was the usual aspirational stuff about how he wants to be president of all the people. Does that ever work? At the end, the mockup of the big cheering crowds at other conventions took the form of Joe and Kamala and spouses waving in the usual fashion at a video wall. Then they walked out into a drive-in theater full of cars that were honking; I'd hate to be a neighbor to that theater, especially as it must have been 11 pm where they were.
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