Democrats, day 3

I managed eventually to get through all of this, though it wasn't easy. An AP video had the whole thing, but the sound kept going out, including for the entirety of Bill Clinton's speech. I switched over to a video on Kamala Harris's account, which only had the prime-time speeches, but at least I'd gotten that far before the AP started glitching.

The climax was, of course, Walz's acceptance speech. This began as an apologia for himself and his governmental accomplishments, replaying some of the points he made in his introductory speech in Philadelphia, skillfully morphing by the end by dropping his own ego and turning into a straightforward cheerleading session for Harris. The videos I watched did not have many of the reaction shots of Walz's children which have afforded so much commentary (critical from the Republicans, charmed from everybody else), but this article discussing the matter has embedded a CNN video which does include the reaction shots. When Walz described how years of infertility treatments had finally produced a child and that's why they named her Hope, from her seat Hope (who is now 23) formed a little heart symbol with her hands, an "I love you, Dad" gesture which sent commentator Stephen Colbert quivering with tears.

In the long list of previous speakers: A surprise appearance by Oprah Winfrey. A loose-jointed effusion by Lateefah Simon, a former Harris deputy at the SF DA's office (she has a story, not told here, of Harris sending her home on her first day to put on more professional clothes, and then personally buying her a suit), who is the nominee to replace Barbara Lee in the House, so we're going to be hearing a lot from her in the future. The parents of one of the hostages still held by Hamas, who made it clear that they're equally opposed to bombing civilians in Gaza, but they do want their son home. With all the fuss being made over the Palestinian victims, I was grateful for this gesture made towards the Israeli ones. As was made clear, there is no point to be made in competing victimhoods. They're all topics of our concern, and the audience seemed appreciative.

Most of the speeches emphasized the positive, of course, but it was the jabs at the opposition which most stuck in the mind. Today the prize went to Hakeem Jeffries, who compared DT to "an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won't go away. He has spent the last four years spinning the block, trying to get back into a relationship with the American people. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason."

But there's been an immense amount of commentary on a gesture of Barack Obama's in his speech the previous day. I'd hardly thought this worth discussing at the time. Listing DT's oddities, Obama mentioned "this weird obsession with crowd sizes." As he did so, he gestured with his hands - holding them palms facing each other, moving them farther apart and closer together but still apart, and looking down dubiously. This has widely been taken and even roundly criticized as a visual joke implying that DT has a small penis. Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show thought it so brutal that he remarked "That's the second time this summer the Secret Service has failed to protect Trump from a lethal attack."

Sorry, but that strikes me as overthinking it. This moving of the hands back and forth, as if playing an air accordion, is a standard gesture of Trump's, so much so that it's been adopted by comedians like Colbert and Seth Meyers when doing DT imitations. I think I even saw Walz make the gesture at one point in some other speech, though I can't remember that for sure.

Or maybe Obama is just relying on plausible deniability.