Attending the last two nights of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in person made me realize one thing: The united center will hold.
It seems so obvious now because the center is holding. Perhaps Oprah said it best when she noted, “When we stand together, it is impossible to conquer us.”
I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in being overcome and taken control of by military force, which is what it means to be conquered.
At the same time, this year’s DNC was remarkably bipartisan, a stark contrast to the idol worship the RNC staged in July.
To wit, Mesa, Ariz. Mayor John Giles (R) not only spoke at the DNC, he also endorsed Democratic Senator Mark Kelly over Republican challenger and Trump acolyte Blake Masters in 2022. For this principled stand, the Arizona Republican Party censured Giles.
We also saw former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia Geoff Duncan. A living, breathing Republican, he captured my heart when he said, “If the Republicans are being intellectually honest with ourselves, our party is not civil or conservative, it is chaotic and crazy and the only thing left to do is dump Trump.”
And then there was Republican Adam Kinzinger, the former Congressman from Illinois’s 16th district. A man whose primetime speech on Thursday night included this stone-cold truth bomb: “Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He is a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim.”
Of course the Republican National Committee censured Kinzinger in February 2022 for his role in investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris called Trump “an unserious man,” a polite way of saying he is a joke. She also spoke for the majority of Americans when she said this about the other side’s abortion fetish: “Simply put—they are out of their minds.”
But if Chicago tells me anything, it is this: Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are winning. They are moving forward like nobody’s business. And in every American’s interests.
