PREVIEW: Night 3 of the Democratic National Convention
Night 3 of the DNC is in the books. Nick Hauselman calls in from the United Center to discuss the speeches and communication from the floor. Then, Jared gets into what he saw while reporting from the protests in the streets.
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Hey everybody, welcome to Patreon-exclusive coverage of Night 3 of the Democratic National Convention.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton, and at the DNC, at the actual United Center, we have the one, the only, Nick Halseman.
How you doing, buddy?
I'm good, I'm good.
After Night 3, the batteries are getting a little bit lower.
They are getting low!
Well, hey, spending half the day with you outside and then getting in here, it's a lot.
Nick, I don't know if you looked at your step counter.
We put in the work today.
Well, I'm kind of curious, you know, if you can give me a quick overview of how it ended up with the protests, because after I left you it sounded like it got a little more exciting.
Listen, things were happening.
So, to get everybody up to speed, and by the way, I just looked at mine, I had 17,000 steps today, so I got that going fully.
So, first of all, if everyone wants to listen to the full coverage of this, and I know you do because you're getting excellent coverage from us, you're not getting anywhere else, you need to go to patreon.com slash montgreggepodcast.
So Nick and I, before he went into the actual convention tonight, we spent a lot of time going to some protests.
We saw Ilhan Omar speaking with a Palestinian group.
Also, Nick, I don't know if you've heard about this since you were in the convention hall, there was a group of uncommitted delegates who were asking the DNC to feature a Palestinian up on the stage.
They were denied by the DNC and have now staged a sit-in, which got very weird.
Nick and I were there as a protest, a Gaza protest was taking place in Union Park.
It was slow going, but eventually got about 5,000, 6,000 people.
It included multiple clashes with the police.
I'll talk more about what I saw, which I thought was really, really disturbing, what the larger implications were.
I marched with them and covered them as they went towards the DNC.
It was very, very tense.
There, of course, were some violent clashes between the protest and the police the night before, which led to a very uneasy situation in which both sides changed the way that they approached it.
But I think the main story tonight, and I'll get into it more after we get done talking, because Nick has to go and shake hands with luminaries.
Nick, night three of the Democratic National Convention was different.
I don't know if you agree with me on this, but we talked last night about how there was no real theme to Night 2.
There were definitely themes to Night 3.
I thought the heavy hitters came out.
There are a lot of speeches and a lot of developments to talk about.
How was it in the actual arena?
You know, again, these things are really slow going to develop in the beginning because it's sort of people who are, you know, less name recognition, maybe less interesting.
But they did get some heavy hitters out here.
And so if you had to ask me who won the night in terms of speaking, I mean, Oprah, the reaction to Oprah, who is, you know, the queen of Chicago, was as loud and as aggressive as anybody's reaction to anything we've seen so far this week.
A really effective communicator.
And by the way, since we like to pull the curtain back, I absolutely guarantee that Michelle Obama's speech team came in and gave Oprah this speech that had it written all over it.
I have my problems with Oprah that we don't need to get into, but she is an excellent.
And I thought that she absolutely overperformed anything we could have expected. - Yeah, but we can't do that.
I also think Tim Waltz gave an incredible speech, which we've got to talk about.
I think Pete Buttigieg actually showed up very well.
I have a problem with his mic, but we'll talk about that later.
Josh Shapiro, I thought, over-delivered based on anything we could have expected.
Really, really heavy-duty tonight.
Yeah, now, you know, the elephant in the room, I guess, is Bill Clinton.
He probably gave his last speech.
He is not doing well, and he doesn't have, you know, the energy.
I mean, he's in that sort of Joe Biden mode these days with his health, so that was, it was nice to see him, and he had a couple zingers, but it was still, you know, it was, you know, it's been a long day for me, but I, you know, I tell you, like, did I start to kind of— It was tough.
—my eyes get a little heavy?
Yeah, like, it got a little heavy.
I was a little bit tough to say with it, with it.
So that was one.
Pelosi spoke, and, you know, she's never, like, amazing in these things, right?
No, she's not a good speaker.
Yeah, and so she kind of just did it, like, paint by numbers.
It was—she got through.
It was fine.
I think five minutes, by the way.
If you want to talk about generational shifts within the Democratic Party, I believe she got five minutes.
Wow.
I mean, that's the thing that actually hit me in the middle of this was like, this is such a huge, you know, transition.
There are so many of these luminaries that are now in their late 70s, and it's time and they recognize it.
It's been a while since we've had a Democratic Party, it's had such a major shift that these people are having to move on.
You know, that's their last speech.
Nancy's last speech, probably, you know, like a big speech like this.
Bill, you know, Biden, all these people.
So it's exciting in that way.
And I can't remember the last time we sort of were in the situation.
So, you know, Klobuchar spoke as well.
And I think that there's a you know, they're going on too long.
They're going on too late.
And and then we have to talk about Walls because he finished the night off.
I got to tell you, I think for all and by the way, the messaging and the presentation has been really, really effective.
We talked about this after the first night, Nick.
The logistics of this convention are completely off.
They have no idea how to schedule people.
They don't know where to put people.
The ups and the downs can give you sickness.
But I will say, by the way, on this whole note, one of the bigger conversations we need to have before you get off here You're exactly right.
The Democrats have a deep, young bench.
They don't know what to do with it yet.
And they don't know where to put people, and they don't know where to go, and that's something I want to talk about before we get done with this.
By the way, you brought up Clinton.
This is going to be one of Clinton's last major addresses.
You know, I think he'll speak in the future.
It'll be an elder statesman sort of a thing.
The mind is still as sharp as a trap.
Like, I mean, it is a steel trap.
It is really incredible how, like, I have my problems with Bill Clinton, but his mastery over facts and his ability to tell a story.
And by the way, a call back to last night, Nick, I told you that he was going to do the man from Hope thing and then bring Kamala Harris into it.
And what happened in all of this?
All of the effective speakers, save for Josh Shapiro, he doesn't understand this yet.
Every major speaker tonight told their story, gave their own lore, got their own personality across.
I mean, Tim Walz has been on the national radar now for, what, like three weeks?
And like, he already has a bevy of catchphrases, the biography's out there, everybody knows it.
The effective communicators are the ones who can give their story and go ahead and move it around to whoever they want.
By the way, you have to love Like a crowd chanting for a coach.
That has to be for you.
They love it.
Coach, coach.
I mean, he really, and he, you know, he's like, I haven't given many of these kind of speeches, but I've certainly given a lot of pep talks.
And how he controlled that room was terrific.
We didn't even mention Buttigieg, by the way.
Yeah.
And so, and Shapiro did it, was also really, really good.
So freedom was the theme.
Freedom.
It was the first night that I ever was really aware of it.
The themes the other night, I'm not even sure what they were.
But tonight they did a good job of at least establishing that and making it clear.
That's what we're talking about.
And they had some good pre-edited pieces as well.
On that note, real fast Nick, because I'm glad you brought that up.
Do you remember when the Biden campaign unrolled, finished the job?
And remember that you and I were exhausted by it and we said the communications of the Biden team are atrocious.
They have no idea what they're doing.
Let's review what has happened in a few weeks, Nick.
Number one, they've branded the Republican Party as weird, which is perfectly encapsulated who they are.
They've branded, we're not going back, we're moving forward.
When we fight together, we win.
I mean, they've taken back the word freedom from the Republican Party.
Which is actually, like, it's a rhetorical thing, but Nick, it's actually historical.
That has been the main tentpole of the Republican Party rhetorically.
It's the way they've hidden racism and segregation and all of it.
The Democratic Party has effectively wrestled that back, as well as patriotism.
Like, it's really kind of bizarre how effective they've been in, like, a month at doing a lot.
And Wallace ends up being the guy who's driving a lot of this, and maybe not even, it might be by accident, but he also has the big phrase, mind your own business.
Mind your own damn business.
Yeah, and he's been able to punctuate his thoughts with that, which is pretty much exactly how like the ultra mega conservatives would want to feel too, mind your own business.
So it resonates across a lot of different things, especially because there's no reason why anybody else, like for instance, if you don't, if you're against abortion, if you think it's murdering, whatever that is, That's you.
It's your right to not use that.
But why does anybody ever think that they can make decisions for anybody else's health care issues?
And that's just kind of that.
If you can kind of phrase it that way, mind your own damn business.
It tends to sort of, you know, end that conversation or win that argument.
And so it's been unbelievable how the messaging since Kamala Harris took over has been every one of them.
Completely changed.
And we spent four years complaining about it, right?
Well, that's because the Biden team was literally terrible at communications.
We screamed about this.
They couldn't get along with the press.
They couldn't get their message out.
They couldn't highlight their successes.
They couldn't explain their failures.
And they just had no ability whatsoever to communicate.
That doesn't mean that Joe Biden didn't have positives that he was able to, you know, bring out or successes.
They had no ability to talk about it or talk about themselves.
