Democratic National Convention 2016: news and updates

One of the great and terrible parts of being a journalist in the 21st century is easy access to any story I’ve contributed to the internet. This made it especially easy to revisit an essay I wrote as a 23-year-old newly minted college grad, working as an editorial assistant at Newsweek magazine.

It was a short contribution to a cover package on a topic du jour that, once again, is quite relevant as the presidential election nears: Hillary Clinton and gender.

Virginia Senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine will get his biggest moment of the campaign Tuesday night as he squares off against Republican VP pick Mike Pence at Longwood University in his home state.

Kaine has been on the campaign trail for over two months now, but still remains largely anonymous nationally. In many ways, he was the safest VP choice available to Clinton. Picking him didn’t hugely excite Democrats’ progressive base the way choosing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren would have. And he wasn’t a historic step forward for Latinos the way Labor Secretary Tom Perez, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, or California Rep. Xavier Becerra would’ve been.

Hillary Clinton is the first woman presidential nominee of a major American political party, and it’s very possible that she will become our first woman president.

This is a major historical milestone. But Clinton’s nomination, and the prospect of her election, doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone — even prominent, self-identified feminists.

PHILADELPHIA — Every night of the Democratic National Convention, Pastor Ray Shawn McKinnon and his friend Sebastian stayed up talking well past 3 am in their Holiday Inn hotel room.

The two met last summer volunteering for Bernie Sanders in North Carolina, and soon became close friends. McKinnon, who is black and 6’1”, calls Sebastian, who is white and 5’2”, his “pint-sized conscience.” Over 14 months, they were inseparable allies: canvassing, phone-banking, and organizing for a common cause.

In their searing speech against Donald Trump this week, the parents of deceased US Army Captain Humayun Khan suggested that Trump has not read the US Constitution — citing as exhibit one Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the US, which likely violates the First Amendment’s protections for the free exercise of religion.

Trump first responded with cruelty and inaccuracies to a family that lost a loved one to war. But then Trump released a written statement responding to the Khans that actually seemed to prove their claim that he hadn’t read the Constitution (emphasis mine):

Donald Trump has responded to the anguished father of deceased US Army Captain Humayun Khan in a way that, as Ezra Klein described, was despicable even for Trump.

Khan’s father — Khizr Khan — spoke at the Democratic National Convention, arguing that Trump’s calls to ban Muslims from entering the US violate the Constitution, and that Trump hadn’t made any sacrifices like the Khans for their country. But during the speech, his wife Ghazala stood silently beside him. On Saturday, Trump implied that she didn’t speak because the Khans’ Muslim faith didn’t allow her to, and suggested that he, as a wealthy billionaire running a business, had made sacrifices, too.

The most emotional moment of the Democratic National Convention was the speech by Khizr Khan, the bereaved father of Army Captain Humayun Khan. With his wife Ghazala by his side, Khan recalled his son’s character, his faith, his patriotism — and, ultimately, his courageous death in the service of the country he loved, and the fellow soldiers he was protecting.

And, yes, the Khan family is Muslim. Under Trump’s proposed policies, they would be innately suspect; had he been president when they immigrated to America, they would’ve been barred from entering, and Humayun Khan never would have served.

PHILADELPHIA — I was there, in the arena of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, when a woman accepted the nomination of a major American political party for president. But don’t envy me for witnessing history, because that’s not really how it felt.

To people watching Hillary Clinton’s Democratic National Convention speech on TV, like my colleague Dylan Matthews, “The first speech as nominee of the first woman nominated by a major party was always going to be a moment. And sure enough, Clinton delivered [...] She nailed it.”

One chief aim of the Democratic National Convention was to humanize Hillary Clinton. Another was to convince America that she’d be a great president because of how hard she works and how good she is at getting things done.

It’s tough to do both of these things at once, especially for a woman in politics, and especially for this particular woman in politics. As Vox’s Ezra Klein pointed out in a profile of Clinton’s “listening” leadership style, presidential campaigns are built to favor the charismatic speeches and cults of personality more typically associated with men. But Clinton’s greatest asset as a politician is her ability to build relationships and coalitions — a task that’s less publicly visible, and also more stereotypically feminine.

On Thursday night, Hillary Clinton made history by becoming the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of any major political party in the US. But according to Nielsen’s ratings data, more Americans tuned in to watch Donald Trump’s acceptance speech than Clinton’s.

Trump attracted 32.2 million viewers while only 29.8 million viewers watched Clinton. This is significantly lower than the 38.4 million viewers who watched Barack Obama’s historic 2008 acceptance speech, but more than the 25.9 million viewers who watched Obama in 2012.

PHILADELPHIA — The balloons came down, the speeches ended, and now the convoy is packing up and heading out onto the campaign trail.

The general election is on.

Hillary Clinton made history Thursday as the first American woman to formally accept the presidential nomination of any major political party since the country was founded.

“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” she said. “It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”

Since former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered a sharply anti-Trump speech at the Democratic convention on Wednesday, political observers have been waiting with bated breath for Trump to respond.

Bloomberg’s speech seemed uniquely tailored to get under Trump’s skin. He said Trump was a hypocrite and a con artist who’s also a terrible businessman, and even seemed to question his sanity.

Both Republicans and Democrats have now met and nominated presidential candidates.

But their nominating bodies could not be more different — and only one appears to reflect the changing diversity of America.

“I come from the land where we manufacture Pez!” J.R. Romano, chair of the Connecticut Republicans, bellowed before a packed auditorium.

The sentiment came during the Republican National Convention’s roll call, a process in which each state is supposed to orally cast its votes for the presidential primary candidates. But give an amateur politician a microphone and an audience of 24 million viewers, and, well, things change.

Since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it’s taken 240 years for a major political party to nominate a woman for president – Hillary Clinton.

“What the butter is wrong with you people?!” Abitha Whitmore, a fictional female delegate from the Second Continental Congress in 1776 (played by Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson) said on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “Why did it take so long?!”

If you watched parts of the past couple of days of the Democratic convention, you could be forgiven for wondering which party you were looking at.

Speakers lavishly praised Ronald Reagan and talked about their faith and family values. The tone was thoroughly patriotic and pro-military, as American as apple pie.

The second night of the Democratic National Convention was also the 26th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act. It was, further, the day of a horrifying anti-disabled hate crime in Japan, where a former employee of a caregiving facility who had expressed support for euthanizing the disabled without their consent carried through on that idea by returning to his employer and stabbing 19 people to death. It was the worst mass killing in Japan since World War II.

This is the uneasy state of disability rights in the world today. Yes, a quarter-century ago politicians of both parties came together to guarantee disabled Americans protection against discrimination, and basic physical access to public life. But we still live in a world where many people consider disability a fate worse than death, and are all too willing to murder disabled people (and people on the autism spectrum, like me) for being an inconvenience.

A lot of what seems inexplicable about Hillary Clinton often makes more sense when you realize her formative years in the public eye were largely spent in front of a religious right that spent a large portion of 1992 making television character Murphy Brown’s decision to be a single mother a national controversy.

Needless to say, there wasn’t much love for Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination shatters a glass ceiling nearly as old as our nation itself. But over the course of Clinton’s campaign, some black women have been both anxious and ambivalent about the prospect of Clinton as the first woman presidential candidate.

And when Clinton finally clinched the nomination in June, Twitter user MadBlackThot created the hashtag #GirlIGuessImWithHer, which soon went viral. This meme captures the sentiment:

Thank you! Thank you for that amazing welcome.

And Chelsea, thank you.

That’s a wrap, folks.

After two straight weeks of primetime electioneering, the 2016 party convention season has come to an end, with Hillary Clinton wrapping up the Democratic event in Philadelphia with one of the strongest speeches she’s given in her career.

Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech on Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention marked two watershed moments. Of course she became the first woman to formally accept the presidential nomination of a major party.

But she also became the first presidential candidate of the two major parties to use the term “systemic racism” in her nomination speech:

Watching Hillary Clinton become the first woman to accept a major party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention was emotional for many observers — sometimes unexpectedly so.

Some talked about how they feel this has been a long time coming for women:

Hillary Clinton wants you to know one thing about her position on gun control: “I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I’m not here to take away your guns.”

She elaborated further on her comments, which she made at her Democratic National Convention speech accepting the presidential nomination: “I just don’t want you to be shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place. We should be working with responsible gun owners to pass commonsense reforms and keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists, and all others who would do us harm.”