Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes:

On Day Two of the Democratic National Convention, the Party’s recent past kept ghosting in and out. Before the networks had even begun their broadcasts, the Party rolled through half a century of its own history: Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, from Georgia, and then Caroline Kennedy and her son in front of the unpainted shingles of a Cape Cod home, and, finally, Bill Clinton, sitting on a flowered couch at his home in Chappaqua, New York. Clinton and Joe Biden form generational bookends—one moderate icon hailing another. But there was nothing especially historic, or historical, about Clinton’s praise of the nominee. His account leaned on Biden’s role in the Obama Administration’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. “Joe helped bring us back from a recession before, and he can do it again,” Clinton said. The Party’s political history of its candidate had been somewhat radically shortened, so that it began in 2008.

Is this still the Party that Clinton remade? Five prerecorded minutes, broadcast early on the second night of the Convention, indicated that his personal influence has waned. Ideologically, too, Democrats have drifted away from him: any talk of triangulation was largely left to the dissident Republicans who spoke on both Monday and Tuesday evenings. But, in other ways during the lead-up to the nomination of a Presidential candidate born in 1942 to challenge an incumbent born in 1946, older Democrats’ hold on their party’s politics remained strong—and not only in the frequency of Springsteen tracks. Biden, whose instinct has often been to seek out the center of his own party, once followed a moderate, Clintonite path, and the project of remaking him during this past year’s long primary campaign was one of suppressing those earlier stands: for the crime bill of 1994; for the Iraq war in 2003; and, above all, during the seventies, against court-mandated school desegregation. The Democrats who gave Biden the nomination seemed to want a familiar candidate, but actually nominating him has required eliding much of his political history.

Clinton’s ascendance, a generation ago, didn’t just mean a preference for pragmatism. It meant a belief in the transformative powers of youth. The Democratic Party of the nineteen-eighties—of Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Dan Rostenkowski, and Geraldine Ferraro—was a traditional operation, dependent on political machines in declining cities and the workingman politics of big unions. The Party that Clinton celebrated at the 2000 Democratic National Convention—a handheld camera tracking him for over a minute as he strode through the bowels of the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, on his way to the podium—had been remade in his image: telegenic, optimistic, assured of its own expertise. The Democrats are still (relative to Republicans) the party of the future, but now the vision belongs to the Parkland survivors and the Sunrise Movement and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—another generational talent who is seen by her opponents as a media persona and by her supporters as a serious policy entrepreneur, a preternaturally talented political figure who arrives with white papers and twelve-point plans. [Continue reading…]