In case you are wondering if politics and American culture are more connected than ever, look no further than the Emmy nominations. The Democrat National Convention and Joe Biden’s Inauguration have both been nominated for Emmy awards. It’s a first and Hollywood couldn’t be more pleased with itself.

Vanity Fair magazine has a glowing piece about Stephanie Cutter and how deserving she and her team (mostly her) are of entertainment awards. Cutter has been around for decades. The political consultant was Bill Clinton’s deputy communications director, adviser to Barack Obama in his first term, and deputy campaign manager on Obama’s reelection bid, besides a frequent commenter on political shows and hyper-partisan Democrat. She was put in charge of the Democrat National Convention’s televised events last summer. The coronavirus pandemic drastically changed how the presidential campaign season was executed and that included both parties’ national conventions. Team Biden had the more difficult task as he was the challenger, not the incumbent. So, Cutter turned to Hollywood to put on a production.

To be clear, Cutter submitted both the Democrat National Convention (DNC) and the inauguration for the awards. These are not random nominations. This is a deliberate attempt by the Democrat establishment to mainstream the party for everyday Americans, or at least those who are watching the Emmy awards. Democrats don’t need to convince Hollywood that they are one with them, everyone already knows that. But, seriously, wasn’t Julia Louis-Dreyfus a sleep-inducing host? You’d think with experience in comedies like Seinfeld and Veep she would have at least produced lines that made the audience at home chuckle a little. Nope. She was bad. The other hosts weren’t much better.

“Certainly when you’re in the throes of dealing with a pandemic…you’re not thinking, Let’s submit this for an award—you’re just trying to get through the end of it without making any huge mistakes,” Cutter says. “But we were really encouraged to submit these for an Emmy because they were so different from what you normally see in politics. In the era of a pandemic, we accomplished something pretty big in terms of being able to produce interesting, creative content that engages people in a virtual setting.”

Cutter and her team—including Adrienne Elrod, talent director for Biden’s inaugural committee, and Ricky Kirshner, an Emmy-winning television veteran—needed to navigate both the new world of entertainment and longstanding political norms. They cut the DNC to two hours a day (typically, its daily run time would go as long as six hours), with speeches of party bigwigs shortened accordingly. “We knew what story we wanted to tell,” Cutter says. “Usually people get up there and speak for 10 to 15 minutes. The average was two minutes for us, and everybody understood. We didn’t get any pushback from anybody wanting to speak longer, for the most part.” She pauses. “There were one or two, but I won’t mention who they are.”

“That is such a politically challenging decision Stephanie had to make there…to go to some very notable VIPs and say, ‘You can only speak for four minutes,’ that is not an easy thing to do in the world that we work in,” Elrod says. “We wanted to convince the American people to support Joe Biden. If we had a bunch of boring speeches, it [was] not going to work.”

The one thing I give credit to the DNC for was the roll call of states delivering their votes. That was good, except for the part where Guam got into trouble for using uniformed members of the military in their segment. The men and women in uniform, on active duty, are supposed to stay out of politics. Oops.

After her alleged success in executing the DNC, Cutter was tapped again to produce the prime-time inauguration special, Celebrating America. Again she turned to her friends in Tinsel Town. They had to “meet the moment” after realizing America really wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. The inauguration followed the events of January 6, and almost a year of lockdowns and pandemic mitigation mandates. The election was stressful and drawn-out. Nonetheless, Cutter persisted.

This was also at the height of the COVID-19 winter surge. “The things that we carried through from the convention [are] that, you don’t have people cheering for you—there is no audience, there’s nobody applauding, so how do you translate that into a virtual program?” Cutter says. “It’s really driven by emotion.” The special had Tom Hanks—“a father figure to the American people,” as Cutter calls him—hosting from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, interwoven with stories of everyday Americans doing extraordinary things with big musical performances. And this was all live.

“We could have taken the easy way out—we could have had everybody out of the city, nothing live from the Lincoln, [kept] Bruce Springsteen and John Legend…at home,” Elrod adds. “That would have frankly made our lives a lot easier, because the logistical aspects of getting them here, making sure that they were secure, moving them around a city that was essentially locked down, was challenging. But I’m glad we put the time in to make it happen. I’m glad that we didn’t go back.”

I don’t know about you but I have never thought of Tom Hanks as “a father figure to the American people.” Maybe it’s just me.

But back to the entertainment—it’s why we’re talking here, after all. The end of Celebrating America offered the kind of big finish that awards were made for—and it didn’t hurt to have some real star wattage bringing it home. Was Katy Perry singing “Firework” on the patio of the Lincoln Memorial, with an enormous fireworks display behind her, a little over the top? Most definitely. Did Cutter and Kirshner, who spearheaded that closer, pull it off? Those who watched know the answer. “Nobody knew exactly what it was going to look like,” Cutter admits. “But in rehearsals, Katy…had such a great sense of timing, that the moment just really clicked.”

And for Elrod, the final scene’s power goes right back to what made the show so powerful—and important—in the first place: “The Katy Perry moment really represented that a change was coming,” she says. “It was time for us to look to the future and celebrate.” They pulled that off. Can the Emmys keep the party going?

That last question is rhetorical, of course. Hollywood will be happy to award Cutter her Emmys. Everyone knows that the members of the entertainment industry are the base of the Democrat Party.