Gone too, though, is the raucous interplay between the party speakers and the crowd. While Trump may well get his grand backdrop, he won’t be able to re-create the thrill of an arena audience chanting “Four more years!” before the balloons drop. Tamer livestream events could also drive away the TV audience he craves. Whatever pitch he makes to undecided voters—if he even makes one—won’t matter if no one is watching.
“Do you really think the people in the middle are going to turn off Hulu and Netflix and YouTube and say, ‘I want to hear another Trump speech from the White House castigating Biden’? No,” Estrich told me. “And Biden? Let’s face it. He has many strengths as a leader; a memorable speaker is not one of them. He’s given two acceptance speeches at conventions. Can you remember a single line?”
Should the conventions permanently fade, would-be stars could miss their chance to launch. A fair argument can be made that Barack Obama wouldn’t have become president had he not delivered his memorable keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. (“There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”) And the nation’s shared political lore will inevitably suffer. Hard as the organizers work to stave off unwanted drama, reality always intrudes, revealing some important truths about the fraught state of our politics.
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