Did the Democratic convention go too smoothly?

Yet the Party cannot run so scared of Trump’s smears about “left-wing mobs” that it shies away from its values or its future. Progressive voters can help win elections, too. In this respect, the Convention—with its mixture of recorded and live speeches, actress moderators, musical acts, and a roll call that doubled as a tour of the country—went almost too smoothly. An in-person Convention can expose conflicts, but it can also give a party a chance to address them, in Convention-center hallways. The fractures in the Democratic Party do not always fall neatly along ideological, generational, or cultural lines. Observers of this Convention, though, could sometimes be left with a sense that the choice was between Bush Cabinet secretaries and the Squad. What’s absent in a Zoom D.N.C. is the same thing that’s absent in many virtual communications: the moments and the places in between.

That’s a particular loss for Biden, who thrives in such spaces. Indeed, that people know Joe, and that he knows them, is emerging as a central message of the campaign. Barack Obama, making the case for his Vice-President’s foreign-policy expertise, said, “Joe knows the world and the world knows him,” but most often what people knew is that Biden treated them with respect. A retired Amtrak conductor described how Biden had befriended the train crew during his commute, over the years, between Wilmington and Washington. The former contenders in the Democratic primary joined a Zoom rap session to talk about “the Joe we know.” Sanders, who called for unity in the face of “authoritarianism,” said he knew Joe well enough to trust him.