“American politics has an occasion to match every mood: ceremony, circus, farce, melodrama, tragedy. Nothing rolls them together more opulently than a presidential convention.” So wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger in 1965.

Times have changed. 

Sure, there were elements of the above this week in Chicago, and, from a purely political perspective, the Democrats did a masterful job of patching up for public consumption the internecine battle that had consumed the party since Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27. And yet, no amount of PR will be able to shield Harris forever. At 59 years of age, she is what she is: vapid, overconfident, an empty vessel too often prone to incoherency. 

The wisest and most powerful of the Democratic power brokers, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, of course knew this. Pelosi in particular has no love for her fellow San Franciscan. The extent of Pelosi and Obama’s maneuvering to oust both Biden and Harris in favor of Gavin Newsom—whose career has now been unceremoniously short circuited—will one day come into fuller view. It is only a question of when.

Harris, a second-rate vice president who ran a third-rate campaign in 2020, is not exactly known for her work ethic or her policy chops, yet she has in the blink of an eye transformed herself into the savior of the Democratic Party. 

As the Democrats leave Chicago they are, to use T.S. Eliot's felicitous phrase, “assured of certain certainties,” above all that they will emerge victorious in November. 

But hubris may be their undoing.

Turning to foreign policy, the scene is grim. Because she has no real power base of her own, Harris is something of a wild card. Contenders for top foreign policy jobs kept busy making themselves seen and heard at events all across town. Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, said to be (for reasons that escape this correspondent) a force on foreign policy in the Senate, popped up and spoke at a reception at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen, and dozens of ambitious careerists in search of those coveted Plum Book appointments all made the rounds. 

If anyone said anything interesting or new, then I must have missed it. What was said sounded like neoconservatism-with-a-human face; foreign policy Democrats might feel bad about the carnage in Gaza, but actually doing anything about it is a bridge too far. They are here to win, and as such one cannot risk the ire of the Israel lobby that just spent $14.5 million to defeat New York’s Representative Jamaal Bowman and $8.5 million to unseat Missouri’s Representative Cori Bush. 

Meanwhile there was much speculation as to who actually might staff the national security apparatus in a Harris administration. One theory floated to me by a longtime Democratic insider was that Biden will make the case for his longtime friend Chris Coons to take the helm at Foggy Bottom. And then there was the inevitable talk about Michele Flournoy finally getting the nod for defense secretary. But no one quite knows for sure. 

Only Philip Gordon seems a sure thing as national security advisor. Will he bring along his comrades from the Clinton and Obama days? Perhaps. As they did four years ago, progressive foreign policy types are suffering from delusions of influence, busy compiling “wish lists” of friends they’d like to see appointed in a Harris administration. They should expect to be about as successful as they were in 2020—not at all.

On policy, it’s the same old stuff. The world’s democracies, led by the occasionally-mistake-prone-yet-underneath-it-all-really-and-truly-virtuous United States, must stem the growing tide of global authoritarianism which has now replaced that old bugbear Communism as our Enemy Number One. On Russia and Ukraine, the Democrats, progressive and mainstream alike, remain in the grip of a kind of neo-McCarthyite fever dream. No surprise there, but what did come as an unwelcome jolt was that they share the current Republican mania over China. I guess one Cold War isn’t enough.