Packed Arena For DNC Finale, No Room For Palestinians: Day 4 Analysis

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Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman tells reporters outside the arena that the speech she would have delivered on behalf of the uncommitted movement would have offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between the party and its own voters.

“We wanted to write a speech to represent what the DNC would have liked to see on that stage in a way that would have been, frankly, a compromise,” says Romman, the first Palestinian American elected to the Georgia legislature.

Romman’s speech was to call for a commitment “to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur,” and for policies from “restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza,” she says.

“To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can — yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars,” the speech would have concluded. “That fights for an America that belongs to all of us — Black, brown, and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me, together.”

Inside, Texas Congresswoman Veronica Escobar gavels in what she describes as “the fourth season” of the DNC. It is not likely to get syndicated.

The hall fills up fast. Some delegates are turned away. Others are reportedly warned they would not be allowed back to their seats if they got up to use the bathroom.

At the very top of the arena, a mix of party activists and reporters pack a standing room only area, lining walls and sitting on every available surface, including decommissioned hot dog stands.

There is an emotional moment in the hall as Al Sharpton introduces the Central Park Five, the five men who were exonerated after being convicted for the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger.

During their trial, Donald Trump purchased out full-page advertisements in local newspapers emblazoned with the headline, “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police!”

And, as ever, Trump has refused to apologize in the decades that followed, even after their convictions were vacated and their civil rights lawsuit settled.

Yusef Salaam, one of the five and now a member of the New York City Council, says Trump wanted him and his friends dead.

“Today, we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed, and DNA proved it,” Salaam says. “That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed, and he never will.”

The audience is told several times Harris will sign the John Lewis Voting Rights Act if she is promoted to the West Wing. That bill previously passed the Democrat-led House but faced a filibuster in the Senate and only garnered the support of 48 of 50 Democrats there back in 2022.

Prior to the start of the primetime lineup, there is an acrobatic drumming performance. There is an extensive musical interlude.

And there is definitely a small group of people who sing along with the more explicit portions of “Get Low” by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz — a crowd favorite at this convention.

The closed captioning screens carry the lyrics “Born in the USA,” as the crowd waves little flags.

“So they put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land, to go and kill the yellow man,” Bruce Springsteen sings.

It is around this time when the uncommitted delegates were reportedly told they would definitely not be getting a speaking slot for their antiwar message.

Clearly, it’s not due to a lack of time, as the organizers are really stretching to get to the 8 p.m. hour.

That’s when the Chicks, canceled by conservatives for their opposition to the Iraq War before canceling “Dixie” from their band name amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, come out and perform the national anthem.

Actress Kerry Washington says she is not on stage because she is a famous actress but instead because she is a regular person. She then does a kind of group selfie type of thing, encouraging everyone to pull their phones out.

Harris’s niece, stepdaughter and goddaughter come out to endorse her.

“She’s fighting for economic opportunity, LGBTQ+ equality and reproductive freedom,” says Meena Harris. “Because. We. Are not. Going. Back.”

What is normally the Giordano’s at the United Center was set aside as a gender-neutral prayer room. But it will be going back to being a Giordano’s after the DNC leaves town.

Comedian D.L. Hughley does a tight five with a joke about how Trump is gong to find out what it’s like to get left for a younger woman.

The discussion then shifts to gun violence before a performance of “What About Us” from Pink and her daughter. Probably prudent for the organizers not to put a Palestinian American on stage for this part.

Arizona Astronaut-Senator Mark Kelly, a man who seems like an ideal candidate until you listen to him start to talk, bemoans that he has to speak right after his wife Gabby Giffords and Pink.

But Kelly actually spoke right after a very strange video excerpt of Harris at West Point issuing the classic martial platitudes about how the point of having a military is to protect national security and how the Pentagon “underwrites” the stability of the world.

This is meant to show how tough Harris is, presumably, along with the speakers who follow. They emphasize her time as a prosecutor and as California attorney general. The Harris campaign is leaning heavily on a couple of items from her time in state government, namely a $20 billion settlement with mortgage firms over the housing crises and a $1.1 billion judgment against the for-profit Corinthian Colleges.

Leon Panetta does not electrify the crowd, but he does provide a reminder that he was a history-maker himself, leading the Pentagon as the U.S. military carried out an extrajudicial killing of an American citizen using a robot for the first time.

Gretchen Whitmer delivers a strong speech. Although she took herself out of the running to be Harris’s potential veep, and Kelly was reportedly one of the finalists, there is really no comparison when it comes to who electrifies an arena full of Democrats.

Eva Longoria and Adam Kinzinger are given the two speaking slots leading up to Maya Harris, Harris’s sister and close advisor, who introduces the nominee for her 38-minute acceptance speech.

In the biggest speech of her life so far, Harris tells the story of growing up, of her mother’s “act of self-determination” by marrying her father instead of returning to her native India to have an arranged marriage.
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“At the park, my mother would tell us to stay close. But my father would just smile, and say, ‘Run, Kamala. Run.’ ‘Don’t be afraid.’ ‘Don’t let anything stop you.’ From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless,” Harris says.

The speech starts strong. The crowd is rapt.

“My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall, brown woman with an accent. And, as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. But she never lost her cool. She was tough, courageous, a trailblazer in the fight for women’s health,” Harris says.

Harris says her mother taught her to do someone about injustice.

“She also taught us ‘never do anything half-assed,'” she says. “That’s a direct quote”

As one might expect, the speech devolves into much of the same speech that Joe Biden would have delivered had he been accepting the nomination on Thursday — rather than get relegated to a late-night appearance Monday.

“Our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past — a chance to chart a new way forward, not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans,” Harris says.

The vice president lays out what record she is running on — her time in state and local government in California, not her time as senator and vice president.

Harris highlights a homeowner protection in California, references the Corinthian Colleges settlement and says she stood up for victims of wage theft and elder abuse as well as California attorney general.

“I fought against cartels who traffic in guns, drugs and human beings, who threaten the security of our border and the safety of our communities,” she declares. “Those fights were not easy, and neither were the elections that put me in [that office]. We were underestimated at every turn, but we never gave up.”

It’s true: although Harris did suspend her 2020 presidential campaign before a single vote had been cast, she did not give up her presidential ambitions.

Her acceptance speech stops just short of calling the 2024 presidential election the most important in U.S. history, warning of dire consequences if Trump returning to the White House.

And it includes some very vague bits about what people should expect to see if she wins.

“We will create what I call an opportunity economy. An opportunity economy, where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed,” Harris promises.

“As president, I will bring together labor and workers, small business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs, grow our economy and lower the cost of everyday needs, like health care, housing and groceries,” she says. “We will provide access to capital for small business owners, entrepreneurs and founders. We will end America’s housing shortage and protect Social Security and Medicare.”

Harris pledges she will sign various laws that Congress has so far failed to sign and make sure the United States continues to have the “most lethal fighting force” of any country.

“I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence. That America — not China — wins the competition for the 21st century,” she says.

Harris also pledged to do whatever it takes to defend American interest against Iran and its proxy forces.

“With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and ceasefire done,” she says, acknowledging the “horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on Oct. 7” and described “what has happened in Gaza” as devastating.

Harris’s speech, for sure, inspires those who have made it into the hall. Her campaign hopes it also inspires disillusioned Democrats — despite denying the uncommitted delegates the symbolic speaking spot they demanded.

Before the final night of speeches started inside the arena, I spotted another presidential candidate outside.

Cornel West spoke to reporters briefly before he headed to address the thousands of protestors who had gathered at Union Park for a second permitted Palestinian solidarity demonstration of the DNC. He was asked what he would tell the Democratic Party’s nominee if he spoke to her.

“I would tell her, ‘Shame on you Sister Harris, in terms of you denying genocide, enabling genocide, we understand you’re part of a party that does that, that party’s corrupt, that party’s blind, that party’s shortsighted, it’s callous. And she says, ‘Well, that’s my party,'” West imagines.

“And I say, ‘Well, your party deserves indictment.’ And you’ve got Gangster Trump on the other hand. Your party deserves indictment,” he says. “Then you have system that sustains both parties. That system deserves indictment.”

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