Forty years later, it's still a tale of two cities
Harris and Walz offer a much different view of what America looks like than Trump - if we would only stop focusing on vibes and start focusing on their words.
Sometimes you need to look past the vibes and focus on the words.
And, during this time every four years, those words tell a story.
"We are a nation in decline,” Donald Trump, who wants to be president again, said yesterday to a crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. “We are a failed nation."
"We were respected,” Trump said. “Now the whole world laughs at us. We're a bunch of foolish people to have allowed this to happen."
He said, as he has numerous times in previous years, “If I don't win, you will have a 1929-style depression. Enjoy it."
His speech lasted about 90 minutes and was mostly his rambling stock stump speech. Behind him, the crowd alternated its cheers with yawns. Hundreds of people decided they couldn’t finish the marathon grievance session and began stepping toward the exits before Trump finished.
About an hour before Trump took the stage, the Democrat running for Vice President, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a former high school football coach, stepped onto a different stage to cheers and hoots that sounded like a pep rally.
Walz delivered what, in comedy club parlance, could be described as a tight, 20-minute set.
Walz's audience included locals from Nebraska, where he grew up. A couple of dozen of his old high school classmates turned out to lend support.
“I was born in West Point,” a tiny Nebraska town. “I went to elementary school in Valentine.” He described a period when his family was down on its luck, and the townspeople “were there for us.
“I wouldn’t trade growing up in that town for anything,” Walz said. “I spent my summers working with them, working on the farms.”
Walz’s vision of America is, to say the least, starkly different from Trump’s. And so is that of Vice President Kamala Harris, the top of the Democratic ticket now running for president.
The day before, Harris unveiled an economic plan that she said drew from her own life experience.
"I grew up in a middle-class household,” she said. “For most of my childhood, we were renters. My mother saved for well over a decade to buy a home. I was a teenager when that day finally came, and I can remember so well how excited she was... Mommy was so excited, it just made us excited that she was so excited."
She then provided what is now becoming a much better-known part of her biography.
"Later in college, I worked at McDonald’s to earn spending money,” she said. “Well, some of the people I worked with were raising families on that paycheck. They worked second or even third jobs to pay rent and buy food. That only gets harder when the cost of living goes up."
There is a life you understand by reading Fox News chyrons. And there is a life you understand from having lived it.
Harris lived that life, and is now pressing an agenda that includes an “Opportunity Economy,” clearly aimed at the people working second or third jobs and trying to get the better life.
Trump’s vision is more in line with A-blocks from the Fox News prime-time lineup.
“We are living like a third-world country,” he said yesterday. “The American dream was dead and it is dead instead as a doornail. They'll never bring it back unless we win.”
Forty years ago, at another Democratic National Convention, then-Gov. Mario Cuomo delivered what has been considered since one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century. Written with assistance from Tim Russert, who would go on to host “Meet the Press,” and his son Andrew, Mario’s speech was titled, “A Tale of Two Cities.”
Besides his from-the-gut delivery, Cuomo told a story about his background that shaped his view of America.
“I watched a small man with thick calluses on both his hands work 15 and 16 hours a day,” he said, remembering his father. “I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example. I learned about our kind of democracy from my father. And I learned about our obligation to each other from him and from my mother.”
Cuomo grew up in Queens, New York, just a mile or two from where Trump himself grew up.
Cuomo could see the value in all Americans’ stories including his immigrant parents.
Even Ronald Reagan, who defeated Democrat Walter Mondale in a landslide that year, understood what Cuomo understood at a certain level. Reagan, in his second term, eventually granted amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants.
Yesterday, Trump said: “We're going to do the largest deportation in the history of our country.”
Just as Cuomo’s words painted a vision of two, different Americas 40 years ago, the words we hear today are doing exactly the same.