Commitment Issues

On the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the ceremonial roll call of the states featured a DJ blasting tunes as delegates delivered floor speeches affirming the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Meanwhile, the Democratic duo popped up at a different arena, ninety miles away in Milwaukee, at a rally with eighteen thousand cheering, chanting swing-state voters. Tweaking crowd-size-obsessed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump by packing two stadiums at once—Chicago’s United Center and Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, which had just recently hosted the Republican convention—Walz declared, “You run a campaign based on fear like them, you’re going to run into a little trouble when you run into a campaign based on joy.”

Joy was the prevailing mood during the Democrats’ convention week. It swept in on a flood of relief after eighty-one-year-old Joe Biden finally dropped out of the race, giving in to pressure from Democrats worried about his age, shakiness, and a disastrous June debate performance. With Biden’s departure, the Democrats seized the opportunity to position themselves as the party of youth, diversity, and a more hopeful future in contrast to the old, bitter, and backward-looking Trump campaign. During the DNC they gathered to celebrate their new energy and rising poll numbers.

As Walz was speaking in Milwaukee, rally-goers unfurled a cloth banner in the stands proclaiming: “Choose Joy.” Later, in the same section of the stands, when Harris took the stage, two more banners popped up denouncing “war crimes” and “genocide” in Palestine. A brief struggle ensued between the joy and genocide banners, temporarily obscuring both messages. Then the protesters were escorted out.

The next morning in Chicago, dissenting voices again broke through the celebratory atmosphere. A group of delegates who were not ready to support Harris at the convention held a press conference at a playground just outside the security fence surrounding the United Center. Among the nearly four thousand delegates at the convention, there were thirty from several states who arrived in Chicago as “uncommitted.” They represented about seven hundred thousand voters in the Democratic primaries who withheld their support for Biden to protest United States support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted delegate from Michigan and cofounder of the national uncommitted movement, delivered what he called “a very simple message for our party leadership.” “That message is: Not another bomb. That message is: Those babies in Gaza who are being blown up into millions of little pieces—those are our babies. We love those babies, and our country’s weapons are being sent to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to kill those babies, and that is not just deeply immoral, that is not just deeply reprehensible, it’s deeply illegal.”

Uncommitted delegates asked the DNC to put a Palestinian American on the main stage during the convention and pushed Harris to take a stronger position on a ceasefire, including an immediate embargo on U.S. military aid to Israel. “The Democratic Party prides itself on being the party of human rights, the party for justice, the party for democracy, the party for doing better,” declared Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, a member of the progressive “Squad” in Congress who was recently defeated in a primary race by what Roll Call described as “an onslaught of pro-Israel spending.” “I believe this to be true, at least, because I know who I am, and I know who the Democrats are that I rock with, and especially when a fascist cult is the alternative,” Bush added. “But when it comes to defending Palestinian lives and ending the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Democratic Party needs to uphold those same values.”

Another Squad member, Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, described her own experience fleeing war in Somalia as a child and described it as “admirable” that the Biden administration withheld two-thousand-pound bombs from Israel, recognizing that they were devastating civilians in Gaza. “But every other bomb, every other weapon, every other munition, does the same thing,” she said.

The week before the convention started, the Biden-Harris administration approved another twenty billion dollars in military aid to Israel, even as the civilian death toll in Gaza reached more than forty thousand, even as The Lancet estimated in July that if “indirect” deaths related to the war are counted the toll could be more than four times that much. Nonetheless, uncommitted delegates said they hoped Harris might pivot away from Biden’s tight embrace of Netanyahu and his right-wing government after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed more than twelve hundred Israelis and seized hundreds of hostages. Back in March, Harris called for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza before Biden did, acknowledging the “immense scale of suffering” among Palestinian civilians. She also skipped Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in July and pledged not to stay silent about the humanitarian crisis. But recently, after meeting with uncommitted delegates and raising hopes that she was open to their demands for a change in U.S. policy, she released a statement saying she would not support an arms embargo on weapons sold to Israel.

Alawieh, who lived in Lebanon until he was six, is a former congressional staffer for Cori Bush and Represenative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. As he described it, the uncommitted message at the convention was not meant to damage the Harris campaign but to help her win over voters, including the more than one hundred thousand in Michigan who voted “uncommitted.” “What we’re doing is popular. It’s necessary, and it’s party leadership,” Alawieh insisted, adding, “We represent the majority of Democrats—the overwhelming majority of Democrats who support a ceasefire.”

The uncommitted delegates spent their time at the convention “building solidarity” with Harris delegates from their states, said Jeremiah Ellison, an uncommitted delegate from Minnesota and a member of the Minneapolis city council. Their petition calling for an immediate ceasefire collected three hundred signatures among the delegates.

The uncommitted movement also organized a panel on Palestinian rights on the convention’s first day—the first ever such panel officially sanctioned by the DNC—moderated by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. James Zogby, a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee and cofounder of the Arab-American Institute, called it “historic.”

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor and a member of Doctors Without Borders, testified during the panel and afterward at the press conference on the playground about witnessing civilian massacres and “children having their limbs amputated at record rates” in Gaza. She came to the DNC to “bear witness to the fact that children are a massive proportion of the civilians” who are victims in the Gaza war. As she spoke, several uncommitted delegates standing behind her at the playground began to weep. But the anguish on the playground did not penetrate the convention hall, where DNC organizers remained noncommittal about demands for a Palestinian American speaker on the main stage.

On Wednesday morning, Alawieh held up his cell phone while talking to reporters. “We’re waiting to hear from the Democratic Party about whether or not there is a place for Palestinian Americans on the stage of the Democratic National Convention,” he said. “I sure hope that there is.” On Wednesday evening, standing in front of the convention center, he held up his phone again and demonstrated that he had it plugged into a battery pack and turned on. Still no word.

That night Walz delivered his joyful acceptance speech. The mood inside the convention center was ebullient. Defending abortion rights and organized labor, welcoming immigrants, embracing a multicultural nation, boosting wages and taxing corporations and the very rich came up over and over in Democratic speeches—a clear contrast to Republican plans to punish abortion and track women’s fertility, dog-whistle attacks on “wokeness” and “DEI”, and the placards Republican convention delegates waved demanding “Mass Deportation Now.”

Biden’s transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg summed up the Republican message in his convention speech, saying, “Darkness is what they are selling. The thing is, I just don’t believe that America today is in the market for darkness.” That judgment appeared to extend to the uncommitted delegates’ message about U.S.-sponsored civilian slaughter.

From a marketing perspective, the DNC was a success—the television coverage rendered almost all protest invisible. In addition to youth and optimism, convention planners cornered that crucial cultural commodity, coolness. “I don’t mean to flex, but as a creator, I get free alcohol,” confided a visibly inebriated social media “influencer” sitting next to me in the stadium seats reserved for press. “Content creators,” as the DNC labeled them, received special press badges, unprecedented access to candidates and celebrity speakers, and designated VIP suites with unlimited free food and booze. Regular reporters paid stadium prices for hot dogs and pretzels. Beer sales were temporarily shut down, with alcohol only available in the private suites during the convention.

By the convention’s final day, when Harris gave her acceptance speech amid a swirl of social media rumors that Beyoncé might show up (she did not), the uncommitted delegates finally received definitive word that no Palestinian speaker would address the convention. Spotlighting death and destruction in Gaza was apparently too divisive. Convention planners did give a prime-time slot to the anguished parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American taken hostage by Hamas. Alawieh said he welcomed the opportunity for Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin to deliver their remarks, which included Polin’s comment that there is “a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East.”

The uncommitted movement staged a sit-in Thursday outside the United Center. Alawieh said he still hoped convention organizers would change their minds and allow a Palestinian speaker. But on the final night of the DNC, featuring Republicans and representatives of the U.S. military, a Palestinian voice for peace would have been an unlikely addition to the lineup.

Former Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, addressed the convention, telling any fellow Republicans who might be listening: “The Democrats are as patriotic as us. . . . they are as eager to defend American values at home and abroad as we conservatives have ever been.” The crowd responded by chanting “USA! USA!” (a discordant echo of a moment earlier in the convention when the big screens played footage of insurrectionists breaking into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 — also chanting “USA! USA!”).

There were some calls from the main stage throughout the convention week to end the war in Gaza, including remarks by progressive Represenative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who claimed that Harris had been “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire. That speech drew sharp criticism in The Nation from Kareem Elrefai, an organizer with the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, who called it a “betrayal.” Senator Bernie Sanders was more blunt in his speech: “We must end this horrific war in Gaza, bring home the hostages and demand an immediate ceasefire,” he declared to loud applause. He added, “Let us elect Kamala Harris and create the nation we know we can become.”

While they expressed strong disappointment in the decision not to include a Palestinian speaker, the leaders of the uncommitted movement appeared to be taking Sanders’ advice about voting for Harris while pushing the Democratic Party toward what they feel it must become.

Every campaign is a Rorschach test. Voters are encouraged to project their hopes onto the candidates. Overall, the Democrats are betting that the picture painted at their convention of an inclusive nation characterized by fairness, opportunity, kindness, and joy can triumph over the Handmaid’s Tale vision projected by the Trump campaign. It’s a wager that they are reading the mood of the country better than Republicans—and that they can intensify an upbeat spirit. Clearly, Democratic strategists believed that giving voice to anger against Israel and contemplating the horrors of war in Gaza would be incompatible with what Walz called “a campaign based on joy.”

For most delegates and the millions of Americans who watched the convention from home, it was easy to go numb during the Democrats’ tough-guy posturing, promising to spend our money maintaining “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” as Harris put it in her acceptance speech, to more chanting from the floor of “USA! USA!” This is how politics is conducted in the world’s largest empire, where every candidate is required to declare that the United States is “the greatest nation on Earth”—especially Democrats, women, and certainly the first woman of color ever to have a serious chance at winning the White House. Foreign affairs writer Suzy Hansen captured Americans’ resignation to this kind of rhetoric in Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, “From abroad, when I used to hear President Obama say that America is the greatest country on earth. . . . I felt like I did as a child, not wanting to admit to my parents I knew there was no Santa Claus.”

Convention news coverage generally invites us to suspend our disbelief, as we watch the performance on stage with the anchors, then join them in rating the performers on how well they are convincing voters—instead of including ourselves among those who need to be convinced.

In her acceptance speech, Harris did not commit to forcing a ceasefire by cutting off U.S. military support for Israel. She did, after pledging her administration’s undying commitment to protect Israel’s security and its right to defend itself, declare that the civilian death toll in Gaza is “heartbreaking” and that the United States must ensure that the “Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

Uncommitted delegates were unsatisfied with the incremental step that first-of-its-kind pronouncement represents. (Rolling Stone quoted a DNC official noting that Palestine has only been mentioned twice on the DNC stage over the last forty years.) But they stopped short of announcing a break-up with Harris. “We’re not going anywhere,” Alawieh said in a statement after the convention. “This is our Democratic Party. This was never about four days, it was about achieving life-saving policy change now and for the next four years.” He pledged to continue to “push Biden and Harris for an arms embargo and uniting our party to save lives and defeat Trump and his destructive agenda.”

Uncommitted leaders who believe withholding their votes in the general election would be unproductive are still searching for leverage. In his statement, Alawieh issued a new invitation, for Harris to meet with uncommitted leaders and Palestinian American families by September 15: “The Vice President’s team must not miss this opportunity to engage with Palestinian Americans, who represent a critical voice in our democracy and party,” he said.