I’ve been paying some attention to the Democratic National Convention this week. I didn’t watch the whole thing – I know too much about politics in this country to be able to watch a lot of political speeches – but I did listen to Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech.
While I don’t agree with everything she said, I am excited about her candidacy. I’d be thrilled to see her as President even if she weren’t running against the criminal grifter and even if she wouldn’t be the first woman in the job.
Plus she has brought a new wave of effective political action into the mix, which also makes me happy because frankly I have no more stomach for Democrats running as Republican Lite.
So I’m hopeful that the Democrats will soundly defeat the convicted felon and force the Republican Party to either remake itself or fall apart.
I checked on the convention earlier in the week and was highly amused when I saw complaints online from various political writers about the fact that the Democratic National Convention was running behind schedule and President Biden wasn’t going to be onstage during “prime time.”
By “prime time” they meant not just broadcast-television-dictated prime time, but broadcast-television-dictated East Coast prime time, which is to say between 8 and 11 pm EDT.
I had several reactions to this.
First of all, I started paying attention to U.S. political conventions in 1960 – I was a nerdy kid and my parents were both journalists and liberal Democrats – and I have never heard of a convention not getting behind schedule.
I mean, you give politicians a mike and they’re gonna talk. Plus if there’s enthusiasm – and this year there is a lot of enthusiasm – there’s going to be applause and standing ovations and other things that slow the schedule down.
And while I’m sure there were speakers that no one would have missed much – say the governor of New York – one of the purposes of a convention is to allow as many players as possible to speak as well as bringing in some folks that beef up your presentation.
Secondly, the convention is being held in Chicago, which is on Central Time. Now I grant that CDT broadcast-television-dictated prime time is actually 7-10 pm, but it still was an hour earlier in Chicago.
Thirdly, it was 8:30 pm in California when I saw these complaints. That’s just the most populous state in the union, with the sixth largest economy in the world.
I note that Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech ended a little after 8 pm PDT – 11 pm EDT. Maybe that was close enough to prime time for those doing the griping.
Every once in awhile it’s nice when something important happens on the West Coast’s schedule instead of the East Coast’s.
Though pretty much nothing does. The country’s center of gravity may be a lot closer to San Francisco than New York City – I mean the Democrats nominated a Californian and the vice presidential candidate is from Minnesota, which is even more not East Coast than California though it is closer by time zone – but no one on the East Coast is going to admit it.
I’ve lived in California for ten years now, and while in some ways I remain a bit of an outsider, the disrespect for a place that is, in fact, vitally important to the United States annoys me.
Now I am – as most folks know – a native Texan (Central Time), and I lived for many years in Washington, D.C. (Eastern Time), before moving to California and Pacific Time. Plus many of the places in this country that I truly love are in Mountain Time. I have a feel for all four of those time zones.
I’m sure the people in Hawaii and Alaska feel even more overlooked by the East Coast, although, to be fair, there aren’t a whole lot of people in either state.
Unlike California, where there are 40 million of us. And when people start talking smugly about how people are leaving California, they’re talking about in numbers that would be devastating in say, Wyoming, but are a rounding error in California.
Another thing I have discovered living in California is that the world time zones effectively end on the U.S. West Coast plus British Columbia. Yes, there are time zones to our west, but most of them are ocean or lightly inhabited. Keep going west and it’s already tomorrow when you hit most of the places that make news.
In California we’re pretty much the last place news of consequence happens in a day – only we’re also a part of the world where lots of news of consequence actually happens.
I discovered this back when I lived in Washington, D.C., and worked as a legal editor on publications on class actions and product liability. It turned out you could not effectively cover legal matters in the United States without paying close attention to California.
Because whatever happened in California was going to happen in the rest of the country sooner or later, good or bad.
I mean, one of the other things you start to realize out here is that many of the problems in this state can be traced to the fact that California had Ronald Reagan first. Hell, it even had Richard Nixon first.
If Kamala Harris wins this election, she will be the third president in my lifetime from California. There were no presidents from California before I was born.
It occurs to me that there have also been three presidents from Texas in my lifetime (assuming you count Bush the senior despite his deep Connecticut roots) and that Lyndon Johnson was the first Texan ever in the White House. The Bushes – like Nixon and Reagan – were disasters, but Lyndon was a lot better president than has ever been acknowledged.
Texas is the second most populous state in the country. It is definitely not on the East Coast.
Now I happen to love the District of Columbia, though like most Washingtonians (former and current) I have very little patience with much of the nonsense that happens on Capitol Hill. I also love New York City, a place where I’ve spent many a delightful day.
But maybe it’s time to acknowledge that the New York and Washington aren’t the only important places in the United States.