I’m standing on the floor of an arena in Chicago waiting for Kamala Harris.

Nearly three hours have passed. Thousands of us are huddled together, stumbling, jostling, hot, uncomfortable, struggling under the spotlights. Everywhere I look, there are people holding up large “Kamala” signs, screaming, shouting, gasping. There is blaring music.

That’s what it was like last night, and the night before, and the night before that: a 96-hour psychological war dance.

To get an idea of ​​what was accomplished at this year’s Democratic Convention – how a party can purge itself of one candidate and install another in the blink of an eye – one need only look across the hall. It’s as if a $200 million tornado swept in, showering 5,000 delegates overnight with new buzzwords, merchandise, slogans, ideas, emotions – hope, joy – while clinically erasing everything else from memory.

Joe Biden, Jill, Hunter, their crazy, secret service-biting dog Commander – all have been in the witness protection program for a long time. When you mention Biden’s name, they barely react. And he actually appeared at the congress.

It is as ruthless as it is terrifying.

I ask delegates from California, Georgia and Minnesota if they think Harris can do it now. It’s her most important speech, the most important party convention in 40 years. Everyone is shouting: “YEEEEESSSSS.” She’s brilliant, “amazing,” “Mizz Kamala.”

As for the look, well, it’s conventionally crazy. Everyone around me is wearing Kamala outfits: pearls, skinny jeans and Converse. Even the men. It’s pretty weird to talk to a 6-foot-tall retired web designer named Chuck from Minnesota wearing pearls, or to see a male delegate from California wearing an actual Queen Mother-style necklace and Kamala makeup.

But as the announcers keep saying—when describing some minor playground injustice Harris endured as a child or some mind-blowing parmigiana she cooked—“That’s Kamala!”

“This is Kamala!” It’s as if they’ve all known her forever, while a six-year-old—Harris’s great-niece—has to explain exactly how to pronounce her name (it’s a “comma” followed by “la”).

When I arrive at the convention center on Monday, it is already filling up with posh, older black women and Ryan Murphy virgins in spray-painted chinos and tasteful stripes.

Everyone looks 45 whether they’re 20 or 80, except for vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, who was specifically chosen because he looks 60 and is white (who gets hired for DEI now?).

There’s a special VIP lounge for 200 TikTokers—sorry, “creators”—who tell you they’re interested in either “Congress” or “public policy.” Why hope that 15,000 journalists will parrot your opinion when you can just fly in an “anti-authoritarian” TikToker or a tame viral expert “on all things Nancy Pelosi,” as one girl from California describes herself.

She finds the former Speaker of the House of Representatives “passive-aggressive and beautiful.”

One of the TikTokers, a bank employee from Minnesota, says she is “ashamed” that her most viral video pointed out that “there is a senator from Georgia who is super hot.”

Was she paid to come here? “Yes,” she sighs. “Some people get paid to do this.” Some people even have “multiple sponsors.” I’ve never seen politics monetized like this: One woman tells me she’s a “delegate and an artist” and gets into the details of her new Kamala-inspired single: “Music to uplift and engage.”

“Elevation” is one of the official words of the Convention.

On a blue carpet next to the congress hall, celebrities perform and give interviews.

One of them, BenDeLaCreme, a star of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” tells me that he has set up a political funding vehicle called Drag PAC to reach the “five million new queer voters” and that he will be writing posts explaining to them “how the actual process works.”

I look at his feed later and mostly see him strutting around in a nine-foot wig, shouting, “See how I’m dressed for the DNC? Very demure, very attentive,” and asking state representatives if they want a “kiss.”

Meanwhile, the weird conversations flow. It’s perfectly normal for people to start with, “My cousin is a coach on ‘The Voice Philippines'” or “Would you like a free Bible?”

In political terms, genitals are high on the agenda. Yikes, there’s an abortion vibe going on here. The prosecutor has made it clear that she will turn Roe v. Wade “into law” as soon as she enters the White House. And so, in the absence of almost any other indication of a policy line, the convention has taken the issue the only way American politics knows how: to terrifying extremes.

At parties, you are bombarded with morning-after pills and condoms. “It’s about reproductive rights,” warns a 23-year-old with a cheese on his head.

About a mile from the hall, a Planned Parenthood abortion van offers free vasectomies and medication abortions. It’s not part of the DNC, but it reflects the spirit: Almost everyone believes in zero limits, even elderly former South Dakota grain farmers like Larry, who, when asked about horror stories about full-term births, says, “Yeah, but when does that happen? Tell me when that happens!”

Everyone is completely for abortion and for women, but of course they can’t say what that is. What is a woman?

“I don’t have an official answer to that,” says a girl during the podcast recording America, who hurt you?

There are at least 66 speeches on the first night. I know, I know – lawyers will be lawyers. Most of them follow this format: The speaker comes, grins incredibly slyly at the audience and then says, “Do you feel something happening? Something stirring? That’s the MAGIC OF KAMALA HARRIS.”

And then the crowd stands up and screams and yells, and then someone comes up and says, “I was raped by my stepfather after years of abuse,” or “In 2013, I was sex trafficked across California,” and then they hand you a stick and say, “We love Joe.” It’s intense.

Hillary Clinton gives a saber-rattling speech, and the next evening Michelle Obama does the same, watching over the audience like a thundering sibyl.

She seems annoyed that the shouting and clapping of mere mortals interrupts her lofty metaphors about escalators and mountains. She wags her finger as the crowd cheers, screams, rolls onto its back and waves its paws in the air like Commander Biden, until her husband shows up and starts playing half-hearted material, particularly deriding Donald Trump’s “cult of personality,” even though just two days later 2,000 men in pearls will stand before the “President of Joy.”

Trump, by the way, is the real star of the convention – they are grudgingly obsessed with “that man from Mar-a-Lago”. Don’t they realize it’s cooler not to mention him?

I started counting how long they could wait before mentioning him. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a sassy Ashley Judd lookalike, lasted all of two sentences.

On Wednesday there will be one surprise after another: Stevie Wonder, Oprah Winfrey (“Democracy requires hard work – and Heart Work”), the entire American football team that Walz coached.

It’s pronounced “Walls,” by the way. It was chosen to appeal to the target demographic of “dads in plaid,” and it makes Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, look like a rich horror ex, even though Vance’s background is far more humble than his.

How does this happen?

In Walz, Harris has brilliantly found a Robin Williams-style character who can simultaneously say, “I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter. I’m a better shot than most Republicans,” and talk about the “hell of infertility.”

He gives the best speech, but it’s a bad week for men, most of whom are talking incoherently, tearfully, boringly, confusedly, or grittedly describing themselves as “real billionaires” (the Illinois governor who attacks Trump). The rest is a pure Botoxed staging of “Lysistrata.”

I guess after all the incredibly bubbling energy, the rousing rhetoric, the nonstop videos, the playing of Beyoncé’s “Freedom”, the excited dressing up, and the endless obnoxious soundbites (“A voice is a kind of prayer”), Harris’ speech was an anticlimax from the start.

There is an eerie din as she steps onto the podium, shining, confident and smiling like a Hollywood star. She looks incredible.

It’s a soft speech, a little wet, low energy: a nothing-burger. She calls Trump an “unserious man”; he and Vance are “out of their minds” on abortion. After that, there’s disappointment that she’s simply taken the side of the base – where was anything to entice moderate Republicans, personal finance, small business, the cost of living?

But after just a few minutes everything is forgotten – the crowd returns to its unreality, rages, pours out of the doors again and rages through the arena: I see Spike Lee and the Central Park Five being led like blind people through the glittering masses. Can it go on like this? Has it reached its peak now? Not if these lunatics can stop it.

From the London Times.