Off to the Races
The balloons dropped, the rhetoric soared, the flags waved and once again events draped a cloak of infamy across Carl Sandburg’s City of Big Shoulders. For Chicago to be the site of a “first” is not out of character. Kamala Harris’ nomination as the first woman of color to potentially become President of the United States is one of many firsts launched in a city where I spent more than three decades as a journalist. And it’s’ a good bet that her journey from the podium to the campaign trail will be far more rugged than the friendly confines of a convention hall. The race will be won on the campaign trail. Harris must now convince voters she is up to the job.
That her nomination to the top of the ticket came in Chicago is apt. The city is the most American of all metropolises with its diverse mosaic of Polish, Latino, Irish, Italian, Swedish, Black, and White neighborhoods that are greater than the sum of the parts. The roots of most Chicagoans trace to immigrants just like the ones who are a major campaign issue for Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump.
Like any candidate for public office, Harris can learn many lessons from the city of grit and hustle. She was nominated in a place that has played a central role in shaping the nation’s constantly changing political narrative, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. The Democratic Convention of 2024 marked the twenty-sixth time a political party has gathered in the city to nominate someone for the highest office in the land. The promise and peril that often started in Chicago demonstrate how things that start well don’t always end that way.
In 1860, a fledgling Republican party tapped its first candidate, Abraham Lincoln, at the Wigwam, a wooden structure built in Chicago to house the GOP convention that made Lincoln its candidate. He became America’s most admired president, but his victory fanned the flames of discord that led to the Civil War. In 1865 he became the first president to be assassinated. The Wigwam burned to the ground four years later.
Franklin Roosevelt accepted his party’s nomination in Chicago just under a century later and introduced in his acceptance speech the New Deal, a platform that would revolutionize American life. He served more terms than any other president and achieved fame for dragging the nation out of the Great Depression. Even though FDR’s programs transformed America and its economy for the better, the programs he started remain controversial, reminding Americans that the roots of our differences are deep.
In 1952, Republicans and Democrats gathered in Chicago for the first nationally televised conventions, establishing a new era in political communications that has evolved into a media maelstrom. Candidates now jockey for power and influence on their own, often using social media to connect directly with voters. Political reporters struggle to maintain their muscle as their minders cling to a failed business model that is making them increasingly irrelevant.
More sensationally, violent clashes in 1968 between police and younger Americans protesting the Vietnam War exposed deep rifts in America and the Democratic Party. In 1968, a brutal war in Southeast Asia was the issue. Harris and her opponent now face younger voters demonstrating against an immoral war in Israel. The response on both sides is more peaceful but also less impressive.
And, of course, Chicago is the home of Barack Obama, the first Black American to be president. His presidential campaign and election revived the deep roots of racism that America still struggles to escape.
Whether history will repeat itself and catapult Harris into the White House to become America’s first female president remains an open question. After Harris and the Democrats pack up to leave Chicago, we will learn more about her prospects in the two months of campaigning that remain before the election. She faces a compressed schedule, but two months is an eternity in politics.
Many words will be spoken and written, many polls will be taken, and American airwaves will be saturated with propaganda disguised as advertising. But make no mistake, this will be close, a neck-and-neck contest with race as a central issue.
The Gallup polling organization says twenty-seven percent of American registered voters identify as Democrats and twenty-seven percent as Republicans. Independents now make up the rest of US adult registered voters. They will decide the election.
Unfortunately, in the way campaigns are now covered, a flub, ill-timed phrase, or clumsy response to a silly question can be amplified in a media free-for-all to make the difference between victory and defeat. Harris’s opponent has survived such challenges more than once and continues to enjoy the solid backing of an extreme but dominant element of his party. For Harris, such a challenge will almost certainly surface in the weeks to come, and how she handles it could determine her fate.
If history is any guide, and it usually is, the candidate who will prevail will ignore the slights that occur in every campaign and provide voters with his or her clear vision for the future of the country.
For Harris, her greatest opportunity is her opponent. Former President Donald Trump offers no clear vision for the future of the nation. His Make America Great campaign is a frayed retread from a past campaign. He is mired in grievances real and imagined. Trump can’t seem to shake the fact that he lost the last election, or that’s he’s not running against President Joe Biden. He’s trying, without much success, to desert a blueprint for the future created by his loyalists at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He offers no alternative, though, other than a patchwork of policies that he believes worked the last time. The missteps of his running mate, Senator J. D. Vance, likely turned off many independent voters. Yet Trump enjoys a cult status among a committed base in the Republican party that refuses to abandon a ticket led by him, a true challenge for Harris.
At this point, Harris has no clear overarching vision for the future of America, either. She, too, adopts a patchwork of policies designed to appease disparate elements of her party and get her core voters to the polls. Her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, seems far more palatable to independent voters. The makings of a clear vision for the future are there – a belief in women’s reproductive rights, equal pay, fair taxation, more rational immigration measures, support for America’s commanding role in the world, and reducing the threat of climate change.
In many respects, her campaign resembles Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, the promise he adopted to win his successful come-from-behind campaign for the White House in 1948. Truman barnstormed the country, using the railroad to promote his views and vision for America. Harris has far less time to flesh out the details of her Fair Deal, but she also has a media that is far more sweeping and efficient than a train. So far, she’s relied on speeches, appearances, and social media to propel her campaign. She can benefit by engaging with the media and political reporters to show she can handle the tough give-and-take that comes with the task ahead.
President Truman and his wife and daughter waving from the train during the 1948 campaign Return of President Harry S. Truman (right) from a whistlestop tour during Presidential campaign. He is joined by his wife, Mrs. Bess Wallace Truman (third from the right), daughter Margaret (second from the right), and two unidentified men. October 2, 1948.
From now until November, voters can expect a nasty campaign from former President Trump. That is his style. You can already see it in the misleading and patently false ads his campaign airs. His tactics make propaganda seem like child’s play. But he is facing something he didn’t expect just weeks ago – a candidate that represents a future that he can’t and won’t replicate. He is fighting the appealing prospect of America turning to a new page in its history. Both candidates are revving up efforts to get their core supporters to the polls in November. That won’t be enough to win, though. The history that flows from Chicago shows that voters seek a positive vision for the future of America. The successful candidate will be the one who convinces voters they can deliver a New Fair Deal.
—James O’Shea
James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.