“You just missed Michael Cohen by a minute, the woman standing next to me said. What was Trump’s old fixer doing at the DNC? I Googled. Michael Cohen is living his best life at the DNC with Band of Trump-hating Republicans, Yahoo News informed me. Mike had rolled up for some good old fashioined Trump bashing, just like the rest of these wonks, handlers, and operatives.
“This is as close as we can get, right?” I asked the woman. In her jeans and bright pink geometric glasses, she looked like a civilian, like me. We were uncredentialed, and therefore couldn’t get within what must’ve been a quarter of a mile from the United Center.
“I think so. We just came for the people watching,” she said, gesturing to her friend next to her. The three of us stood out in a sea of campaign staffers and delegates, all dressed in blue and red suits, lanyards around their necks.
It was day three of the Democratic National Convention and day 19 of my short tenure as a Chicago resident. I had the day off work, and nothing to do but get on my Hunter S. Thompson shit and poke my nose around the old DNC to do some gonzo journalism. “What’s it like in Chicago right now?” My friend had texted me the day before. “The same?” I replied. “Quiet?” My neighborhood was two train rides and fifty minutes from the convention center. Far enough from the action that it was anyone’s guess that 50,000 visitors had flooded into the Windy City that week to attend. I’d gone back and forth on whether I’d even venture down to West Loop to investigate, but figured the FOMO might hit hard if I let the whole convention go by without stopping by even once to bear witness to the show.
Night three was set to be a veritable who’s who of Dems – Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Pete Buttigieg were all set to speak – along with appearances by Oprah, Chrissy Tiegen’s boy toy John Legend, and Stevie Wonder himself. I watched as a procession of gen Z aides and social media interns passed me by, iPhones in hand, ready to capture the evening in its entirety for Tik Tok. Anything for the 18 - 35 vote.
On the outside of the security barrier, a group of three protestors chanted the names of murdered Palestinian children and their ages through a megaphone. “If these names are bothering you, they should!” The leader shouted. “The Democratic party is complicit in their deaths. YOU are complicit in their deaths!” The people in line stared straight ahead or down at their phones, their expressions not revealing whether or not the names were in fact bothering them.
Next to them, a group of pro-life Christian protestors held court. “Chicago! Baltimore! Detroit!” They shouted. “Democratic governance has ruined American cities!” A man dressed in head to toe Cubs gear held up a sign that read “Attention lukewarm Christians: Jesus will vomit you out of his mouth. Revelation 3:16.” Out of his mouth! You know. As Jesus does.
“Are you just here to watch?” A mustachioed young man with an Australian accent and a tweed suit jacket sidled up to me.
“I am! What about you?”
“I came up from southern Illinois to cover the event for my magazine, Dispatches,” he explained.
“You didn’t get a press credential?”
“We were too late applying,” he confessed.
“What are you going to write about then?”
“The crowds outside, I guess,” he laughed. I made a mental note of it and figured I’d do the same. If he could write about it, so could I. Press credentials be damned. His name was Sky O’Brien, I learned. He was originally from Perth and came to the states for school. Got his MFA in Seattle at the University of Washington and then landed an English professor job, which took him to Elsah, Illinois of all places, right along the Missouri border. Along the way, he’d made a stop in Berkeley, where he’d met his co-editors at Dispatches Magazine. Lit world people! Even here, among the policy wonks and Hill rats. We were everywhere, it turned out.
After forty five minutes or so, I started to get antsy and decided to wander the couple blocks to Ashland, where the main Gaza war demonstrations were taking place. 72 protestors had been arrested the night prior at a demonstration outside the Israeli consulate, just a ten minute drive from where we were. Surely, there would be some interesting action that night, too.
As I turned the corner, I recognized someone and quickly whipped out my phone to snap a picture. I knew the face, but couldn’t place it. Was he on CNN? MSNBC? I knew who would know. My dad. I sent him the picture. “That’s Warnock, the senator from Georgia,” he responded right away. “He gave a great speech. I think he may be a pastor.” I fact checked him, and Wikipedia confirmed.
I made my way through a sea of cops on bikes. A hundred of them at least. All cops are bicyclists, I thought to myself. A chopper roared overhead. I’d been down by the convention for less than an hour, but the sun was getting low and the festivities were set to start at 5:30. Security at the event seemed to be amping up.
The neighborhood baseball diamond on Ashland was filled with demonstrators donning keffiyeh and waving Palestinian flags. The perimeter of the park was dotted with people wearing BRAT-green baseball caps, each printed with “National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer” in white text across the front.
I approached one of them – a thirty-something woman with tattoos up and down her arms. “We’re basically the eyes and ears of the protest in case anyone gets arrested and ends up needing legal representation,” she explained. “We’re observing and creating documentation that can be used in litigation to hold law enforcement agencies accountable for their actions. I’ve been doing it at events like this for years now.”
I thanked her, and made my way through the crowd of protestors, stopping to listen to the speakers onstage, expounding on the fact that our tax dollars are being put to use genociding the Palestinian people in Gaza. “And down the block from here, the pageantry of the DNC is meant to distract you from that fact! Do not fall for it! The Democratic Party is funding this genocide.”
I made my way around the baseball diamond, listening to the speaker and wondered whether there might be another clash that night. More protestors jailed. What else might the evening have in store? Would Stevie Wonder play “Isn’t She Lovely”? What would Oprah have to say? What did she think about the 40,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7th?
On my way back to the el, a pretty young blonde girl with piercing blue eyes stopped me. “Can I interest you in a copy of The Communist?” She asked me, and handed me a newspaper with the signature hammer and sickle printed on the front. “The Voice of the Revolutionary Communists of America”, the subtitle read. I scanned the headlines “Neither Party Represents the Working Class! The Communists are Building One That Will”, “Down with the Warmongerers!”, “I Was a Delegate to the Last Democratic National Convention. Four Years Later, I’m a Proud Revolutionary Communist.” Her name was Bea, she said, and she got involved with the Communist Party in the post-Bernie era, when she was looking for an alternative to the Democratic Party. “We’re a party of class fighters committed to the complete overthrow of capitalism. We reject the artificial scarcity of a system based on the pursuit of profits,” she explained. I Venmo’ed her $5 for a copy of the paper, which felt steep for a Communist rag devoted to the complete overthrow of capitalism, but I figured I’d support the cause. For journalism.
Bea was curious though. Like the other people I’d met that afternoon, she wanted to know what I was doing at the DNC with no real purpose other than watching the crowds roll by. “What’s it like down there?” Try as she might to exist wholly outside the system, even Bea’s curiosity was piqued by the pomp and circumstance of two party politics. “Did you see any celebrities?”
