The Convention is Over, But the Video is Just Getting Started

 

They put that convention together in roughly four weeks. 

Okay, the basics were already in place. Chicago was not going anywhere. The venues were booked. The staff was hired. The balloons were on order. The party color was still blue.

All they had to do was switch out the candidate. No problem.

Yes problem. The effort had to be massive, a “sleep when you’re dead” moment for several thousand people, and they pulled it off without a hitch. It was maybe the best mini-series ever.

We got four days of spellbinding speakers, heart-tugging videos, and gut-wrenching stories of grave injustices perpetrated by MAGA miscreants.

We got to watch Democrats punch back, for a change, after decades of back-peddling against a Republican insurgency that seems, finally, to be running on fumes.

We got to see the case against Donald Trump emphatically pressed, with large dollops of vitriol and ridicule.

But all that was last week. What now?

As it happens, the convention wasn’t just about the convention. It was also about media technology, and about the massive gathering of video assets — an accumulation of thousands of terabytes of raw footage — that can be used and reused across the length and breadth of the media, and social media, landscapes.

Think about the footage they shot in those four days. Think of all the speakers, all the prepared videos, all the interviews. Think of all the coordinated sign-waving, the crowd shots, the fan-cam shots. Think of all the attendees, from the stars to the household names to the rank-and-file party members.

Now think about all the stories that were told, and can now be re-told, in any media, in long or short form. These stories cover dozens of pertinent issues, and they provide the ammunition Democrats can use to pummel Republicans. And they’re all at the fingertips of excellent editors, who are slicing and dicing them as we speak.

Video editors have long worked with ‘bins’ — an old word from a pre-digital era — by which they mean the digital containers where they organize video clips that belong together. The editors working for the Democratic National Committee now have dozens of such bins to work with, each filled with scores of juicy sound-bites, ready to be cut into ads precisely targeted to audiences that will be most receptive to them.

There is, no doubt, a large bin labelled “abortion rights.” It contains every clip of every speaker who mentioned abortion, contraception, IVF, reproductive rights, or the Supreme Court. It also contains those harrowing stories of mothers forced to flee their own states to end pregnancies that threatened their lives.

These clips will be fashioned into ads targeting suburban women, college students, and anyone who thinks government has no business in their bedroom.

Then there’s the “Republicans for Harris” bin. It wasn’t by accident that lifelong Republicans had a role at the Democratic convention. These were not the so-called Never-Trumpers. They were, rather, true MAGA believers who realized they’d been conned, and that Trump had made fools of them.

It was Trump’s own press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, who told us of Trump’s limitless depravity. She confessed that the reason she, famously, never scheduled press conferences was that she didn’t want to lie to the public.

This sort of “reformed addict” testimonial is a TV commercial waiting to happen. It will also be re-purposed as a YouTube ad, a TikTok video, and possibly an entire media campaign, each in its own way targeting all those Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the primary.

There’s surely a bin labelled “Unions,” featuring Sean Fain calling Trump a scab. We can guess there are bins labelled “Price Gouging,” “Veterans’ Issues,” “LGBTQ Issues,” and “Gaza.” All will make terrific ads.

But the biggest bin is reserved for “Attacks on Trump.” This bin will contain far too many clips to actually use, especially since Trump himself makes better anti-Trump ads than Democrats ever could. But there will nonetheless be miles of footage, much of it using ridicule as a weapon. There is nothing Trump hates more than being laughed at.

Of course, this Trump bin has plenty of sub-bins. There’s one just for JD Vance, another just for Project 2025, and yet another for the incompetent but deadly response to Covid.

And that’s just the negative stuff.

On the positive side, there’s Tim Walz, the big revelation of this election season. At least a half-dozen bins will be devoted just to his footage.

When he speaks of being a gun guy, and a better shot than anyone in Congress, that clip will go into an ad targeting NRA members — most of whom, it should be remembered, are in favor of common-sense gun control.

When he speaks of his family’s struggles with infertility — and the anxieties of the IVF process — red-state Democrats will take that footage home to their own constituencies, who are already primed to exploit that issue.

When he speaks of public education, you know his clips will be circulated among teachers all over the country.

And when we saw his love for his son Gus, and Gus’s teary adulation of his dad, it was a perfect made-for-TV moment. But this wasn’t just another feel-good family tearjerker. It was also a reminder that there are millions of families with neurodivergent children who were touched on a deeply personal level, and who might just vote with their hearts. We can expect to see that moment a few more times between now and November.

I won’t even get into the “murderer’s row” of speakers, except to list but a few: Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Clinton, Clinton, Obama, Obama, and a trifecta of Michigan women — Whitmer, Nessel, McMorrow — all of whom kicked ass. Each was scintillating, each had a fresh perspective on the dominant themes of the day, and each threw pithy one-liners on the pile for later use.

Most of the communications that come out of the convention will feature cutaways to clips of Kamala’s acceptance speech, which was extraordinary. In it, she touched every base, addressing just about everything that’s been on Democrats’ minds for at least eight years. Whatever the issue, there will be an ad that covers it, and a clip from that speech that will fit right in.

And those ads will be backed by more than half a billion dollars in media buys, a staggering war chest. Most of it will be spent in battleground states, but don’t be surprised if some of it pops up in Florida, Texas, or Ohio, because why not?

It all serves to underscore, and in stunning fashion, that the Democrats are now on offense and moving down the field. We will soon find out just how strong they are, and how enfeebled the GOP has become.

None of which means this is over — the electoral college has screwed us before. But I like our chances a lot better than theirs.