PHILADELPHIA—Have you ever been to summer camp? My whole class went for a week when I was in seventh grade. I remember a feeling we all had towards the end, on the second-to-last day, of bleak and overwhelming melancholy. Something had happened. We didn’t know why, but what had begun with yearning and exhilaration on the first night in the cabins—the joyous conversation about girls and activities to come, unpacking all the underwear and towels nicely folded by Mom, ghost stories—ended with ennui and even dread. That week seemed to encompass years, even decades, of human experience.
Covering the Republican and Democratic National Conventions was not as moving an experience for me as attending seventh-grade camp, but it’s a useful emotional touchstone nonetheless. Going to both national party conventions is like being at summer camp and boot camp and Woodstock and Sea World simultaneously. Here is what the last two days looked like for me.
I woke up on Wednesday very hung over and went back to the mixed martial arts arena where I’d seen Paul Manafort on Sunday evening to attend a press conference starring Rudy Giuliani, who argued that if Trump is a Russian agent, he would not announce it live on CNN.
Later I headed to city hall with a colleague to watch Black Men for Bernie and OccupyDNC. We walked up to a bad techno remix of "Come Together." Khasawa Sawat addressed us as "sisters and brothers" and told us, "We have to build a left right here and right now." When she was finished, a man was allowed to walk on stage to announce that he had lost his brother. Someone plugged the film version of Clinton Cash ("they’re not even charging you to see it!") and a man on stilts in red, white, and blue pinstripe trousers carried an anti-oligarchy banner in the style of the no-smoking symbol and gave out high fives to children. Meanwhile we took in the signs ("BAN FRACKING," "Voting in Fear is Not Democracy, It’s a Hostage Situation"; "People, Planet, & Peace Before Politics"; "Bernie Got Screwed"). The people were very nice, but on the whole, it was a yawn.
I woke up on Thursday raring to go. We could not find the planned burning of voter registration cards or even Jill Stein’s speech—probably because of the massive rain—so it was mostly an indoor day until it was time to head to the convention center. I walked into Section 120 of the Wells Fargo Arena at 8:20 p.m. and stayed for the rest of the night without taking a break for a cigarette. There was not a single seat left in the periodical press filing area (I only got mine by forcing out someone to whom it did not belong), and reporters from British magazines and Japanese newspapers and news agencies from every state in the Union were fighting like African warlords for tiny plots of blue-carpeted territory.
Virtually every speech from the dozen or so surrogates on Thursday night was interchangable, with the same lame jokes ("We’ve seen this bad movie—and the sequel!"), tired antitheses ("build this country up rather than tear it down"; "Hillary Clinton wants to build schools; Donald Trump wants to build walls"), awkward syntax ("too crass to repeat and too many to repeat"), and gibberish ("LGBT rights are human rights"). Try to guess who said "In Donald Trump’s America, if you get knocked down, you don’t get up" or "our workers deserve peace of mind and a piece of the pie" or who gushed about Hillary’s so-called "Chelsea Test" for public schools as First Lady of Arkansas. The general? The preacher? One of the musical guests?
A woman with a generic airport announcement voice—could it be the same she who welcomes me back to Reagan National with such unflaggingly neutral energy?—explained at one point how to take colored cards out of bags sitting under their seats in order to form the American flag. When Katy Perry performed, thousands of people held up their cellphones with the flashlight function turned on as if they were Bic lighters. There were a few scattered boos throughout the evening, but otherwise it was the convention Clinton might have dreamed of.
It is an odd experience for someone of my generation to listen to Chelsea Clinton speak. We grew up reading about her—remember the braces?—in TIME for Kids, and to this day I picture her as an awkward student. Applause for Chelsea, whose slow, affectless delivery made me think of a bad elementary-school teacher ("the friend-li-est di-no-saur"), was scattered and tepid, and cheers infrequent and cursory. If the journalists sitting next to me on the floor saying "awww" intermittently were not being sarcastic, they are an embarrassment to our profession. The ones who cheered and smiled and pulled out their phones when she came out to "Fight Song" certainly are.
Hillary’s speech prompted a number of lingering questions. Did Bill really like to talk about how Arkansas grows the biggest watermelons in the world? Does anyone really believe that Hillary Clinton likes Pride and Prejudice? What would it mean for her to like something in the spontaneous, ordinary way you and I like things?
Entire rows sat passively when Hillary said something cursory about Israel. Even I laughed aloud when she called my generation "the most tolerant and generous young people we’ve ever had." As for Hillary, while she looked good on television—which is the point—from my seat the figure in the white suit with the very bright blonde hair looked like a rounder Thin White Duke-era David Bowie. My favorite line of the evening was her thought on public service: "The service part has always come easier than the public part." You don’t say?
For the—I think increasingly small—target audience of undecided voters, it was probably a good speech, with requisite vaguely defined sections on domestic policy, foreign affairs, and so on. The Hillary farce is very difficult to perform, but when maximum resources are devoted to it, it comes off very well. Last night I saw a tough, competent, no-nonsense wonk and foreign policy pro who is simultaneously a grandmother, Jane Austen fan, animal lover, and a kind of fairy godmother promising to wave her wands at problems like "meanness" and turn the pumpkins of green technology into GDP-boosting union-job carriages. But the whole thing starts to come apart when she dismisses Trump as being "in the pocket of the gun lobby" (does he care about this issue any more than he does fighting abortion?): this and a million other things could have been repeated ad taedium about any one of the 17 Republican presidential candidates in this cycle. The Democrats have cried wolf too many times.
One of the last things I saw was the sign saying "Go Stunt #1," a signal for the American flag trick. When the confetti came down moments later, hundreds of reporters began taking selfies and cheering. I got on the wrong bus on the way back to my hotel. When I did make it back I found myself drinking goodbye beers in the parking lot with my colleagues. At one point a woman came by saying, "I spy a Twitter tote!" I was ready to go home.