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- [Voiceover] This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra.
- Hello, I'm Gwen Ifill
and welcome to The Washington Week Webcast Extra.
I'm joined around the table
by Dan Balz of The Washington Post,
Jeanne Cummings of The Wall Street Journal,
Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post,
and Reid Wilson of The Hill.
Now that we're on the other side
of the nominating conventions,
let's talk a bit about the infrastructure
of the events themselves.
There are balloons and there is confetti,
and there are funny hats,
but there's a lot happening under the surface.
So which party managed just that part,
the theatrics of the convention, Karen, in your opinion?
- Oh, hands down the Democrats.
And ironically enough, when Donald Trump had for months
been promising a quote on quote "showbiz" convention
and that this was gonna be a production
unlike anything we'd ever seen,
and by the end of this week he was saying, "What?
"I didn't really care about that stuff."
- [Gwen] Anybody else?
- I noticed the signs.
The Democratic signs were better
than the Republican signs--
- From where I was sitting,
I could look down during the videos
and see the signs being handed out.
They had a very efficient operation
that would just slide them into place,
so when the lights came back up,
it was suddenly a sea of whoever was speaking,
Joe, Michelle, you know.
- I thought one of the other differences
was that the sequencing of speeches,
I thought that at the Republican convention
in those prime time hours, things seemed out of whack,
that they had Melania Trump's speech on Monday night,
and then they had two more speeches afterwards,
and that happened a couple of times.
- [Gwen] It felt like she had some place to go,
and that's why they let her off the show.
- It was this with the Democrats.
They built that prime time hour effectively.
- I would just like to say as a print journalist,
I'd like to thank the Trump campaign
for bringing their people out early, getting it done,
so that we can then write.
But no, I--
- As a television journalist, let me say
there are long musical interludes
that I wasn't happy about.
- I agreed the Dems ran a better show,
and they may have run a better show
because they were afraid of what Trump was going to do
because Trump can do, or we assumed, could do TV,
and they had to be worried that he was indeed
going to put on a very good show.
But then we all forgot
that Manafort hasn't run a convention since 1976,
so there's something there that's not in sync.
But the other thing I noticed with the Democrats
is that they saved the best for last.
Those last two hours of prime time,
that was compelling television, not just good politics,
and that's, I've never seen anybody
that would do that that well.
Yes.
- So my pick for best, most effective speech
was Michelle Obama, who I think I've never heard
give a bad speech, but there was something about her,
the timing of her speech,
which grabbed all the convention's distraction
over other things that had been going up until that moment,
and did a couple things.
It reminded people of what will happen
when the Obamas leave,
Democrats, well Democrats who love the Obamas,
and it also was emotional, I thought.
What was your favorite?
- Well, I think yeah.
I think it would just be hard to top her,
and in fact, for the rest of the convention,
the speakers as they would speak would say,
"Well, and then here I am following Michelle."
- Including anybody else, Joe Biden or?
- Well I thought there were a number.
I thought she gave a very effective speech,
and the other thing she did,
hearkening back to the disruptions of that day,
she changed that convention with her speech,
because up to then, the story was of problems with the DNC,
problems with the Bernie people,
and she put an emotional edge on it
that moved it in the direction
that the Clinton people desperately needed.
I thought President Obama's speech
may have been the most effective of the week,
because he did so much in it.
And one of the things he did that I think was strategic
and potentially very significant was,
they grabbed back, obviously,
the idea that America is great.
They tried to get that counter-Trump
on the idea that it isn't.
But they were doing it in the context of an America
that is a diverse America, a changing America,
a transforming America, an America that to some people
is a little scary, they were trying to say,
"This is a great country, and here are the reasons why."
- My personal favorite was Joe Biden.
I know, I thought Biden gave the best speech of his life
the last time he's on a national stage.
He's given lots--
- He was very, it grabbed me, too, yes.
- He's given lots of really good speeches.
When Biden is on his game,
there are few that can touch him.
- [Gwen] Malarkey!
- Malarkey, right.
But the way he stopped the applause,
spoke directly into that camera
so if you were sitting on the couch
he was talking right at you.
He had teleprompters around him, but we all know
he views that as a benchmark of opportunity,
not what he has to read.
And he was concise, though.
He was brief, especially for Joe Biden, brief,
which I think made his messages much more powerful,
and not so much in his validation of Hillary,
which was fine, wasn't any better or worse than anyone else,
but his indictment of Trump was very powerful.
- Well speaking of Trump, there's one other thing
we didn't get to in the main program,
and it's this whole, he has a gift for distraction.
He has a gift for stealing the limelight,
which is what he set out to do a couple of times this week,
but unintentionally, I think,
when he looked in the camera once again and said,
"Gee Russia, you might
"really wanna look at Hillary's emails,"
which every foreign policy expert grabbed their heart
as a betrayal of what a president would do.
- And Dan referenced the sequencing
of the Democratic speeches.
One of the major things that changed
after Donald Trump made those comments
was that Leon Panetta tore up his speech
and wrote a new one,
questioning Donald Trump's fitness for office.
I should be beyond the point now where I'm surprised
by the lack of decorum in this campaign,
but several Democrats used the word "treason" this week,
and in regards to Donald Trump.
This is something new, I think,
in the litany of misstatements
or improper, impolitic statements that Trump has made.
- You think it turns a corner where he actually will change?
Because every time we think that's true--
- Yes, that's true.
But it also opened a Democratic door
to really hammer home the question
of whether or not this person is fit to be in office.
Hillary Clinton had the standout line in her speech, to me,
was, "If this is somebody who can be rattled by a tweet,
"do we want them to have access to nuclear weapons?"
This is a new line of attack that is really gonna,
I think, pay dividends for Democrats in the long run.
- He thrives on chaos,
and whether by design or by accident,
he is a strategic disruptor,
and I think part of that was that.
But the other is, he hates not to be in the limelight,
and so this was the Democrats' weekend,
and he found a way to put himself
right in the middle of it.
- Substantively too, it comes 180 degrees from 2012
when Mitt Romney was identifying Russia
as the greatest strategic threat
and being mocked by President Obama saying,
"The '80s want their foreign policy back."
Well it turns out Mitt Romney was pretty right about that,
and Donald Trump has now completely given that ground away.
- Well thank you all very much.
I know that you're very tired as am I
'cause it has been an amazing couple of weeks,
but it's not over guys.
It's just beginning.
For a deeper dive into this week's history making politics,
go to the Washington Week homepage
for a brief history of women in politics.
You'll learn things you did not know.
That's at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek
And that's it for the Washington Week Webcast Extra.
We'll see you next time.
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