Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Thursday, August 13th, 2020.

I am John Puthhorts, the editor of commentary magazine with me as always associate editor Noah Rothman,

Hi Noah. Hi John, senior writer Christine Rosen,

Hi Christine. Hi John.

And executive editor Abe Greenwald, hi Abe. Hi John, we're going to be discussing Abe's masterly piece.

Yes, this is a revolution, the lead of our September 2020 issue now up at commentary magazine.com.

Abe's piece, not the whole issue, which will be up.

I guess tomorrow or Monday and it is a dazzling issue I have to say, but most dazzling for Abe's remarkable article.

And we will get to that in a minute.

First, let's talk about the debut of the Democratic ticket yesterday afternoon Joe Biden introducing Kamala Harris

as his running mate in a peculiar event in Wilmington where they were socially distanced.

And there was no audience and there was no cheering and there were no balloons and there was no real energy in the room

that could be provided by the classic setting of the introduction of vice president or the really sort of the beginning

of the presidential campaign in earnest in this mad dash over the next 81 days till the until the election.

Instead, we had them standing apart wearing masks at a certain point there, their spouses coming out and tugging them.

And then you could sort of see all the wires on the floor when they did the shot where they in order to get them all in the picture together.

The cameras had to be kind of pulled back and so you could see stuff on the floor you don't ordinarily see cords, power cables, things like that.

Was this a good or a bad debut based on this odd technical frame?

Christine, what do you think?

Well, you know, it's funny. It made me appreciate weirdly the kind of stage craft that goes into the manufactured pump that we've all gotten used to

with these sorts of announcements, right? Like the applause and the balloons and the loud music and it actually does lead to energy and enthusiasm as a viewer when you watch it.

And I think that was very notable in this case because neither Biden nor Harris demonstrated a lot of energy in their remarks, particularly Biden who although his remarks made a lot more sense because he was reading them from a teleprompter seemed fairly very low key low register unless he was attacking Obama.

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