Show & tell
US-Eye , Issue 1631 WHAT is the point of an American political convention?

For law enforcement, it's a chance to stand around in tactical camouflage. For delegates, it's a chance to tour the country and meet people from Wyoming for the first time. For merchandise vendors, it's a chance to offload their dead stock of Biden or Mike Pence T-shirts.

For the political parties, though, these are four-night infomercials, selling their best slogans and personalities to a primetime television audience.

Chicago bullish
At the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago last week, speeches kicked off at 5.30pm and the audience had to suffer three-plus hours of regional mayors, random rabbis and swing-state governors before the big guns rolled in: the Obamas, the Clintons, Stevie Wonder, Oprah and Pink.

On the first night, the warm-up acts dribbled on for so long that Joe Biden had to stay up way past his bedtime to deliver a valedictory address.

For anyone raised on the milder ale of, say, Lib Dem party conferences, many aspects of the DNC were almost hallucinatory. Why not bring an entire American football team on stage, as the man introducing vice-presidential candidate Tim "Coach" Walz did? Why not turn up – as the Wisconsin delegation did – with yellow foam blocks of cheese on your head?

Mock election
The Democrats used the convention to accomplish a complete reset of their election strategy. Biden's team had been focused on the threat Donald Trump poses to democratic norms, which had the virtue of being true. The downside was that swing voters didn't seem to care.

The Harris campaign has largely ditched the end-of-days stuff in favour of pointing and laughing.

In his speech, Barack Obama did a dick joke, making a suggestive hand gesture as he said that Donald Trump was obsessed with "crowd sizes".

Senator Elizabeth Warren, 75, who hides a razor-sharp brain under a twinkly schoolmarmish demeanour, referenced a false rumour that Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance once had sex with a sofa. "Trust Donald Trump and JD Vance to look out for your family?" she said. "Shoot, I wouldn't trust them to move my couch."

Michelle Obama's motto "When they go low, we go high" no longer applies. Now the Democrats are going lower.

Centre pitch
As for the rest, Team Harris is now running a classic centre-left playbook: tough on crime, tough on immigration, populist on economics. And like Keir Starmer's Labour, the Democrats are keen to normalise the idea of switching your vote.

For Starmer, that meant accepting Tory MP Natalie Elphicke into the party, despite views somewhere in the region of Norman Tebbit. Here, the Dems put a parade of former Trump staffers and Republican officials on stage to stress that voting for Kamala "doesn't make you a Democrat, it makes you a patriot".

Don the drain
The Democrats left Chicago relatively united – even the protests over Palestine were small and mostly peaceful. But the election is still on a knife-edge. So what was Trump doing while all this hoopla played out in Chicago?

Why, he joined a mulleted Louisiana comedian called Theo Von on his podcast, which has a huge fanbase of young men – a demographic where the Republicans have a big lead.

The pair discussed drug addiction, with Von telling Trump that cocaine "will turn you into a damn owl, homie, you know what I'm saying?" Trump nodded. Three months to go.