I am not in Chicago. I happen to be in Washington D.C., which as you may presume is something of a (relative) ghost town, which makes both the execution of my paying day-job duties and restaurant reservations much easier. The combination of productivity, the unseasonably nice weather and the chance to meet up with some old friends has made this a rather pleasant trip.

You can understand, then, my reluctance to venture, even mentally, to Chicago and the Democratic National Convention. Alas, duty calls, so herewith, some notes in abstentia on the goings on at the DNC:

The ceremonial showing to President Joe Biden the stage exit seemed a bit unceremonial. The act was completed by his former boss, Barack Obama, in a manner which struck me as polite but perfunctory. The sense one gets is the Democrats are eager to shunt the still-sitting (for those who may have forgotten) president aside before he does any more damage. Politics is politics, and bears little room for sentimentality, but the whole thing had a melancholy undertone of rank Machiavellianism.

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One also gets the sense the Democratic Party remains, for all intents and purposes, former President Obama’s. Ever the gifted orator, the master of the non sequitur, Obama’s speech will likely go down as the highlight of this convention, assuming the pro-Hamas protestors don’t burn the whole place down before it’s finished. His job was to tee up the running mate and the candidate, appearing on the subsequent evenings, but he may have merely set the convention-goers up for disappointment. Neither Vice President Kamala Harris or Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz share the former president’s oratorical skills or ability for rhetorical gymnastics. Harris may surprise us all and display some previously well-hidden skill Thursday night, but the overwhelming sense one gets watching the show to this point is it is Obama’s, and he is merely managing the chess board with the pieces which circumstance has left him, which are far short of ideal.

Harris is no Barack Obama, not by a long shot. In fact, there is no presidential candidate, from either party, in living memory, with whom she compares favorably, from a purely political standpoint. She lacks not only Obama’s rhetorical skills, but Hillary Clinton’s political command, or Bill Cliton’s able-to-get-him-out-of-anything political charisma. She did not campaign for this position, she was maneuvered into it. She is what you would get if you typed “liberal presidential candidate” into ChatGPT, with as little depth.

The national mood of Democrats the last few weeks has been one of relief masquerading as enthusiasm, and any real enthusiasm will start to evaporate as the honeymoon phase wears off and even a grotesquely sympathetic media will have to begin to take her seriously. She has been mum on policy until recently, and rightly so, from a campaign perspective. After she dribbled out bits of her proposed economic agenda last Friday, the jaws of economists everywhere hit the floor, having mistakenly believed the ideas she espoused about price controls, profligate spending and taxing wealth had been buried in the same grave as the flat earth and medical use of leeches.

Granted, the one big thing Harris has going for her is her opponent. “What ifs” are no more helpful in politics then anywhere else in life, but one cannot help but wonder how much different the tone in Chicago this week would be if Harris were facing Nikki Haley as the Republican candidate. There would still be excitement for the candidate, because there has to be, but it would be far more forced and artificial, as the party would almost certainly be resigned to minimizing the electoral damage it would be trudging toward in November. Alas, that is not to be, and instead Harris now has a decent chance of winning despite herself. The coming presidential debate offers the country the same condolence prize as the last one did, a bit of national theatrical drama, but not much of substance. A debate really does neither candidate any good — Harris, because she dares not elucidate on policy, even if she can, and Trump because he is simply unwilling to engage on policy — the one strength he arguably has, at least where those policies differ substantively.

Finally, there is the choice of venue itself. Of all places in the Union where the concrete and measurable failures of hyper-progressive policy are on display, Chicago is near the top. By almost any metric — educational performance, poverty, crime rate — Chicago’s statistics are on the wrong end of the scale. The cruel irony of the city which bears the scars of the results of statist models for addressing societal problems actually also hosting the national convention of the party that is the prime incubator of those models is one which bears far more comment. It is also on which even the soaring oratorical skills of Barack Obama cannot neatly explain away, which is why he made no attempt to do so.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.