A postmortem of Joe Biden's convention performance; Trump-haters are grateful that Biden didn't collapse into a pile of drool, but there are problems on the horizon.

If one judges Joe Biden's convention speech by the standards of past convention speeches, whether Democrat or Republican, it was decidedly mediocre. He had a lot of platitudes, he spouted lies, and he plagiarized. In other words, it was what we've come to expect from Joe Biden during his 47 years in politics.

For Biden's supporters, though, which means those who hate Trump, it was a satisfying performance. Unfortunately, Joe may not have enough of those supporters to make a difference come November. This Democrat convention may have been the first time in American political history that a candidate's speech, rather than giving him the convention bounce, gave his opponent the convention bounce.

Regarding the content of Biden's speech, I wrote about my impressions here. I also recommend Monica Showalter's piece about the con Biden was running. Lastly, I recommend Charles Lipson's analysis of the conspicuous gaps on topics that Biden ought to have addressed.

The best spontaneous reaction from a leftist to Biden's speech came from Van Jones. I have a soft spot for Jones. While I despise his ideology, I like his honesty. He praises Trump when he thinks the latter deserves praise, and, in the case of Biden's speech, he's the one who will blurt out what everyone else was thinking:

Oops... CNN's Van Jones let the cat out the bag!
"And we were prepared for it to be a terrible speech. As long as he didn't embarrass himself, we were going to come out here and praise it!"
This is what the liberal media will be doing tonight, tomorrow, and the foreseeable future pic.twitter.com/UIfZbPhYVe— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) August 21, 2020

It turns out, though, that satisfying a desperately anti-Trump base is not enough for the larger American population. One of the truisms in American politics is that candidates get a "convention bounce." There's even a Wikipedia entry:

A convention bounce or convention bump refers to an increase in support that U.S. presidential candidates in the Republican or Democratic party typically enjoy after the televised national convention of their party.

In the case of the Democrats in 2020, there was indeed a convention bounce. The problem for them, though, is that the bounce didn't go in Biden's direction:

This wasn't supposed to happen.

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