Halfway through the 2016 Democratic National Convention, and there’s been just one reference to ISIS and Islamist terrorism.
After the first full day of the convention and more than 60 speakers, Republican Party communications director Sean Spicer noted the fact in a tweet. It was quickly picked up by a number of conservatives in the media, which triggered a “fact-checking effort” by the left-leaning Politifact.
Their verdict:
Based on our searches of C-SPAN closed-captioning text, Congressional Quarterly transcripts and other video archiving services, we couldn’t find any speaker who mentioned “ISIS,” “Islamic,” “terror,” “terrorist” or “terrorism” during the first day of the convention … the email accurately reflects what was said—or more precisely, not said—from the podium in Philadelphia. We rate the statement True.
To be fair, on the same day, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did use the word “terrorists” once in her speech. But she was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention—more than 500 miles to the southwest in Charlotte, N.C.—not the Democrat convention in Philadelphia.
So, on the second day of the convention, when the Democratic Party was supposed to be making its case for why the first woman to receive a major-party presidential nomination should, in fact, become the 45th President of the United States, they managed to eke out one reference to ISIS (or ISIL, Islamic State, or Daesh—pick your preferred term). That’s when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered a rebuke of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“He has undermined our fight against ISIS by alienating our Muslim partners,” she said. “He has weakened our standing in the world by threatening to walk away from our friends and our allies—and by encouraging more countries to get nuclear weapons.”
But while she attacked Trump’s policies, she offered no Democrat alternative at all. Even the Washington Post—which has never been mistaken for a Trump media ally—offered this analysis:
In contrast to her detailed denunciation of Trump’s “dark vision of America,” however, Albright barely touched on Clinton’s approach to terrorism. She praised the Democratic nominee for her tenure at the State Department, saying she saw her “restore our country’s reputation around the world,” but she didn’t endorse her current strategy for defeating ISIS—indeed she scarcely mentioned it.
In an election where national security has become a major issue for voters—and while the sitting secretary of state has said air conditioning is a bigger threat than ISIS—the lack of coherent messaging will likely hurt Democrats in November.
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