Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.GETTYUnable to gather in person, the Democrats took their party’s convention digital—and nailed it, argues David Frum, who served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. In the process, the party created the first true social-media convention.

“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus,” Edward Gibbon writes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.

Barack Obama didn’t try to inspire Americans tonight: He wanted to scare them.There were no thousand-watt smiles or soaring rhetoric from the former president as he exhorted voters to elect Joe Biden and warned them about the perils of giving Donald Trump another four years in the White House.

Calls from the White House come in with the number blocked. People who are used to getting them know to pick up. And invitations to sit in the first lady’s box for the State of the Union address don’t come around very often. People who get them know to say yes.Kamala Harris received one of those invitations at the end of January 2012. She was in Washington, D.C.