“Our best days aren’t behind us, they’re before us,” President Joe Biden said last night at the Democratic National Convention.
It was a poignant line. A statesman must believe that what he is doing will benefit his country after he exits the stage, but Biden’s speech was on the first, rather than the last, day of the convention because his fellow Democrats had concluded that his own best days were behind him and nudged him to step down from the nomination.
And so there Biden was, capping off a night on which the Democrats pursued a delicate mission: to honor the sitting president before quickly changing gears to produce a coming-out party for Kamala Harris, Democrats’ newly named presidential nominee. Hillary Clinton managed to distill the whole business down to just a few sentences.
“There’s a lot of energy in this room, just like there is in this country. Something is happening in America. You can feel it,” she said. “First, though, let’s salute President Biden. Thank you, Joe Biden, for your lifetime of service and leadership.”
She paused, ever so briefly. “And now, we are writing a new chapter in America’s history.”
Some things have come later for Biden than he anticipated. Having dreamed of the presidency for decades, he finally achieved it in the twilight of his life. His star turn at this convention came late, too. By the time Biden took the stage, at about 10:30 p.m. Chicago time, it was barely a half hour before midnight in Washington.
The speech he finally gave was neither one of his finest nor an obvious flop. It was a reminder that Biden was always a workmanlike speaker, even before his aging became apparent. He was a bit hoarse, and a bit stiff, but never seriously off track. One could see, beneath the surface, the bones of the nomination-acceptance speech he might have given: a look back at the literally and figuratively shattered Washington he’d inherited on January 20, 2021, and then running through the accomplishments of his administration to set the stage for a second term.
Biden didn’t want to relinquish the nomination, and he waited until the pressure to step aside became irresistible. (He joked in his speech about having been labeled both too young to be a senator and too old to be president.) But he has also always been a faithful soldier in the Democratic Party, and he did not evince any bitterness or reluctance on stage. He took diligently to the task of pivoting from the Biden presidency to the Harris candidacy. As Biden knows, his own legacy will depend substantially on whether Harris replaces him or Trump returns.
“I stand before you to report on this August night that democracy has prevailed. Democracy has delivered. And now democracy must be preserved,” he said.
Easing the ache of stepping down was the noisy applause delegates and others in the United Center gave him. Biden was repeatedly interrupted by “We love Joe” chants. Speakers throughout the evening praised Biden and paid tribute to him, though the tributes were necessarily retrospective. When UAW President Shawn Fain thanked Biden for “making history” by marching on a picket line, it was a small leap to being history.
The past was a motif throughout the evening. Other than Biden, no one received such thunderous applause as Clinton, the party’s 2016 nominee, in the only place she is so beloved. Clinton cast back to a bittersweet line at the end of her 2008 campaign for president with hopes for a happier ending with Harris. “Together, we put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling,” she said, “And tonight we’re so close to breaking through.”
Representative James Clyburn, the South Carolinian who helped make Biden the Democratic nominee and in doing so became one of Washington’s most powerful players, got a prime speaking slot. Vendors around the arena hawked T-shirts with pictures of Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter that read, “Squad goals.” (Isn’t there already a Democratic Squad?) Even Steve Kerr, the coach of Team USA and a veteran of the classic Chicago Bulls basketball teams of the 1990s, was on hand for nostalgic flavor.
But the most emotional moment other than Biden’s speech came near the start of the night, when the Reverend Jesse Jackson was honored. Jackson, 82, is only about a year older than Biden; both men ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 1988. He’s now frail and appeared in a wheelchair on stage, where he did not speak. But Jackson has seen the party follow some of the paths he laid out, and he was showered with applause.
Biden, too, has come a long way from his ignominious exit in 1988. If his career is not closing the way he imagined, he at least got a hero’s valediction. As he often does, he quoted from a song by Gene Scheer: “America, America, I gave my best to you,” he said. The crowd roared in agreement.