Stephanie Scarbrough/AP Photo
President Joe Biden delivers the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, August 19, 2024, in Chicago.
For a guy who’d recently admitted he’d asked his staff not to schedule him any events after 8 p.m., Joe Biden burned the midnight oil pretty well on Monday night. The mangled and inaudible lines no longer mattered the way they did when he was still the party’s standard-bearer. Fluffs notwithstanding, he delivered a speech that was both effective and affecting. The pathos, if pathos there was, was the pathos of age, not of ineffectualness. Biden’s attacks on Trump were forceful; so were his endorsements of Kamala Harris.
Biden deserved a victory round, chiefly for what he’d done on the economy. At one wonderful moment, he even summoned the temerity and historical accuracy to note that his economics were not only not those of the Republicans, but not those of his Democratic predecessors, either. Economies prosper, he said, from the middle out and the bottom up; the top-down model had never worked. Republicans said it worked, and in a somewhat muttered aside, he even added that “a lot of Democrats thought it worked.”
So they did, and it’s not those Democrats’ party any more. That was evident at the moment that this long evening session perked up, first with the brief appearance of Kamala Harris on the stage, and then with the fighting speeches of UAW President Shawn Fain and, in her first address to a national convention, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The two social democrats took the stage to rapturous receptions, which, in AOC’s case, an observer might not have predicted when Nancy Pelosi reacted in a distinctly nonfriendly manner when as an incoming first-termer, she joined a sit-in in the Speaker’s office.
Does that mean, as some sectarian leftists allege, that AOC has sold out to the mainstream? Absolutely not. AOC’s reception, like Fain’s, was evidence not that they’d moved to the center but rather that on economics, the party had moved toward them. It was one more reminder that Biden had made all those progressive appointments to the Labor Department and the regulatory agencies because he understood very well that his party had moved, that the 2008 crash and the ensuing Great Recession had soured the young on unbridled capitalism as the Great Depression had soured their grandparents. On Monday night, AOC established herself as that generation’s champion: the millennial who understood what they’d gone through because she’d gone through it herself, emerging, by the end of her talk, as one of the party’s foremost stars.
I’ve been going to Democratic conventions for more than 50 years now, and I’ve never heard anywhere near the number of references (all laudatory) to unions as I heard on Monday night. A half-dozen union leaders spoke from the stage. That was just one of the evening’s themes, of course: So were the fights to restore abortion rights, civil rights, and to preserve the all-too-shaky foundations of American democracy. But the party has been liberal on social issues for decades; reclaiming a neo–New Deal perspective on the economy has only been going on since Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren burst onto the national scene. Those perspectives had not been in evidence during the administrations of Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
The cheers for Fain and AOC and then for Biden were of a piece—cheers for those who returned the cause of economic justice to the center of Democratic ideology. That’s the ideology that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz inherit, and from which they haven’t shown any significant inclination to stray. Indeed, I think they understand they need to take it further.
Democrats have never loved Biden more than they did on Monday night, but they loved him precisely because he stepped down. By having done it so late in the game, he effectively made Kamala the immediate de facto nominee, and she’s done so well as a candidate that the glow from her candidacy now shines on Biden, too. Biden’s ending his candidacy produced a tsunami of relief; Kamala’s subsequent candidacy has produced waves of joy.
The affection seen for Biden Monday night—he took five minutes to get going through the applause—was appreciation not just for his tenure in office, not just for his shifting the party’s mission to one that took on the current incarnation of American capitalism, but also for his reluctant realization that he had to pass the torch. Had Kamala somehow fumbled it during the past month, there would have been anger at the tardiness of his decision not to run. That she hasn’t fumbled it, that she’s exceeded all expectations, meant that Biden could come before delegates whose affection and respect for him weren’t clouded by his having hung on for so long. As retirement parties go, it was loving, and a blast.
