On the menu today: The first night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago stretched into the second morning, as a cavalcade of minor-league Democratic officials pushed Joe Biden’s farewell address right out of prime time. Instead, Biden began addressing the nation right around the time that Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel usually greet their audiences, and went on for 50 minutes or so. Last night, the stage was set for genuine drama, for the rare sight of a sitting president who was effectively strong-armed out of the nomination by other powerful party figures offering his farewell to the party and passing the torch to his handpicked successor. But Joe Biden met the moment with yet another long, shouty stump speech, quite possibly the speech he’d once intended to give on the convention’s fourth night with a handful of minor edits. Also, AOC offers the most spectacularly implausible boast of the night about Kamala Harris.
Biden’s DNC Flop
Chicago — Like that old saying about a tree falling in the forest, if an American president gives a speech long after most of the audience has gone to bed, does he make a sound?
Before Joe Biden delivered his address Monday night, Van Jones said on CNN that the night would feature “the old lion” delivering “one last roar.”
It was less a roar than a long series of shouts, a reheated collection of his greatest hits from the period since he reemerged as a presidential candidate in 2019. Biden pointed, hectored, bellowed, and glared. The president had been done dirty by his own party and the convention organizers, and he wasn’t interested in hiding his peevish mood.
“You can’t love your country only when you win.” “There’s no place for political violence in America! “We finally beat big Pharma!” “[Trump] never built a damn thing!” “Great jobs, right here in America! With every new job and new factory, pride and hope are returning to America’s communities!” “Wall Street didn’t build America! The middle class built America! And unions built the middle class!” “‘Suckers and losers!’ Who does he think he is? Who does he think he is?” “We just have to remember who we are! We’re the United States of America, and there’s nothing we cannot do when we do it together!”
Our Noah Rothman noticed that a lot of Biden’s rhetoric was recycled from his “remarks about the continued battle for the soul of the nation” at Independence Hall in September 2022. Other parts felt recycled from this year’s State of the Union Address.
Perhaps the most significant line was one that was ad-libbed: “Those protesters out in the street, they’ve got a point.”
In one final, absurdly shameless insult from his party, Biden took the stage at 11:26 p.m. Eastern time, pushed out of the prime-time window by an inordinately long list of can’t-miss Democratic Party all-stars like Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo, childhood friends of Kamala Harris Stacey Johnson-Batiste and Doris Johnson, Maryland representative Jamie Raskin, Texas representative Jasmine Crockett, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, and Delaware senator Chris Coons, before we got to Biden’s wife Jill and daughter Ashley.
Now, West Coasters might be shrugging, but there was a time when finishing by 11 p.m. Eastern was important for the local news and, after that, The Tonight Show. And even today, all other things being equal, you would rather that audiences in the Eastern time zone — you know, in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan and Georgia and North Carolina — could watch your best featured speakers.
The not-so-subtle signal was that Democrats didn’t want anyone to watch Joe Biden’s speech live. And it’s hard to begrudge them that trepidation, as his last appearance in prime time was such an unmitigated disaster that it led to him quitting the race.
Biden finished at 12:20 a.m. by my watch; Trump finished his speech after midnight, too. The two most recent nights of the national party conventions demonstrate that the organizers have no respect for their audiences. There’s an art to a good speech, and pacing and knowing when to keep things succinct are irreplaceable skills.
It was the first time since 1968 that a president who was eligible to run for another term chose not to do so, and Lyndon Johnson didn’t address the 1968 convention in Chicago. It was a historic moment, and Joe Biden chose to turn in the same old shouty stump speech.
But the whole night felt like attending a funeral, with the departed sitting next to us in the pews. Sure, the ludicrously long line of speakers was happy to insert a line paying tribute to Joe Biden . . . because he is leaving office.
The Accidental President
Joe Biden must rank among America’s most improbable presidents, and if he wasn’t an accidental president, his arrival in the Oval Office was owed to two extremely unlikely twists of fate. The first was Barack Obama’s selecting him as his running mate, and the second was the Democratic Party’s palpable fear that Bernie Sanders would botch a winnable race against Donald Trump in 2020.
In the summer of 2008, Biden’s second presidential campaign had flamed out six months earlier. It’s not just that the longtime Delaware senator lost, it’s that he couldn’t even muster 1 percent in the Iowa caucuses. Almost no one in the Democratic Party gave him serious consideration compared to much better known, much more popular options like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. The campaign had reinforced the perception of Biden as a gaffe-prone buffoon, as he had begun his campaign with the condescending description of Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
According to Obama’s campaign manager David Axelrod, it was a “coin toss” between Biden and Evan Bayh, and one of the deciding factors was that Bayh seemed “low-key, even flat” in his meetings with Obama campaign officials. If Obama hadn’t picked Biden off the political scrap heap in the summer of 2008, Biden never would have become president.
Fast-forward to 2020, when Biden returned to the presidential-campaign trail for a third time, and he looked and sounded . . . considerably older. Kamala Harris clobbered Biden in the first debate, painting him as a racially insensitive relic of past eras who opposed busing and integrated schools. Julian Castro dared question whether Biden’s memory was as reliable as it used to be. Biden sputtered to a distant third in Iowa, an abysmal fifth in New Hampshire, and a distant second in Nevada.
South Carolina Democrats — mostly African Americans — subsequently gave him a much-needed big win. But even then, Biden appeared to be in a near-tie with Bernie Sanders, who intended to go into the general election defending the record of Castro’s Cuba. (Picture the poor soul who had to run the Sanders for President office in Miami.) Sanders insisted upon running as a hardline progressive, at a time when Democrats just wanted to find somebody who would beat Trump.
The Democrats — perhaps in a preview of the ruthless pragmatism they would bring to bear against Biden this summer — concluded that nominating Sanders was too risky, and that Biden, being the last man standing who wasn’t openly socialist, was the safest option. In stunningly rapid succession, Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden.
And then about two weeks later, the whole world came to a screeching halt, as the Covid pandemic shut down American life. It’s an oversimplification to say that the pandemic elected Joe Biden, but the lingering effects wrecked the economic accomplishments of the Trump administration at the worst time.
Biden is lucky he got the one term that he did. Americans were always going to be extremely skeptical of reelecting an octogenarian president for another four years. He should have announced after the midterms that he would only serve one term and let Harris run an actual primary race, with his endorsement and good odds.
Instead, Biden’s career is ending in ignoble embarrassment. Many members of his party leaked, often anonymously, that they had no faith in him against Trump. George Clooney took to the pages of the New York Times to tell Americans that the Biden he saw at a June fundraiser “was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Powerful Democrats finally mustered up the willpower to force him out of the office he had literally spent his entire adult life pursuing. That Jill Biden Vogue cover — “We will decide our future” — looks pretty funny now, because it sure as heck looks like Nancy Pelosi decided your future, Madam First Lady. Last night, Coons tried to get a “we love Joe” chant going, but the audience that had enthusiastically cheered the previous speakers seemed tired and lethargic. The assembled delegates weren’t feeling it.
Sure, the delegates cheered when he finally appeared, but this was a hearty farewell. No one seemed all that torn up that Biden wasn’t continuing on as the party’s nominee.
Democrats love running on the theme of generational change — John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. Right now, they’re overjoyed because they get to run a multicultural 59-year-old — right on the cusp of Generation X — against a 78-year-old white guy. The 81-year-old Joe Biden was never able to provide that.
Kamala Harris, Who Provides All Good Things
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking Monday night about Kamala Harris: “She is working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.”
No, she’s not. She’s running for president. I’m sure Harris gets briefed on the negotiations regularly, but Bill Burns, the CIA director, has been the Biden administration’s point man on this thorny, stubborn impasse. He’s been doing it since January, with a lot of meetings in May and a lot of meetings in July.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday . . .
Why Did Kamala Harris Meet in Secret with the Mayor of Dearborn?
Neither Harris Nor Walz Is Willing to Be Interviewed by Anyone but Each Other
Tonight, I’m scheduled to appear on CNN between 11 p.m. and midnight . . . but with the way these Democratic politicians talk, who knows what will happen?