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DNC: Biden praises VP Kamala Harris’ ‘enormous integrity’
President Joe Biden’s high praise of Vice President Kamala Harris tied a bow on the end of the Democratic National Convention’s first night.
For several years, a man named Alfred, who once lived in North Jersey but has since retired to Florida, has regularly emailed me with his thoughts about President Joe Biden.
Alfred does not offer any original insight into Biden. His dozens of emails invariably contain this message: “Your dementia idiot president.”
By the way, in case you wondered, one of Alfred’s best-known accomplishments in life — dutifully documented in media postings — is his collection of license plates. Draw your own conclusions.
I thought of Alfred’s unfair cascade of derision as I watched Biden’s nearly hourlong farewell across the arc of midnight on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.
In that speech, Biden was not an idiot. And he certainly was not suffering from dementia. But Biden is battling the most dismal and debilitating of all political ailments. Simply put: Too many people underestimate him.
So in this column, I’m making an exception. It’s time to give Biden some credit.
Biden’s humanity is his greatest strength
I realize it’s fashionable to poke fun at politicians. They rank somewhere at the bottom — with journalists — as America’s least admirable people. And in this age of social media, when even a license plate collector can fancy himself as a judge of a president’s mental health, Biden has become an easy target.
For starters, he’s been a public persona for more than half a century — plenty of time to make mistakes. Certainly, I don’t count myself as a lifelong fan of Biden’s. His history of verbal gaffes is legendary. And it’s hard to forget his mistake-riddled handling of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in 1991 to confirm the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
But as former New Jersey state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, a Democrat from Teaneck, once told me, Biden has an unabashed and genuine capacity to understand the pain that people carry in their lives. That is no small thing.
For years, Weinberg, who retired from public life in 2022 at the ripe young age of 86, kept a photograph of her and Biden in her legislative office. The photo tells us much about Biden. He is seated with Weinberg on the concrete steps of a building. He is holding her hand and discussing the pain that comes with the death of a loved ones. Weinberg says both were crying.
Imagine Donald Trump showing this sort of emotion. (Nah, don’t bother.)
Biden, now 81, who will leave the presidency in January at the ripe young age of 82, wore his heart on his sleeve — no easy task in these days when even mayors of the tiniest of towns are surrounded by public relations flaks who pretty much tell them when to comb their hair and sneeze.
What’s striking about Biden is that he never ran from his humanity — good and bad. As he said in his speech Monday night before Democratic convention delegates in Chicago, he has made his share of mistakes. But haven’t we all? If you haven’t tripped, you’ve never tried to run.
Biden’s hard choice to say goodbye
And so it is with Biden. For a half-century, he has been the most public of people, running and occasionally tripping but always getting up to run some more.
We watched in 1972 when, just before turning 30 and entering the U.S. Senate, he had to bury his wife and infant daughter who had been killed in an auto accident on a Delaware highway as the family was about to celebrate Christmas. In 2015, we watched again as Biden, wrestling with dreams to run for president, buried his son, Beau, who died of brain cancer. And on the day of his address before the Democratic National Convention, House Republicans issued a nearly 200-page report on evidence they say they compiled during an impeachment investigation that did not merit any charges. (Nice try, Republicans. Why not take some time now and do something — such as fix immigration?)
Now, after finally winning the White House but facing the wrenching and humiliating reality that his political career is ending because he is not a young man anymore, Biden walked before the intense spotlight of the nation — actually, the world — to say goodbye.
It’s too bad that Democrats were so caught up with their self-worship on the first night of the convention that they allowed speaker after speaker to take the stage ahead of Biden, delaying his remarks until the point when most of America was either asleep or heading toward a pillow. Yes, many speakers praised Biden. But the long lineup delayed Biden’s own valedictory until nearly midnight. (Memo to Dems: Hire a stage manager with a watch.)
Not surprisingly, Biden offered a long litany of his own accomplishments. And why not? He is, after all, a politician who wants to burnish his legacy. And let’s be honest here: He has a presidential legacy worth bragging about, starting with his bipartisan leadership on national infrastructure legislation whose impact will endure for decades.
Biden also dutifully offered his support and praise for the new Democratic presidential nominee who replaced him, Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Tim Walz. But consider how Biden described his place in this new and quickly assembled political order.
Biden said, “Kamala and Tim understand that this nation must continue to be a place of possibilities.” No surprise there. But then, Biden turned the rhetorical tables and promised to “be the best volunteer the Harris and Walz camp have ever seen.”
Does this mean that Biden will be manning a phone bank somewhere on election night? Probably not. But the contrast is surely startling — from president to just another cog in the Democratic election machine.
More Mike Kelly: Kamala Harris has the joy, but has to show us where she stands at the convention
‘We just have to remember who we are’
Biden did not seem to mind. Or if he did, he buried that feeling. Indeed, his most important message came at the end of his speech.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you,” he said. Then he added an all-too-human postscript: “I really have been too young to be in the Senate because I wasn’t 30 yet, and now I’m too old to stay as president. But I hope you know how grateful I am to all of you.”
As a newspaper columnist, I’ve learned that most people yearn for a graceful ending to whatever they are doing. Whether it’s a baseball coach, a college professor, a police officer, a member of the clergy or a cashier in a retail store at the mall, most people don’t want the endings to their careers to be framed by chaos, confusion and bitterness. They hope for grace — and, if they’re lucky, a happy ending.
So as the clock spilled into the small hours of Tuesday, Biden showed what it takes to leave the stage gracefully in these intensely unhappy political times when there seems so little grace.
“Folks,” he said, “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.”
Those may turn out to be Joe Biden’s most important words.
Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network, as well as the author of three critically acclaimed nonfiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. A paperback edition with an updated epilogue of his 1995 book, “Color Lines,” which chronicles race relations in a small New Jersey town after a police shooting and was called “American journalism at its best” by the Washington Post, was released last year. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in the Northeast, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: [email protected]
Source link : https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnists/mike-kelly/2024/08/21/joe-biden-legacy-speech-american-possibility-dnc/74878133007/
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Publish date : 2024-08-20 21:21:00
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