WILMINGTON, Delaware—A four-day convention held in the midst of a global pandemic culminated on Thursday night with a speech that somehow managed to raise the stakes even higher.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s address was more forceful than emotional—a sweeping condemnation of President Donald Trump that framed the election in Manichean terms of light versus darkness and hope versus despair.
“It was in our darkest moments that we made the greatest progress,” Biden said. “There’s never been anything we haven’t been able to accomplish when we’ve done it together… This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.”
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The nation, Biden said, found itself in a “season of darkness,” confronting four historic crises, the COVID pandemic being merely one. Wearing a dark suit, white shirt and pocket square, and blue tie, he stood in front of rows of American flags on a large, otherwise empty stage. The room was almost entirely dark—a symbolic backdrop for the somber message he was there to deliver.
“We can choose a path to becoming angry or less hopeful, more divided, a path of shadow and suspicion, or we can choose a different path together, take this chance to heal, to reform, to unite a path of hope and light,” Biden said. “This is a life-changing election.”
The address culminated a final night of the Democratic National Convention that was an amalgam: part public-service announcement, part political rally, an instruction manual for the next 74 days, and a warning for what is to come if the status quo of the Trump administration is allowed to stand.
While much of the lead up had a staccato, whipsaw feel—bouncing between comedic bits from host Julia Louis-Dreyfus and tear-jerking montages (particularly the address of a 13-year-old New Hampshire boy who explained how Biden had helped him overcome his stutter)—the undertone of Biden’s speech itself was decidedly simple. He was playing for keeps.
Ahead in the polls, and with a formula that has worked for him electorally, the former vice president was not planning to deviate from the script. It wasn’t particularly heavy on substance—though, as Mario Cuomo famously said, politicians campaign in poetry—and the promises he made were to pursue some amorphous post-partisan governance. He tied himself, once more, to President Barack Obama, even thanking the former president for his service, and emphasized his empathy by directly addressing the families who had lost loved ones to COVID.
“Your loved one may have left this Earth, but they’ll never leave your heart,” Biden said, adding that “the best way through pain and loss and grief is to find purpose.”
For Biden, the speech itself was a culmination of a decades-long career in politics that had seen him play a myriad of roles: from young upstart, to victim of personal tragedy, to casualty of scandal, to long-serving senator, to washed-up presidential candidate, to vice president. He had run for the White House twice before, never winning a single delegate. On Thursday, he took on the burden of being the Democratic nominee in an election that his predecessor, Obama, framed as a contest for democracy itself.
But unlike Obama and his penchant for soaring rhetoric, Biden acknowledged his goals from the first day of his administration would be managing the disease the nation faces today, one that will likely be worse in the immediate future.
“We’ll develop and deploy rapid test results available immediately. We’ll make the medical supplies and protective equipment that our country needs. We’ll make them here in America, so we will never again be at the mercy of China or other foreign countries in order to protect our own people,” Biden said.
“We’ll put politics aside, we’ll take the muzzle off our experts,” he added. “So the public gets the information they need and deserve. Honest, unvarnished truth.”
“Our current president has failed in his most basic duty to this nation. He failed to protect us,” Biden continued. “He failed to protect America. And, my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable.”
For months, it didn’t seem as if Biden would be in this place. His run for the nomination was memorable mainly for how poorly it was going. His defeats in the first few nominating contests raised the specter of another electoral humiliation. And then, the tides turned, with the party rallying around his calls for national restoration and the notion that a seasoned statesmen was what they needed to run against Trump.
Those were the themes of the convention too. Over the course of four days, the program was filled with Republicans—famous and not—explaining why they would be switching sides in November. It may have infuriated progressives. But campaign aides said it was a reflection of who Biden was and is. They wanted to give people a “permission structure” to back his campaign, as one aide put it.
When Biden finally spoke, two factors worked in his favor.
The first was the setting. A known riffer, prone to get sidetracked by the crowd’s reaction or applause, he had no audience to address on Thursday. Instead, he read from a teleprompter positioned in the distance and delivered a speech succinctly and firmly—the camera notably zooming in ever so slightly on him to dramatize the weight of the remarks. The room was otherwise silent.
The second was the expectations. For weeks, the Trump campaign had painted Biden as senile, unable to finish sentences, let alone coherently address the nation.
With a bar set indescribably low, Biden easily cleared it. He stressed the unprecedented nature of the dire times. But his message was also strikingly similar to the themes he had spoken of his entire career: the dignity of having a job, the inherent decency of the American people, the importance of balancing American might with American mercy, and the ways in which personal tragedy can serve as a larger purpose.
“I know how it feels to lose someone you love—I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest, that you feel your whole being is sucked into it,” Biden said, referring to the deaths of his wife and infant daughter only weeks after he was first elected to the U.S. Senate, as well as the more recent death of his elder son, Beau, from brain cancer. “But I’ve found the best way through pain and loss and grief is to find purpose... and we have a great purpose as a nation: To open the doors of opportunity to all Americans, to save our democracy, to be a light to the world once again.”
His speech completed, Biden was joined on stage by his wife, Jill, running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and her husband, Doug Emhoff. After waving to the panels of fans zoomed in for the occasion, the four Democrats in masks darted outside quickly into the temperate night to watch fireworks explode above the stage, clapping along with the bangs, as music blared across the plaza.
“Welcome to Wilmington,” Biden said, before exiting with his team.
