Up until July 21, President Joe Biden was planning to cap this week’s Democratic convention here in the Windy City with a Thursday evening speech that would quiet his critics and forcefully make the case to the American people that he is fit to take on Donald Trump again in 2024.
Instead, this 81-year-old, post-dropout president walked onstage at around 10:25 p.m. Central Monday evening to concede that his second-in-command is better equipped to do the job. It’s “not true,” he told the crowd, that he’s “angry” with those who asked him to step aside. “I love the job. But I love my country more.”
Biden’s onstage delivery Monday evening was fiery and far more energetic than the president America saw on live television during the June 27 in Atlanta, where he looked pale, confused, and struggled to string sentences together. “Folks, let me ask you — are you ready to vote for freedom?” the president said in a more than 45-minute long post-primetime speech that was apparently delayed by poor logistics. “Are you ready to vote for democracy and for America? Are you read to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz?”
In a speech that hearkened back to his democracy-versus chaos reelection pitch at the start of his 2024 reelection bid, he reflected on the gravity of his swearing-in nearly four years ago, two weeks after a mob had stormed the U.S. Capitol. He spoke of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 that he claims inspired his 2020 presidential run, making sure to pepper his remarks with characteristic Biden quips about his battle for the “soul” of this nation. Biden cast the Democratic Party’s electoral fight against Trump in existential terms, a turnaround from his plea to the American people after an attempted assassination on Trump’s life last month to “lower the temperature” in our politics.
“We’re facing an inflection point, one of those rare moments in history when the decisions we make now will determine the fate of our nation and the world for decades to come,” Biden told the crowd. “We’re in a battle for the very soul of America.”
“We saved democracy in 2020, and now we must save it again in 2024,” he added.
After he concluded his remarks, Biden was joined onstage by Harris, who held the president’s hand in a passing-of-the-torch moment. While he sprinkled in references to his confidence in Harris, Biden focused his speech mainly on his own record and accomplishments as president.
As expected, Biden’s entrance into the United Center on opening night was met with rapturous applause and chants of “thank you, Joe!” from delegates, 99 percent of whom had pledged their support for Biden before he dropped out. Also cheering in the audience last night were many of the same congressional Democrats who had spent the three-week-long slog after the debate knifing him in public and in private.
Through the bittersweet noise, Biden found a way to deliver an impassioned speech Monday evening that defended his record, dinged Donald Trump as a “loser,” and gave a late-summer goodbye to the party that lost faith in him.
“Crime will keep going down,” Biden told the crowd, “when we put a prosecutor in the Oval Office instead of a convicted felon.”
It’s fitting that this president who loves nothing more than a weekend at the beach will depart the convention after this evening’s remarks for a family vacation. Biden may still be the sitting president of the United States. But it’s Kamala Harris’s time to shine, and he’s not sticking around to watch the kind of party she throws this week in Chicago — or sit and chat with the Democrats who forced his hand.
Biden was preceded onstage Monday evening by a slew of high-profile Democrats including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y), 2016 Democratic presidential Hillary Clinton, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul. The pre-Biden lineup included his staunchest congressional ally, Senator Chris Coons (D., Del.), his wife of nearly five decades, and his daughter Ashley.
Democrats have spent the past few weeks since his July 21 departure from the race heaping praise on the president for giving his party the gift of a more competitive presidential race – one he’d spent months losing in the polls to Trump.
“He made the right decision for the country. Certainly, he made the right decision for the Democratic Party, and the change that it has brought is kind of breathtaking when you look back at the arc of the last month,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told National Review last week.
Funny how quickly things can change in politics. In mid-July, a sense of euphoria had settled into the Republican firmament after Biden’s catastrophic June 27 debate performance. Then Trump survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally, injecting a somber tone to a race that was already his to lose. Two days after his brush with death, Republicans gathered in Milwaukee to kick off a jubilant GOP convention that left them feeling like nothing could stop their momentum.
Then, Biden dropped out of the race, pulling the rug out from under Trump.
“A lot of my friends out in Milwaukee were cutting the pie before it was cooked,” says longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin. Yet he insists the president had spent months being realistic about the prospect of a new opponent. “When I was traveling with President Trump in Iowa, I was saying, ‘You need to concentrate your attacks on President Biden.’ He says, ‘You know he’s not going to make it to November,’” added McLaughlin. “So, I don’t think this was a surprise to President Trump, because he was predicting it back in January.”
As Harris gains on Trump in the polls, Republicans have spent recent weeks gaming out how to define her to the American people in a post-Biden race. Ask those close to Trump, and they call her a San Francisco Democrat who carries all the baggage of the current administration but is even more “dangerously liberal” than Biden. She’s a “communist,” says Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita. As president of the Senate, “she is the one who broke the tie on the $2.5 trillion worth of spending they unleashed in inflation that every family is now dealing with,” says Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley.
This early on in the new race, it’s not yet clear how often Biden will appear alongside Harris on the campaign trail. “I think that he looks ahead and sees his role in this campaign as Volunteer-in-Chief,” former White House senior adviser Anita Dunn told “CBS Mornings” in an interview. “He’s ready to do whatever he needs to do, whatever she wants him to do to get her elected.”
