Biden passes the torch
What I saw on Day 1 of the DNC.
The Democratic Party’s past yielded to its future Monday at the first night of the party convention in Chicago.
Most notably, at the end of the night — past 11 p.m. Eastern Time — President Joe Biden took the stage to deliver his last major political speech after five decades on the national stage.
“I made a lot of mistakes in my career,” Biden said, addressing the American people, “but I gave my best to you.”
Biden’s emotional speech — he could be seen wiping away tears as the roaring convention center greeted him onto the stage — was punctuated several times by chants of “thank you, Joe.” Almost every time, Biden would take in the chants for several beats before responding with a message of his own: “Thank you, Kamala.”
It was the president’s way of deflecting attention onto his vice president and potential successor, who is now running the campaign against Donald Trump that Biden himself very much wanted to run. “I promise I'll be the best volunteer Harris and Walz have ever seen,” he said, referring to the VP and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Another Democratic party elder, 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, also addressed the gathering on Monday. “The future is here,” Clinton declared.
In a messaging decision carrying more than a touch of symbolism, both Biden and Clinton emphasized the themes that marked their two presidential campaigns — themes that Harris has largely leaned away from, despite her close ties to the two figures. (In addition to Biden elevating Harris to the national stage, Clinton has become a quietly influential adviser to the vice president.)
For Clinton, that meant stressing the historic import of Harris’ ascension as the second female presidential nominee in U.S. history (after Clinton herself). “Together, we put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling,” she said. “And tonight, [we are] so close to breaking through once and for all.”
“Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come,” Clinton added.
In the president’s case, the speech served as something of a window into what a Biden 2024 campaign would have looked like, emphasizing the threat to democracy posed by Trump. “With a grateful heart, I stand before you now on this August night to report that democracy has prevailed,” Biden said. “Democracy has delivered, and now democracy must be preserved.”
Those are messages you are unlikely to hear as much in the subsequent nights of the Democratic convention: Harris has largely opted not to center her identity and the historic nature of her candidacy, and she is more likely to call Trump “weird” on the campaign trail than to paint him as as threat, a strategic break with the two previous nominees. Monday was Biden and Clinton’s chance to sound their familiar themes; moving forward, the convention — and the party — are likely to revolve more around Harris’ preferred language of crusading for “freedoms.”
At times, Monday night felt like the obligatory exercise the party had to go through to get to that more targeted messaging, the necessary farewell to the aging president that allows the more Harris-focused festivities to kick off. Ultimately, Monday may end up lingering like a stand-alone night, transitional programming before the heart of the convention can begin
On the sidelines of the convention, I talked to many top Democrats who spoke quite affectionately about Biden — before almost universally pivoting to acknowledge that his withdrawal had created an energy not seen in the party for years. I began to think of these as “but conversations,” as in “I love Joe Biden, but [insert statement indicating relief that he is not the nominee here].”
“I don’t think there’s a major difference in the themes and the policies that you’re going to be hearing [in the coming nights of the convention],” Delaware State Sen. Sarah McBride, who is poised to be elected as the first transgender member of Congress in November, told me, “but I think it’s obviously going to be different names and different faces, and there’s obviously a new kind of energy right now.”
“We’re all so grateful to Joe Biden, of course, for everything that he’s done for this country. He has passed incredibly meaningful domestic policy that has changed the trajectory of this country,” Greta Neubauer, the top Democrat in the Wisconsin State Assembly, said. “And it’s also really exciting to have someone on the ticket who is focused on the future, and who has a vision for where we’re going, and is able to just energize new parts of the Democratic coalition as well.”
OK, that one was an “and,” but you get the idea, and the unspoken subtext: that Biden, as much as they may love him, would not have been able to inspire the same energy or mount the same campaign. (Left unspoken, on stage and off, was also the circumstances in which Biden exited the ticket. As he spoke, it almost sounded as though he was a two-term president stepping off the stage by constitutional force, which, of course, was not the case.)
The most vivid proof of the energy shift came earlier on Monday, when Harris strode into the stage, surprising the delegate, and was met with uproarious applause:
No one I talked to was happier than Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), who was the first congressional Democrat to call for Biden to step down, way back in August 2023 — long before it was en vogue. (In between, he also mounted a quixotic primary challenge against Biden, which failed miserably but which he now credits with playing “a tiny party” in the president’s eventual withdrawal.)
“I’m feeling like a kid in a candy store,” Phillips said. “I was told that I couldn’t have any candy, and now I walk into this place almost a year-and-a-half after starting my mission, and it is one of the most magnificent, joyful, optimistic feelings I’ve head in a long, long time.”
Calling himself, somewhat immodestly, the “Paul Revere” to Biden’s “George Washington,” Phillips said the significant enthusiasm at the convention would have been replaced with a “funereal” feeling had it been a Biden, and not Harris, coronation.
“It would have been a lot of effort to generate fake energy, and any human being can usually feel that fakeness,” he told me. “And this is all real.”
More notes from DNC Day 1
Other notable speakers: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) gave a particularly forceful speech, notably punctuated by chants of “AOC” — a visible sign of the party establishment embracing her after relegating her to a 90-second speaking slot just four years ago. Freshman Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) also impressed many I spoke to in the room — and more than one delegate referred to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-GA) rousing closing, when he spoke about children from inner-city Atlanta to Appalachia, from Israel to Gaza:
Funniest run-in: At one point, I was walking around McCormick Place — a nearby convention center being used for many of the off-site Democratic events — when I spotted Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) preparing for a Fox News interview. “I don’t have anything positive to say about Chicago!” he said frantically, predicting that the host would ask him about the city’s crime rate. I then watched as his communications director urgently thumbed through Google, before reporting back that the homicide rate fell in both 2021 and 2022, satisfying the senator.
Celebrity encounter: You never know who you might see on the convention floor. One person I spotted on Monday: Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy grandson, Vogue correspondent, and viral TikTok sensation, hanging around the New York delegation. Schlossberg declined to be interviewed.
Logistical nightmares: DNC Day 1 was marked by logistical snarls, including lines that wrapped around the convention center and prevented many delegates and reporters from arriving for hours. Luckily, I arrived fairly early and avoided the worst of the delays, but was still stuck in some lengthy lines myself, as well as finding myself lost at one point in the maze of a security perimeter set up around McCormick Place. (And don’t even get me started on the WiFi, which crashed every minute or so throughout the night!)
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Thanks also to those of you joined the live chat and the live video last night. It was really fun getting to talk to you all after Biden left the stage!
Here’s the chat if you want to join in today. I’ll be hoping in throughout the day, including during former President Barack Obama’s speech, which will cap off tonight’s programming.
Keep on sending in questions you want answered or stories you want me to run down while I’m here in Chicago. I’m here for you, so let me know what inside glimpses or parts of the party coalition you want to see in my coverage.
Talk to you soon!
Isn't it wonderful that we have Gabe at the convention!!!
DNC joy-filled with positivity, care, compassion and ideals that our country was built upon.