They Did Go Back. (For One Night, At Least.)

Biden offers an appropriate swan song.

One night into the DNC and we’re already burning the candle at both ends! Andrew joined Tim, Joe, and Sebastian for a night-one nightcap over on YouTube last night, and there’s lots more where that came from: We’ll be all over video coverage of the rest of the convention as well. Happy Tuesday.

President Joe Biden acknowledges applause during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 19, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

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Biden Passes the Torch

—Andrew Egger

During their convention, Democrats are keeping their eye to the future, in accordance with Kamala Harris’s central campaign theme: We’re not going back. And much of the convention’s first night stayed true to that theme, featuring speeches from a few rising stars: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, Andy Beshear.

But Monday’s programming was also backwards looking, ending with a big spotlight on the past when President Joe Biden closed out the night.

It was a totally unprecedented, unbelievably charged moment: Biden, who just weeks ago was still planning to headline the convention, took the stage in front of a sea of delegates who’d originally pledged their votes to him. The crowd went berserk despite the late hour, applauding for minutes before Biden could even begin as he fruitlessly tried to wave them down.

In his speech, Biden didn’t dwell much on the moment. He framed his decision to step aside with the same platitudes he used to announce that decision in the first place: “I love the job,” he said, “but I love my country more.” The only really interesting new note—“All this talk about how I’m angry at all those people who said I should step down, that’s not true”—was a quick off-prompter aside, raised and moved past.

For the bulk of his speech, Biden remained unsentimental. In fact, much of it felt like a retread of his most recent State of the Union, as he rattled off accomplishments and talked about why he decided to run for president in the first place. Eventually, however, he turned to blessing the Harris/Walz ticket.

“Selecting Kamala was the very first decision I made when I became our nominee, and it was the best decision I made my whole career,” Biden said, praising her experience and her “enormous integrity.”

“She’ll be a president our children can look up to,” he went on. “She’ll be a president respected by world leaders—because she already is. She’ll be a president we can all be proud of. And she will be a historic president who puts her stamp on America’s future.”

And he made a ferocious case against Donald Trump, laying into his erstwhile opponent with all the fire he was so noticeably unable to muster during their June debate.

“This will be the first presidential election since January 6th,” Biden said. “On that day, we almost lost everything about who we are as a country. And that threat—this is not hyperbole—that threat is still very much alive.”

Biden’s never been the world’s most soaring orator, and we doubt many of the delegates, listening to him speak, were pining to swap him back in as their party’s standard-bearer. The emotions in the room were complicated—gratitude as Biden’s decision to step aside mixed with the gloomy knowledge of why that decision was necessary. Cameras caught some attendees in tears.

But the most poignant moment came at the end of the speech, when Biden made the sometimes-risky move of reaching for lyrics to bring him home. The song, “American Anthem,” was one he’d quoted in his inaugural address, and he brought it back out here:

Let me know in my heart when my days are through:
America, America, I gave my best to you.

And then, once more, he looked to the past. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career,” Biden said, “but I gave my best to you.”

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Time to Pivot Forward

—William Kristol

True confession: I didn’t watch every moment of the first night of the Democratic convention. An even more damning additional true confession: I fell asleep before Joe Biden began speaking at 11:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

Terrible, I know. What is political punditry coming to? But, hey, when I volunteered to take this estimable newsletter over from Charlie Sykes, it was Morning Shots I was signing up for, not Late Night Shots. (Though by the time Biden’s speech ended, it was technically morning again, I suppose.)

There was a fair bit of speculation as to whether the lateness of Biden’s speech was a byproduct of disorganization, or was deliberate. Either way, it could have been worse. In 1972, after a weird and protracted vice presidential nominating process that took many hours, George McGovern took the stage on the final night of the convention at 2:48 a.m. This was for his presidential acceptance speech—which is kind of important! (And of course the VP pick, Thomas Eageleton, McGovern’s choice, whose nomination was confirmed after all that unnecessary delay, had to withdraw nineteen days later.)

As Will Rogers, the American entertainer and humorist, said a century ago, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

In any case, three brief comments on last night:

1. The key business was the handoff of the baton from President Biden to presidential nominee Kamala Harris. That seemed to go fine, and it was important that it do so. So the convention accomplished what it had to do on its first night. The party is now Harris’s. Over the next three nights we’ll presumably hear a more sustained case for her as our next president.

2. That wasn’t last night’s focus. Maybe it couldn’t really be, insofar as the evening was to culminate in Joe Biden’s appearance. So many of the speakers spent most of their time making the case against Trump. Which some did quite well.

Still, the case for Harris is the more urgent and important work. The fact is that voters know all about Trump, and some small but key group of swing voters haven’t yet been conclusively persuaded to vote against him. Those voters were resistant to Biden and are uncertain about Harris. President Obama’s speech tonight should serve as a bridge to the case for Harris.

3. Consistent with the overall dramatic arc of the convention, its first night seemed to look backward more than forward. But the pivot to the future needs to begin tonight and then culminate Wednesday and Thursday. The convention theme needs to progress from “Thank you, Joe” to “We’re not going back” to something like “Let’s go forward together.”

And could the convention planners please try to get the big name speakers to the stage around 10:00 p.m. Eastern? We boomers found it very distressing that the great James Taylor got bumped last night because the convention was running so behind. Put him on in prime time tonight, and you’ve got a friend. I dare say many friends.

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Quick Hits

‘I CAN’T IMAGINE WHAT HE’S GOING THROUGH’: Be sure to read Sam Stein and Marc Caputo’s excellent piece on Biden’s moment last night, crammed with color from the convention floor and insights from Biden’s aides. We were struck by a comment they got from Pennsylvania delegate Justin Flemming: “I can’t imagine what he’s going through, to be honest. It’s got to be bittersweet. I mean, he did something that was so rare, to give up power. It was so selfless.”

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A SINGLE-ISSUE VOTER: J. Michael Luttig, the retired appellate judge who became one of the most famous conservative legal critics of Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election, endorsed Kamala Harris in a statement yesterday. “In voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her public policy views are vastly different from my own,” Luttig wrote, “but I am indifferent in this election as to her policy views on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all Americans should be.”

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MEANWHILE IN LA LA LAND: A weird one for you that we missed this weekend: a Trump Truth Social post claiming (falsely!) that Taylor Swift had endorsed his presidential bid. “I accept!” Trump wrote in a post accompanied by AI-generated images of young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts and Swift herself dressed as Uncle Sam with the caption “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.” (Reminder: It was only a week ago that Trump, having somehow imbibed a conspiracy theory that a picture of a Harris rally crowd was faked, argued that Harris “should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”)

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