Had President Joe Biden stayed at the top of the presidential ticket this year, the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago would have looked and felt very different from the one that’s planned. Instead of the Democratic family reluctantly giving the car keys to 81-year-old Biden one last time, on Monday night, they’ll give him a round of applause you’ll probably hear all the way in Georgia.
“I can tell you this, when Joe Biden steps on that stage on Monday night here in Chicago, it is going to blow the roof off of the United Center,” Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison told me and my colleagues on the “Politically Georgia” radio show this week. “He is going to get flowers that he so aptly deserves.”
The “flowers,” as the kids say, are going to be for more than just stepping aside to let Vice President Kamala Harris take a run at the job he wanted to keep doing himself for four more years, although that will be a big part of it.
By withdrawing from the presidential contest against former President Donald Trump, Biden has fundamentally flipped the race on its head. It went from old vs. old, between Trump and Biden, to old vs. new, with Harris as the new face atop the Democratic Party.
In the space of three weeks, the November election has gone from what looked like a Republican rout after the Atlanta debate to a genuine toss-up. In giving up his chance for reelection, Biden gave his fellow Democrats, including Harris, a chance to win. You’ll hear all of that relief and gratitude and excitement when Biden walks onto the stage Monday night.
You’ll also hear appreciation for the role Biden has played in advancing Black leaders, even as, let’s face it, an old white guy. He was not only the loyal deputy to America’s first Black president in Barack Obama, he also lived up to his promise to choose a Black woman as his vice president with then-U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris. In office, he appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court and paved the way for Harris to try to be the first female president in American history.
As the head of the Democratic Party, he moved to push aside the traditional early states of Iowa and New Hampshire as the first to vote in the presidential primary for more diverse states in the South, including Georgia, which our Republican leadership declined.
On Monday night, Democrats won’t just be thanking Biden for what he did in office, but also for who he has been over more than five decades in public life. The Chicago convention will be his 13th in 52 years during a career that has been as defined as much by tragedy and failure as it has by success.
At the 1976 convention in New York, he was one of 14 floor managers for Jimmy Carter after he became the first senator to endorse Carter for president earlier that year.
He skipped only the 1988 convention in the year he lost his first race for president. He missed the Atlanta event to recover from brain surgery following two aneurysms.
In 2004, Biden spoke on the final night of fellow U.S. Sen. John Kerry’s nominating convention in Boston, only for Kerry to lose that November. In 2008, after losing his own campaign for the White House for a second time, Biden accepted the nomination to be Obama’s vice president instead.
Biden accepted the 2020 Democratic nomination for president in Wilmington, Delaware, with cars honking in a parking lot instead of crowds cheering his name, since COVID-19 forced organizers to abandon their plans for a traditional convention. He’d always hoped his son Beau would be the one to run and win, he said later. Since Beau had died five years earlier, he ran instead.
Biden said that year that he planned to be a “transitional president” for the nation, but he probably didn’t know how right he was. He didn’t know at the time that he would become president himself. Nor that four years later, his own age and infirmities would become obvious, seemingly to everyone but him. And he certainly had no idea that he would get pushed to withdraw from the 2024 nomination he’d already won by the same people who had been some of his closest friends in the party for decades, including former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
It must have felt like a terrible betrayal. But by listening to Pelosi and others telling him he had to go, it will be the thing Biden is remembered for the most, especially by Democrats.
Harrison compared Biden’s decision with Trump’s actions after the 2020 elections, including Jan. 6.
“Donald Trump so desperately wanted to hold on to power that he was willing to risk the life of his vice president. We saw that,” he said. “Joe Biden so believed in democracy … that he selflessly gave that power to his able vice president to take it. That is a contrast between selfishness and selflessness. And that’s why Joe Biden will go down as one of the best presidents we’ve ever had.”
Biden attended his very first Democratic convention in 1972. He was a 29-year-old first-time candidate for the Senate when delegates met in Miami Beach, Florida, and battled each other over the Democratic platform and the choice of vice president. Divided and disorganized, Democrats lost later that year in a landslide to President Richard Nixon.
By stepping aside, Biden is hoping that his now-united party can avoid the same fate. His party believes it can. And that’s what you’ll hear in Chicago at what may be Biden’s last spotlight on the convention stage.
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