CHICAGO — In a political swan song rendered less than a month after he abandoned his campaign for a second term, President Joe Biden on Monday praised his own presidency and urged fellow Democrats to help elect Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him in November.
“Join me in promising your whole heart to this effort — that’s where my heart will be,” Biden said on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention.
In remarks that ended well past midnight on the East Coast, he also highlighted a long list of accomplishments — from major infrastructure and climate change laws to lowering the cost of prescription drugs for seniors and combating the Covid pandemic.
Biden was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation, with chants of “Thank you, Joe” drowning out his attempts to start his speech and thousands of signs reading “We ❤️ Joe” waving when he was introduced. It was a bittersweet moment for a party that sought Monday to exalt Biden after it turned on him just a few weeks ago — and to flip the page from its past to its future.
By the time he began to speak, a sprinkling of Democrats in the crowd at the United Center could be seen blinking back tears or wiping them away.
This was not the convention speech Biden expected to deliver. He had planned to accept a second presidential nomination later this week. But his disastrous June debate against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, ignited Democratic calls for him to leave the race. For more than three weeks, Biden dug in, vowing to fight on. Then, with pressure from his own party continuing to mount, he announced in separate written statements on July 21 that he would surrender the nomination and endorse Harris.
Once he left the campaign and ensured with his endorsement that it would go to Harris, Democrats began to venerate him — a process completed Monday when thousands of delegates embraced their lion in winter with the warmth of their cheers. Relinquishing his own power to enhance the chances of defeating Trump, many Democrats say, was the ultimate act of political altruism.
“I think it’s hard to put into words the selflessness,” Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., said Monday night. Casten said Biden gave his life to public office, reached the pinnacle and stepped aside. “We don’t get a lot of examples of that in American history.”
In Biden’s telling, his presidency has been a smashing success that did nothing less than “save democracy” from Trump. And, he said, “we must save democracy again in 2024.”
Quoting from the song “American Anthem,” written by Gene Scheer and recorded by Norah Jones, he concluded, “America, I gave my best to you.”
There was no doubt his audience in the arena and the broader Democratic electorate agreed with him.
Lorraine Miller, a Texas delegate who was clerk of the U.S. House, said she suffered through intense security screening and long lines to get into the United Center so she could participate in honoring Biden.
“That’s the only reason I’m here,” she said. “The importance of the evening is saying thank you to Joe Biden for passing the baton. He deserves thanks from the party.”
Many of Monday night’s speakers tried, like Biden, to balance paying tribute to his political career with propelling Harris into the stretch run of the campaign, just weeks after she ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket.
“He has been democracy’s champion at home and abroad,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, said in a speech that prompted boisterous ovations. “He brought dignity, decency and competence back to the White House. And he showed what it means to be a true patriot.”
But most of Clinton’s remarks were about Harris and the history of women in politics and government. If Harris wins, she will break a glass ceiling that Clinton was only able to crack as the first woman nominated for the presidency by a major party.
“On the other side of that glass ceiling is Kamala Harris raising her hand and taking the oath of office as the 47th president of the United States,” Clinton said. “When a barrier falls for one of us, it falls, it falls and clears the way for all of us.”
Two members of Biden’s family, first lady Jill Biden and first daughter Ashley Biden, introduced him with warm, private memories of a husband and father who has lived most of his life in the public eye.
“There are moments when I fall in love with him all over again,” Jill Biden said.
Earlier in the day, the president spent some of his downtime at his hotel, preparing for the bookend address — and also catching up with longtime supporters. At his downtown hotel, Biden surprised some of the several dozen supporters who flew on a charter plane from Delaware on Monday to attend his speech.
Biden “worked the room like he was still running for office,” joked the Rev. Christopher Bullock, the pastor of Canaan Baptist Church in New Castle.
At his first convention as a senator, in 1976, Biden was tapped to act as a floor whip and television surrogate for the party’s nominee, Jimmy Carter. “I have to fill up three to four hours of tube time,” Biden told the Wilmington News Journal on the eve of that convention.
Forty-eight years later, with six terms as a senator, two terms as vice president and nearly a full term as president under his belt, Biden found himself again in the role of making the case for someone else to be commander in chief. As painful as the turn of events has been for him, he appeared to have no trouble promoting Harris.
“Selecting Kamala was the very first decision I made when I became our nominee,” he said of his 2020 call to put her on the ballot as his running mate. “It’s the best decision I made.”
