Source: Kent Nishimura / Getty
In a speech that will likely be defined by many American historians as powerful, brave and self-sacrificing, I’d like to offer the remix. President Joseph R. Biden actually seemed more Dickensian, more a tale of two temperaments: his was the most strained of voices, his was the most defiant of voices; it was the most generous of tones and the most parsimonious of tones. It was a speech of gratitude and grace; it was a speech of dismissal and distaste.
And that distaste came jump-scare fast and brilliantly following a graceful set-up line:
I’m surrounded by portraits of extraordinary American presidents…. George Washington showed us presidents are not kings. Abraham Lincoln implored us to reject malice. Franklin Roosevelt inspired us to reject fear….I revere this office, but I love my country more.
(Read: Dictators like Trump only love the office. True patriots like me love the nation and the people of the nation. Love the clap back that doesn’t need a childish name attached to it, just some basic statements already in evidence.)
After, he transitioned to the words that it seemed should have guided the rest of his remarks:
I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. It’s the best way to unite our nation. I know there was a time and a place for long years of experience in public life. There’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.
It’s This One Man’s World
Source: The White House / The White House
But instead of pivoting to Kamala Harris immediately like it appeared to be the intention of the set up (and like almost every single other Democrat did around 2:00pm (Eastern) on Sunday), Mr. Biden spent the majority of the speech defiantly, perhaps even defensively, running down his record of accomplishments. I kept waiting for him to say their record of accomplishments.
Those words never came and it was cringey to watch, squirmy even, especially after that torch passing comment. It hung like a heavy, ugly, patchy vinyl tarp over the rest of his speech, no more so than when he reminded (Black) Americans that he’d appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, undercutting the undeniable power of that act. Justice Brown Jackson felt more like a talking point than the point itself.
By the time Biden did mention Vice President Harris, he spoke of her in a way that we’ve rarely before heard. He said, :
I would like to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she is tough, she is capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and a leader for our country.
It is difficult to recall the president ever speaking as generously about Kamala Harris. Over the course of his tenure, despite all the people and money she brought to the previously unremarkable Biden campaign in 2020, the Vice President has seemed mostly and deliberately hidden away—except from excoriation across the media spectrum. From self-titled liberal or left-wing presses to individual white-wing wing nuts on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Just about all of them were filtered through a racist and sexist lens. And almost none of those seemed to ever get any White House pushback.
Which is why leaving her out of his rundown of accomplishments felt kind of mean-girlish. And his exclusion of Obama entirely, a man without whom he likely ever would have achieved his White House dreams, was just immature and petty.
The Other Side Of The Mountain
Biden’s grudge against 44 goes back to Obama’s support of Clinton over him in the 2016 contest. That animus was only heightened during the current election cycle in which Mr. Biden once more felt unsupported by Mr. Obama.
While maybe, and only maybe, those sentiments had some merit in 2016, surely in 2024, they were wildly misplaced. Watching the once ready-to-scrap Senator originally from Scranton has at times felt like elder abuse. It’s been painful to watch. The daughter and the mother in me wanted to scream, Leave him alone! Have you no shame?
Done differently, this summer of his discontent could have been remembered in perpetuity less as Biden’s LBJ moment and more as the moment he mirrored Mandela in ’99. And who knows? Maybe someone will pretend it is the latter. Historians have been weirdly sort of accepted as liars. All the revisions. All the official biographies of the same darn person.
Regardless, it will surely go down in history as the moment we collectively, finally, exhaled because at last a glimmer of hope that we won’t tumble completely down the other side of this American-slash-Handmaid-slash-Travyon-slash-Sonya brutal Mountain we’ve seen courtesy of Trump and MAGAs and January 6, 2021 and so much more than all of those three.
Because no matter what any of us might feel personally about Biden––from Obama’s wingman to the president who first put a Black woman on the Supreme Court and onto the presidential ticket and went full frontal for student debt relief; or else to his 1980s attack on Anita Hill, and his 1990s commitment to mass incarceration to championing of scientifically unsound and horribly damaging drug laws, to his support of Israel’s genocide—it’s probably wisest to remember that no matter what we feel about him, there’s something much, much worse and its trying to come at anything human and decent and even remotely democratic, guns blazing.
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