If Joe Biden wins November’s US election, he will be the oldest president in American history, surpassing Donald Trump’s record. At 78 on inauguration day, he will be older than Ronald Reagan on the day he left office.
The second night of the virtual Democratic national convention on Tuesday made no attempt to hide this fact. Even as the Trump reelection campaign put out a vicious advert insisting that Biden’s mind has gone downhill in recent years, there were reminders of his longevity at every turn – and of some things in the past that Democrats would rather forget.
So along with inspiring stories and improved production values, this was a night of nagging contradictions and hypocrisies – just the things that Trump exploited to claim that only a maverick outsider could blow up the Washington establishment.
Here was one-term president Jimmy Carter, who ended the 1970s besieged by crisis and deep disapproval. Now 95, he gave his blessing via audio message, pointing out: “When I ran for president in 1976, Joe Biden was my first and most effective supporter in the Senate.” Many of the grassroots party members who spoke on Tuesday night had not been born in 1976.
Here was former president Bill Clinton, who turns 74 on Wednesday, making him three years younger than the nominee. This was his 11th straight convention speech but the first since the #MeToo movement cast his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and various harassment or assault allegations, in a fresh light. Clinton is also now regarded as an old school centrist in a party tacking left.
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Here among the ghosts of conventions past was John Kerry who, like Biden now, was challenging an unpopular incumbent in the form of George W Bush in 2004, only to fall short. “When this president goes overseas, it isn’t a goodwill mission, it’s a blooper reel,” he said. “He breaks up with our allies and writes love letters to dictators. America deserves a president who is looked up to, not laughed at.”
And here was Colin Powell, who was Bush’s secretary of state during the illegal invasion of Iraq. Film maker Michael Moore, who was a Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate, tweeted sardonically: “Can’t wait for Colin Powell’s ‘irrefutable and undeniable’ case for a Biden presidency tonight! Nothing unites our country more than all of us fondly reminiscing about the US bombing, invading, terrorizing, & pillaging Iraq on the basis of lies this man told to the United Nations.”
All of the above got more speaking time than Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the progressive star, who had only a minute to formally nominate Biden’s former rival, Sanders, ahead of the preordained roll call that declared Biden the nominee. She used it to praise “a movement that realised the unsustainable brutality of an economy that rewards explosive inequalities of wealth for the few at the expense of long-term stability for the many”. It was as if she was the guest at the wedding that everyone prays won’t spill the big family secret.
Amid all the flexing of muscles by the party establishment, however, there were some uplifting moments as again the digital convention format allowed people at the grassroots to shine. The keynote address featured not one but 17 of the party’s best and brightest from all over the country, including state representatives, mayors, a Navajo Nation president and members of Congress.
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There was a particularly moving segment with progressive activist Ady Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. “Even during this terrible crisis, Donald Trump and Republican politicians are trying to take away millions of people’s health insurance,” he said.
And the surprise of the night was the roll call to formally nominate the candidate, which in normal times unfolds on the floor of the arena with delegates wearing wacky hats and soon becomes rather tedious. In the Covid-19 era, however, viewers were transported to every US state and territory with an array of diverse delegates, accents, languages and backdrops, and quirks such as a chef holding a tantalising plate of calamari in Rhode Island. For a moment, America could look itself in the mirror, and it liked what it saw.
The roll call culminated with a grinning Biden – nominated at last, after failed attempts in 1988 and 2008 – in what looked like a school library accompanied by balloons and streamers, a nod to the pageantry of old.
At the end, there was another convention staple, a biographical film about the candidate’s spouse. There was the story of the tragic loss of his first wife and baby daughter and his courtship of the woman who would become second lady, Jill (“I wasn’t big on the whole date scene thing but when I met Jill, I fell in love with her when I saw her.”)
Standing in an empty classroom at a school where she once taught, a powerful symbol of Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus, Jill Biden asked: “How do you make a broken family whole? The same way you make a nation whole. With love and understanding – and with small acts of kindness. With bravery. With unwavering faith.”
It made a convincing case that the multiple tragedies in Biden’s own life have granted him empathy and humility suited to a moment when America itself is grieving losses in its public health, economy and moral leadership. It also ensured the evening closed on a high note, not in feuds over Clinton and #MeToo, Powell and Iraq or Ocasio-Cortez being woefully underused.
That, of course, did not stop Fox News running the chyron “Dems trot out political failures to promote Biden”. Expect to hear a lot more of that when Republicans convene next week.