Biden selected by Democrats to take on Trump in US election
● 77-year-old is backed as candidate with Harris set to be his running mate
Democrats have formally nominated Joe Biden as their candidate in the US presidential election.
Party elders, a new generation of politicians and voters in every state joined in a pandemic-cramped virtual convention to send him into the general election campaign to oust President Donald Trump.
For someone who has spent more than three decades eyeing the presidency, the moment on Tuesday night was the realisation of a longsought goal.
But it came in a way that the 77-year-old could not have imagined just months ago as the coronavirus prompted profound change across the country and in his presidential campaign.
Instead of a Milwaukee convention hall as planned, the roll call of convention delegates played out in a combination of live and recorded video feeds from American landmarks packed with meaning: Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, the headwaters of the Mississippi River, a Puerto Rican community still recovering from a hurricane and Washington’s Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Mr Biden celebrated his new status as the Democratic nominee with his wife and grandchildren in a Delaware school library.
The convention’s most highly anticipated moments will unfold on the next two nights. Kamala Harris was set to accept her nomination as Mr Biden’s running mate yesterday, becoming the first black woman to join a major party ticket.
Former president Barack Obama will also speak as part of his stepped-up efforts to defeat his successor.
Mr Biden will deliver his acceptance speech tonight in a mostly empty convention hall near his Delaware home.
He used the second night of the four-day convention to feature a mix of party elders, Republican as well as Democratic, to make the case that he has the experience and energy to repair the chaos that Mr Trump has created at home and abroad.
Former president Bill Clinton and ex-secretary of state John Kerry, plus former Republican secretary of state Colin Powell, were among the heavy hitters on a schedule that emphasised a simple theme: leadership matters.
Another former president, Jimmy Carter, now 95 years old, also made a brief appearance.
Some of them delivered attacks against Mr Trump that were unusually personal, all in an effort to establish Mr Biden as the competent, moral counter to the Republican president.
“Donald Trump inherited a growing economy and a more peaceful world,” Mr Kerry said. “And like everything else he inherited, he bankrupted it. When this president goes overseas, it isn’t a goodwill mission. It’s a blooper reel.”
Mr Clinton said Mr Trump’s Oval Office is a place of chaos, not a command centre.
“If you want a president who defines the job as spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media, he’s your man,” Mr Clinton said.
For his part, Mr Trump spent Tuesday courting battleground voters in an effort to distract from Mr Biden’s convention.
Appearing in Arizona near the Mexican border during the day, the Republican president claimed a Biden presidency would trigger “a flood of illegal immigration like the world has never seen”.
Such divisive rhetoric has become a hallmark of Mr Trump’s presidency, which has inflamed tensions at home and alienated allies around the world.
Mr Biden has the support of a sprawling political coalition, demonstrated again during Tuesday’s convention, although history is not on his side. Only one incumbent president has been defeated since 1992 – George HW Bush.