Democratic convention: Did Biden make his case?
“The kindness was the point,” said Zack Beauchamp in Vox.com. Last week’s “virtual” Democratic convention, ingeniously redesigned for the Covid era, focused on the character and failures of President Trump, contrasted with the “fundamental decency” of the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. When the White House is occupied by “a cruel man whose indifference to ordinary Americans has killed tens of thousands” in the pandemic, who has vengefully taken migrant toddlers away from their parents, and who has deliberately stoked racial and cultural animus and divided the country, the prospect of a president who might actually care about people, and do what it takes to protect them, offered “an off-ramp.” Speaker after speaker, most memorably a 13-year-old boy Biden befriended and counseled on overcoming his stutter, highlighted the nominee’s deep reserves of empathy, acquired over a lifetime of personal tragedy. Biden himself had to close the sale, said Frank Bruni in NYTimes .com, and “he absolutely did.” In a flawless, forceful 24-minute live address, the 77-year-old candidate not only disproved Trump’s disgraceful accusations of senility but movingly pitched himself as an optimistic, resilient public servant uniquely qualified to, in Biden’s words, “overcome this season of darkness in America.”
It may be smart for Biden to appeal to voters’ “nostalgia for the recent past,” said Sarah Jones in NYMag.com. Even some Republicans are pining for the relative normalcy of the pre-Trump era—hence the convention speeches from Republican neverTrumpers John Kasich and Colin Powell. But will Biden’s promise of a return to normal and to bipartisan compromise fire up the Democrats’ progressive base? The young activists who represent the party’s future want “revolution,” not a return to the status quo of unchecked climate change, wealth inequality, and racial injustice. Clearly, Democrats were worried that Trump’s “smears about ‘left-wing’ mobs” might frighten moderate voters, said Amy Davidson Sorkin in NewYorker.com. But they overcompensated, and treated progressive voters almost as an afterthought. This was a “four-day exercise in sleight of hand,” said Matthew Continetti in The Washington Free Beacon. We heard time and again how Biden, with his undeniable decency and empathy, will heal America’s wounds and “Build Back Better,” as the title of Biden’s economic plan puts it. But the speakers were “awfully vague” about what this would mean in practice for the blue-collar voters that Democrats are supposedly trying to recapture. The increasingly desperate working families of America want “concrete plans to improve their lives,” said Ronald Brownstein in TheAtlantic.com. Biden has released a detailed job-creation agenda, but at the convention provided only uplifting rhetoric about brighter tomorrows. As they did in 2016, Democrats may come to regret not directing “a more targeted economic appeal at the voters Trump is relying on most.”
Voters now have seen plenty of Trump, said Isaac Schorr in NationalReview.com. He’s chosen to be “the president of Charlottesville and QAnon,” the mean-spirited man who again last week attacked the late Republican war hero John McCain as “a lousy candidate.” When the only alternative is Trump, “Biden’s kind and reasonable affect should be more than enough to deliver him the White House.” Biden may be a throwback to a backslapping era when Democrats and Republicans made deals in hideaway Senate offices, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post.
But “civility, bipartisanship, basic decency, and public service are not mere nostalgia.” These virtues are “the moral architecture of democracy,” and they truly will be on the ballot this November.