policy
CHICAGO (AP) — President Joe Biden delivered his farewell address to Democrats on Monday night, his decision to withdraw his reelection effort unleashing latest energy in his party after Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the highest of the list of candidates.
After 52 years of rising to the highest of his party's influence, Biden, 81, was given a hero's welcome for his move for Harris. Weeks earlier, many in his party had pressured him to offer up his re-election bid. His speech, which had been billed because the highlight of the evening, was postponed until late at night since the convention program was greater than an hour behind schedule.
A month after the unprecedented mid-election switch from Biden to Harris, the Democratic National Convention, which began in Chicago on Monday, is especially vital for the party. The opening night was intended as a handover from the incumbent to his hand-picked successor – albeit 4 years before he had designated her as his successor.
Harris appeared unannounced on stage Monday night because the convention's primetime program began to thank Biden for his leadership ahead of his later speech.
“Joe, thank you for your historic leadership, for your lifelong commitment to our country and for all that you will continue to do,” she said. “We are forever grateful.”
Democrats hope the week-long event will catapult Harris right into a confrontation with Republican Donald Trump, whose comeback bid for the White House is seen by Democrats as an existential threat. Having taken the ticket only a month ago, Harris must now win over a divided country that’s more positive about her but not yet fully made up its mind concerning the election.
Less than a month ago, Democrats were divided over foreign policy, political strategy and Biden himself, who emerged from a disastrous debate by claiming he had a greater likelihood than another Democrat, including Harris, of beating Trump.
Part of the presentation of Harris and her Vice President Tim Walz will probably be to first give a dignified farewell to the incumbent president, who’s scheduled to deliver the foremost address on Monday.
The Democratic Party would almost actually be in a far worse position if Biden had continued to campaign despite growing concerns about his mental and physical health after he struggled to complete full sentences in the controversy against Trump.
Democrats took turns praising Biden's leadership and his alternative of Harris as his successor. “I have never known a more compassionate human being than Joe Biden,” said his longtime confidant, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who led the gang in a “We love Joe” chant.
They sought to link each Biden and Harris to what the party sees because the governing couple's hottest achievements: leading the country out of the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, driving massive investments within the country's infrastructure, advocating for lower health care costs and promoting clean energy.
“Thanks to Joe and Kamala, we have lowered prescription drug prices, repaired roads and bridges, and replaced lead pipes,” said South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, whose support in 2020 was crucial to Biden's victory in the first election. He added that considered one of Biden's best decisions was “selecting Kamala Harris as his vice president and supporting her as his successor.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, greeted with sustained applause, paid tribute to Harris and stressed her potential to interrupt the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” and grow to be America's first female president. Clinton was the Democratic nominee in 2016 but lost that election to Trump.
“Together, we have broken many cracks in the highest and hardest glass ceiling,” Clinton said, invoking a metaphor she utilized in her speech eight years ago when she lost the election. “On the other side of that glass ceiling, Kamala Harris takes the oath of office as the 47th President of the United States. When a barrier falls for one of us, it clears the way for all of us.”
Clinton also acknowledged Biden's resignation, saying: “Now we are writing a new chapter in American history.”
Clinton, 76, underscored the party's cross-generational reach. She followed 34-year-old New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Harris and made the primary mention of the war in Gaza on the convention, addressing a difficulty that has divided the party's base for the reason that October 7 Hamas attack and Israel's subsequent offensive.
Outside the world, 1000’s of protesters flocked to Chicago to denounce the Biden-Harris administration's support of Israel's war effort.
Harris is “working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home,” Ocasio-Cortez said to cheers from the gang.
Meanwhile, Democrats tried to shift the main focus to Trump, mocking his criminal convictions and claiming he was fighting just for himself and never “for the people” – the official theme of the evening.
Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow lifted an oversized copy of “Project 2025” – a blueprint for a second Trump term created by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation – onto the lectern and quoted from parts of it.
“That's what we read,” McMorrow said. “Whatever you think, it's so much worse.”
Former President Trump has publicly denied any interest within the measures outlined in Project 2025, but he has close ties to its authors, and campaign aides have praised their work previously.
Democrats have continued to make abortion access a central focus of voters' concerns, betting that the problem will help them win, because it has in other key elections for the reason that Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago. Among the speakers on Monday were three women whose health care was affected by that ruling. And the convention program included a video during which Trump praised his own role in overturning Roe.
A month after a key union leader spoke on the Republican National Convention, several union leaders took to the ground Monday to appeal to the party's core constituency. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain shouted “Trump is a scab” to the gang and praised Biden and Harris for standing with striking autoworkers last 12 months.
The convention program also paid tribute to the civil rights movement, with an appearance by Reverend Jesse Jackson, founding father of the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition, who suffers from Parkinson's disease. There were several references to Fannie Lou Hamer, the late civil rights activist who gave a landmark speech at a Democratic convention in 1964.
Hamer was a former sharecropper and a frontrunner of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an ethnically integrated group that challenged the inclusion of an all-white Mississippi delegation on the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer delivered her speech on August 22, 1964—exactly 60 years before Harris would accept the Democratic nomination, becoming the primary black woman and first person of South Asian descent to run as a significant party presidential nominee.
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