Bye Joe, hello Kamala. President Biden’s farewell at the Democratic National Convention was a stirring and, at times, tearful valedictory in front of a crowd watching the torch pass to his protégé, Kamala Harris.
We got a plethora of “and another thing”, lists of achievements and some veteran shoutiness, leavened with pathos – “America, I gave my best to you”. In real time, it felt as if the torch was taking a mighty long time to leave Biden’s hands as he gripped the podium for well over an hour. Someone joked that we may need Nancy Pelosi, the steely former House speaker whose public interventions prompted Biden to quit the race last month, to “text Joe to move on”.
Overall though, the optics on the TV networks and social media clips delivered what the party wanted – a decent send-off which got past the awkwardness of Biden’s departure: a polite fiction was maintained that it was his decision alone to quit the candidacy. It was also a runway for Harris, who strode on stage to smother her old boss with love with a wide, glassy smile and look of a woman thinking, “I’ll take it from here”.
Conventions make mass entertainment out of raw politics, and last night was a shiny floor show of Democratic stars showing off moves to their fans and socking it to detractors. Hillary Clinton, an elegant steel magnolia at 75, delivering a substantial speech on how Donald Trump would seek to........