Towards the morning of the fourth day of the convention, some Democrats I know privately began to worry that the party was blowing it up. I heard a list of concerns: there was not a clear sense of what Biden would actually do as president, there was too much emphasis on his character, there was not enough to reach out to moderates like Americans who did not identify with some of the protest movements that were carried out every night.
But Biden’s speech yesterday seemed to alleviate many of those fears.
The concerns I heard all stem from the same problem: the Democratic Party in Trump’s age is far more heterogeneous than the Republican Party. It is rationally different. It’s ideologically diverse, spanning from Bernie Sanders to Michael Bloomberg. It is economically diverse. This is a good problem for Democrats to have, because it was born out of its swell rows driven by hostility toward Trump.
The growth has come from two directions. The first is a passionate activist wing created by Trumpism that is young and diverse and Biden was hostile during the primaries. The second is the now mythical university-educated suburbs that sat down to Trump soon after 2016 and helped Democrats win in 2018.
Biden won the Democratic primary by mostly ignoring the former group, and one of the projects of the convention was to unite these factions over something common. But between its primary victory and convention, a trio of crises struck the country: a pandemic, an economic collapse, and an anti-racism protest movement.
If it seemed like the convention was sometimes some sort of hodgepodge of messages and ideas and themes, it’s because these competing strings of the 2020 campaign all clashed. Democrats had to appeal to the wildly deviant factions of their new coalition. They had to sell their nominee. And they had to make the case against Trump.
I read Biden’s speech as an attempt to deal with all these competing demands. And how he and his campaign did it tells us a lot about how he could govern.
The two most influential Democratic constituencies are fellow-educated White and Black voters, two groups that care enormously about racial justice. Her interest in the party was clear in every speech. The mass protests against systemic racism were carried out by the Clintons and the Obamas and images praising the 2020 demonstrations were shown in videos over all four nights.
Biden’s old sidewalk speech of the primaries was redesigned Thursday night with racial justice as the centerpiece.
“Good evening,” Biden began. ‘Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: Give people light and they will find a way. Give people light. Those are words for our time. ”
Baker, not as well known as some of her contemporaries in the civil rights movement, grew up in the South and listened to her grandmother talk about the horrors of a slave. It was a subtle reference, but Biden then used the aphorism about light and darkness – made famous by the grandson of an American slave – in his remarks: “I will be an ally of light, not of darkness,” “It is a moment that demands hope and light and love. “He called on America” to once again be a light to the world. ”
Biden rarely uses the language of the activist’s left, and his agenda, still mostly intact from the primaries, was always written with an eye on the broad middle. But he often absorbs the basic goals of leftist causes when he feels the pressure is enough. He chose a Black woman as his running mate. He infuses his speeches with the wisdom of great civil rights leaders (he also praised the late John Lewis). And last night, as president, he promised to “do the hard work to eradicate our systemic racism.” (Although Black Lives Matter leaders would point out that Biden has not moved to them over a range of key issues, particularly police funding.)
Much of the week was balanced by Democrats to praise Biden for his empathy and character and Trump attacks for – well, just about anything. What was missing from the big speeches – with the notable exception of Bernie Sanders – was a clear articulation of the specific policies that Biden would pursue to combat the pandemic and recession. Biden filled those holes clearly. He discussed, with some specificity, infrastructure, education, health care, climate change, and tax policy. He gave a detailed list of actions he would take to stop the spread of Covid-19.
Overall, this was a sharp speech in response to the dramatically changed circumstances of recent months, as Biden transformed from the leader of a faction within his party to the leader of the most diverse election coalition in modern politics. In that span, the pre-existing crises he knew he would face as president – climate change, the declining status of America in the world – were pushed aside by three additional and equally urgent crises.
There is a lot to tackle and a lot to tackle in a single speech or even a four-day convention.
At the end of it all, Biden returned to Baker.
“Perhaps history can say that the end of this chapter of American darkness,” he said, “began here last night when love and hope and light participated in the struggle for the soul of the nation.”
