“You know me.” It’s one of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s most-used lines, a folksy introduction, a deflection and a defense.
Fact-check: It’s true. Mr. Biden has been around long enough to be on his third presidential run in four decades. Long enough to have had a dubious role in the 1991 Senate sexual harassment testimony of Anita Hill (for which he’s expressed regret), and then to be celebrated by the actress — Kerry Washington, the third-night host of his nominating convention — who played Ms. Hill in the 2016 HBO movie “Confirmation.”
So the Democratic National Convention did not, like many conventions, have to introduce a new face to the audience. Instead, it built a connection.
In clips, reminiscences and policy segments, it presented Mr. Biden as someone who has lived through troubles and consoled others in theirs: talking a colleague through grief; helping a young boy who, like Mr. Biden, struggles with a stutter.
And Mr. Biden’s acceptance speech cast him as the Connecter-in-Chief.
As you would expect of a challenger, he attacked President Trump’s handling of multiple national crises, including the pandemic that left him addressing a near-empty room. But he also, contrasting himself with a president who has said he hasn’t cried since he was a baby, offered not just to alleviate the country’s wrenching problems, but to feel them along with us.
Mr. Biden’s speech was possibly the most ordinary thing about a shaky but fascinatingly experimental convention, forced to reinvent itself by the limits of Covid-19.
Conventions have for decades been TV productions more than politically decisive or newsmaking events. But this was the first one that was purely TV: Stitched together from tapes and location shots, it had no existence in a physical space other than your screen.
transcript
Highlights From the Democratic National Convention: Night 4
On the last night of the convention, Joseph R. Biden Jr. officially accepted the Democratic nomination for president. In the most important speech of his career, he said that Americans “will overcome this season of darkness.”
-
“Welcome to the fourth night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention: ‘Uniting America.’ OK, these last few nights have been going so well, we’ve decided to add a fifth night where we will just play Michelle Obama’s speech on a loop.” “We’ve cried out for justice. We have gathered in our streets to demand change. And now we must pass on the gift John Lewis sacrificed to give us: We must register and we must vote.” “Our military spouses hold their families together, praying for their loved ones’ safety wherever they’re deployed and serving as caregivers to our disabled servicemembers, and then picking up the pieces and starting again, whenever the next tour or the next war arises. Joe Biden understands these sacrifices because he’s made them himself. When his son Beau deployed to Iraq, his burden was also shouldered by his family. Joe knows the fear military families live because he’s felt that dread of never knowing if your deployed loved one is safe.” “A couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. And I was absolutely terrified. One of the first people who called me was Joe. His real warmth and kindness on that call — man, I gotta say, it made me cry.” “I am very excited to present to you a group of people that ran in the 2020 Democratic primary against Joe Biden. You could think of this sort of like ‘Survivor’ on the out-interviews of all the people that got voted off the island.” [laughing] “Bernie — Bernie, don’t you laugh, because I’ve got questions for you like, Why does my girlfriend like you more than she likes me? But let’s —” “Because she’s smarter than you, and that’s the obvious answer, right?” [laughing] “Hi, my name is Brayden Harrington and I am 13 years old. And without Joe Biden, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. About a few months ago, I met him in New Hampshire. He told me that we were members of the same club. We stutter. It was really amazing to hear that someone like me became vice president. I’m just a regular kid. And in this short amount of time, Joe Biden made me more confident about something that’s bothered me my whole life.” “If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst. I’ll be an ally of the light, not the darkness. It’s time for us, for We the People, to come together. And make no mistake: United we can and will overcome this season of darkness in America. We’ll choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege. So it’s with great honor and humility I accept this nomination for president of the United States of America. As president, the first step I will take will be to get control of the virus that has ruined so many lives. Because I understand something this president hasn’t from the beginning: We will never get our economy back on track, we will never get our kids safely back in schools, we’ll never have our lives back, until we deal with this virus. While he’s no longer with us, Beau inspires me every day. Beau served our nation in uniform, a year in Iraq, a decorated Iraqi War veteran. So I take very personally the profound responsibility of serving as commander in chief. I’ll be a president who will stand with our allies and friends and make it clear to our adversaries: The days of cozying up to dictators is over. Just a week ago yesterday was the third anniversary of the events in Charlottesville. Close your eyes — remember what you saw on television. Remember seeing those neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists coming out of fields with lighted torches, veins bulging, spewing the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s. Remember the violent clash that ensued between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And remember what the president said when asked? He said there were, quote, ‘very fine people on both sides.’ It was a wake-up call for us as a country, and for me a call to action. At that moment, I knew I’d have to run, because my father taught us that silence was complicity and I could never remain silent or complicit. May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight, as love and hope and light join in the battle for the soul of the nation. And this is a battle we will win, and we’ll do it together, I promise you.” [music, Coldplay, “A Sky Full Of Stars”]
It also had a lot of audiences. It had to speak to the party’s moderates and its left. It spent a lot of time courting Trump-averse Republicans. And it had to reconcile a party with big constituencies of young people, women and people of color with its nominee, a 77-year-old white man.
So the convention was a little bit like an old-time variety show for the Quibi age: A little something for everyone, and in quick, efficient bits. Speakers, live and taped, were brought on and hustled off. The keynote was sliced-and-diced among 17 speakers, sometimes trading off a phrase at a time. (Even Mr. Biden’s 24.5 minute speech, according to C-SPAN, was by far the shortest D.N.C. acceptance speech of the last four decades.)
The whiplash was especially strong in Thursday’s first hour. Julia Louis-Dreyfus of HBO’s “Veep” delivered cutting jokes aimed at the sort of extremely online voter who would pick up a reference to Republicans mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s name, between earnest speeches and emotional stories.
The historian Jon Meacham appeared, and so did the lip-syncing social-media Donald Trump impersonator Sarah Cooper — something for the PBS crowd, something for the TikTok kids.
Senator Cory Booker and several of his primary opponents shared warm memories of running against Mr. Biden, in a round table Mr. Booker likened to a “Survivor” reunion special. The mogul and brief-lived Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg spoke separately, having apparently blown the rest of his billions on flags.
It was a lot — policy and personality, kitsch and cheek — but this convention had to reinvent the language of a political ritual that usually relies on thousands of party faithful, in person, as extras.
How do you recreate the experience of hordes of roaring faithful when none of them can be there? You can’t. What you can do is find a way to create different but equally powerful emotions without them — as, for instance, Tuesday’s touchingly kooky delegate roll call travelogue did.
Incendiary applause lines don’t work the same when no one is there to clap; zingers don’t land without someone to laugh. What does work is gravity and heart.
And that, as Mr. Biden demonstrated in the convention’s climax, is something he can do.
He stepped up to the podium from the shadows, prefiguring his first promise: “I will be an ally of the light and not the darkness.” This set up his larger theme, which was that, beyond policy, he saw the election as a moral struggle: between inclusion and division, decency and viciousness, caring and contempt.
Mr. Biden had concrete criticisms and counterarguments to the president, especially on fighting the coronavirus: “It didn’t have to be this bad.”
But it was when Mr. Biden talked about feeling the pandemic and its devastation that you could feel the speech take off.
He asked to speak to those who had lost someone to Covid. He had lost too, he said — the convention had reminded us of this, and a four-night character arc paid off in this moment. “I know how mean, cruel and unfair life can be sometimes,” he said. “Your loved one may have left this Earth, but they’ll never leave your heart.”
There have been over 170,000 Americans lost to the pandemic but no real public mourning. Mr. Biden didn’t say anything about the president who, visiting the site of a mass shooting last year, posed with an orphaned baby and gave a thumbs up. He didn’t say that the country might miss having a leader who believes that feeling loss doesn’t make you a loser. He didn’t need to.
The camera pushed in closer. Mr. Biden, like his running mate, Kamala Harris, spoke from a podium in a near-empty hall, which gave Ms. Harris’s speech a haunting air on Wednesday. This time, the camera held him tight in the frame, matching his intimate speech. It wasn’t written as if it were meant to rouse a cheering crowd in the room. It was written to the camera, like a presidential address, and reached through the screen to the other side.
The speech did end like Ms. Harris’s, with music anticlimactically playing in the desolate hall as Mr. Biden waved to supporters on a big screen — a substitution much pandemic-era TV has made for live audiences that will never stop feeling uncanny.
But there was more. Mr. Biden masked up and went to the parking lot, where flesh-and-blood supporters, socially distanced by their wheels, were having a tailgate party. A modest spray of fireworks popped overhead in the dark.
It wasn’t overwhelming. The backdrop wasn’t monumental. But it fit this American moment of tentative pleasures and small, improvised celebrations. Maybe there would be bigger fireworks someday, when there was more to cheer about. The important thing, for now, was the feeling.
August 21, 2020 at 08:05PM
https://ift.tt/3l4s3NB
Biden Speaks Once More, With Feeling - The New York Times
https://ift.tt/3d5QSDO
No comments:
Post a Comment