8/21/20
WASHINGTON — Whenever I called my mom to tell her something bad had happened, she said, “I know.” As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, “To be Irish is to know that, in the end, the world will break your heart.” Joe Biden has had his heart broken again and again and again. And yet somehow — against all odds, in one of the most remarkable resurrections in political history — Biden stood with a full heart before an empty hall to accept his party’s nomination. At 77, he has spent half-a-century running races; he has been dismissed and written off and gotten tangled up in his own missteps. He has been immobilized by grief, slowed by age and imprisoned by this plague. And yet the old war horse has made it to his party’s winner’s circle — and he has a real shot at the Oval. Through all of his travails and disappointments — as he went from being a cocky 29-year-old senator-elect to a chastened 72-year-old vice president pushed aside for Hillary Clinton — he never lost his passion for the American ideal that anything is possible if you work hard enough and dream big enough. And that is how he cast his vision for America — in mythic terms of light and darkness, empathy and cruelty, decency and despicability.
Never naming Donald Trump in his speech, Biden vowed to be “an ally of the light, not of the darkness,” and to help us “overcome this season of darkness in America.” The antidote to Trump’s dystopia, he said, would be the illumination of Ella Baker, a civil rights icon: “Give people light and they will find a way.” Malignant neglect was the theme of the week, capped when Biden charged that Trump’s failure to protect the nation during the pandemic was “unforgivable.” It was gratifying to hear the Obamas finally say, with such icy contempt, what we knew they were thinking about Donald Trump. In one of the most moving convention scenes ever, Brayden, a 13-year-old from New Hampshire, courageously and charmingly talked about how Joe Biden, who has had a lifelong struggle with stuttering, tried to help him with his own stutter. (As opposed to Trump’s denigration of the disabled.) The teenager said that Biden “told me about a book of poems by Yeats he would read out loud to practice.” He concluded that he was supporting Biden because “we need the world to feel better.” Biden loves to use the Yeats line from “Easter, 1916,” about a world “all changed, changed utterly.” So, please, change it. Utterly.
