The Democrats Throw Joe Biden a Goodbye Party
17:08 Share

BP added more than $130 billion to the U.S. economy over the past two years by making investments from coast to coast. Investments like acquiring America's largest biogas producer, Arkea Energy, and starting up new infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico. It's and, not or. See what doing both means for energy nationwide at bp.com slash investing in America.

Last night, thousands of people gathered in Chicago for the first night of the Democratic National Convention. This is going to be a great week. And the room was ready for a party. The evening featured a cameo from their candidate and speeches from people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, NBA coach Steve Kerr, Hillary Clinton, and President Joe Biden.

This week, we'll be in your feeds each day, broadcasting from Chicago and breaking down what we've seen and heard from The New York Times and the United Center in Chicago. I'm Ested Herndon. This is The Run-Up.

We're sitting in a makeshift tent in the parking lot. It's not a tent. It's probably nicer than a tent. It's a tent. It's a semi-ornate tent in the parking lot of the United Center. And we have some activity happening around us. There's helicopters swirling. It feels a real convention vibe. There's live stuff happening. Yeah, there's live stuff happening. We're basically sitting outside. Yeah.

Can you introduce yourself and tell me what you've been covering for the last year or so? My name is Reid Epstein, and for quite a long time I covered the Joe Biden campaign. And when that vanished, I began covering the Kamala Harris campaign. Yeah, you have been tasked with chronicling this from beginning to the end. Can you just tell me, like, for a second, what's it been like to, like, be up close to such a historic moment? Well...

For quite a long time, really until this week, since the debate, every day, reporters covering this campaign would wake up and not know what the next day would be like. For a while, we were on Biden's political death watch, talking to people and reporting out whether he was going to remain as a candidate. And then when he dropped out, we had two and a half weeks of figuring out who Kamala Harris's running mate was going to be.

And now we have the convention. And the convention is really, going back to the end of June, kind of the most normal political period that we've had because it really does...

appear to be shaping up like a fairly typical political convention. Yeah, a typical political convention after the most atypical lead up to a political convention. Now that you're here, it feels as if Democrats are, frankly, jubilant. I mean, is that your sense, too? They are out of their minds. I ran into Terry McAuliffe in the hallways in the United Center.

And he said he is having the most fun of any convention that he's ever been to. And I asked him if he's having more fun than he would have been if Joe Biden was still the nominee. And he said, I'm having the most fun of any convention I've ever been to. That, I think, all builds us to tonight. One of the things we wanted to do is pick a moment that stuck out both for you and me from the list of people who spoke this evening, which really represented a full scope of the Democratic Party from, you know,

Raphael Warnock to House members like Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to like Hillary Clinton or Senator Chris Coons. And then obviously culminating with the Biden family and the president himself. I'm actually going to start with the moment that stuck out to me, though, which

It's keeping in the theme of like my Chicago Bulls love, my United Center love, my excitement of being here. Please welcome nine-time NBA champion and coach of the 2024 Olympic gold-winning men's basketball team, Steve Kerr.

I was really interested in the speech from NBA coach Steve Kerr because I thought it really represented something that was a little different from Democrats and what they've been trying to do, which felt like a reclaiming of patriotism. So the last time I was in a packed basketball arena was in Paris, France. You had Kerr describing his own recent Olympic experience. We had players from across our wonderful country.

Players who have trained and fought relentlessly, shed tears trying to beat one another throughout their careers, joining forces to wear the red, white, and blue. And saying that, you know, what you see from the Olympic team was something that represents kind of the diversity of America. Thank you. Thank you.

And you had a USA champ break out after. And I know the Democrats coming into this week felt like they wanted to kind of reclaim the stars and stripes from Republicans. That after all the red, white, and blue we saw at the RNC, they didn't want to just cede that to Trump and the other side, but wanted to kind of make a claim for their version of patriotism themselves.

You covered the 2019, 2020 Democratic primary also. I can't remember an event where like USA chants were breaking out or there was such a like overt embrace of stars and stripes when you literally have now the Olympic coach and obviously Chicago Bulls legend Steve Kerr making that argument.

Legend may be a little much. The shot makes him a legend. Don't laugh, Reed. The shot in the finals makes him a legend. Were you even alive when he made that shot? I was not only alive, I was sentient. I do remember. I think I was like five. Five. But I do have pretty clear memories of 97 and 98 of the Bulls championships. Okay.

But what I'm saying is, like, that moment really jumped out to me because also it plays outside of a different political arena, right? Like, Kerr is a cultural figure, and obviously him ending the speech by taking Steph Curry's signature celebration of when if he hits a dagger and saying, this is what we're going to do to Donald Trump in November. In the words of the great Steph Curry, we can tell Donald Trump night-night.

Felt to me like a response to the Hulk Hogan's or the Kid Rock's that we saw in the RNC. The Democrats just have more star power to work with. Right, and they also depend more on the types of celebrities who can reach...

people who may not be inclined to vote, right? Steve Kerr is going to talk to a segment of probably young men who are basketball fans but aren't so into politics who might see a clip on social media or TikTok of him, parts of his speech tonight. And that's what they are banking on. That's why Democrats were so anxious when Biden was running that none of these celebrities or pop stars really wanted anything to do with this campaign.

because they need people like that to reach voters that are part of their coalition. Yeah. In the Biden version of this campaign, you would know better than me, but we have gotten these people at the convention, do you think? You might have gotten Steve Kerr because he was pretty outspoken even when Biden was in trouble. But you wouldn't have had whispers of people like Beyonce or other pop stars coming in to play for a Joe Biden convention.

Yeah. Tell me your moment from this evening that really stuck out to you. So the biggest moment to me was a moment when nobody was talking from the stage. It was when Joe Biden came out. I would like to introduce my father, your 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden. Thank you.

And he had almost four and a half minutes of sustained applause and chants. And that was really the moment that Joe Biden had waited his entire life for. You know, he didn't get a convention in 2020. He had run for the nomination a couple of times before that. And that...

that moment you could see he was wiping tears from his eyes. He was smiling. He looked truly touched and emotional, uh, in that, in that moment. And it was really the high point of the night, both for Biden and for the whole convention. Um,

It was, you know, like we talked about, a release of energy from the delegates and people in the room thanking Joe Biden, not just for what he's done as president, but for getting out of the race and letting them get behind somebody else. And it was, you know, four and a half minutes is a long time to have somebody on the stage with a crowd cheering so loud that they can't speak. And so that was the magic moment for Biden personally.

not just for this convention, but really for his entire political career. That moment was the capstone of it.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. It was kind of a moment for vindication all around. I mean, you can even say Hillary Clinton's speech that came a little earlier. There was a sense of a torch past that was broader than just the individual President Biden, but that Harris was inheriting a legacy that encapsulated not just Biden, but folks like Clinton in the campaign that she ran, obviously, unsuccessfully against Trump in 2016. It does seem as if Democrats have found a way to look to the future

while embracing the past? Is that too much? Well, that's a tricky thing to do, to look to the future and embracing the past. And Harris has managed that in her stump speeches where she talks about standing on the shoulders of civil rights leaders and the baton is in our hands is something that she says quite often. And Clinton certainly played into that. Some of the other speakers. The problem is,

with all of that came when Joe Biden started speaking. What do you mean? Because the Harris campaign and most of the night built up this frame that the election is a choice between the future in Kamala Harris and the past in Donald Trump. Yep.

And most of the speakers through the night had touched on that until it got to Joe Biden, who spoke about why he ran for office in 2020, the Charlottesville episode, his legislative record, all of the things that Donald Trump had said.

democracy, a lot of these themes that are important to the campaign but have been de-emphasized as political rhetoric by Kamala Harris in favor of this broader future versus past framing. It clearly is one that Biden himself cannot sell to the public based on his advanced age.

And the fact that his cultural touch points are deep into the past. Tonight, he mentioned the ancient Greeks. And so it's just harder for him to make that case than it is for Harris. Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it was a peek into Earth 2 where Joe Biden is accepting the Democratic nomination this week.

It kind of sounded like the speech he could have given on the Thursday of that hypothetical convention. I mean, it was a listing of his own accomplishments and a framing of his own legacy much more than it was a setup of Kamala Harris, even though there was some of that. I mean, it was pretty much the speech he would have given if he was the nominee. And many pieces of the speech...

were things he has said in campaign speeches over the last year and a half. I mean, he is defending his legacy as president, which is clearly very important to him. And he does not want it to be forgotten. But I wouldn't expect we'll hear that much of it the next three nights. Right. One thing, though, that stuck out to me from the speakers throughout the day, and it goes to your point earlier of like,

People were really grateful to Joe Biden all throughout the night. And they're clearly grateful for the policy accomplishments that he lists out in his speech. But they're also grateful for his decision to step aside. And that also felt really in the air. I also couldn't help but think about how so many of the people on that stage, whether it be AOC, whether it be Jasmine Crockett, Chris Coons, so many of those people were people who were

did not want Biden to step aside, made the open case for him to not do that. And so you have a Hillary Clinton up there saying, you know, like, there's something happening in America, that there's new type of energy we are seizing on this moment. And a part of me still has a part of my brain that was like, a moment that almost didn't come because of you all. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of people in that room who were ride or die Biden people until the very end. And said that was the only way Democrats could win.

And whether they believed that is almost immaterial. Yeah. That's what they were saying. Yes. I don't know that I believe that all of them believed it. Yeah. But they were being loyal to Biden because they felt that was the right move. But you don't hear anybody who is in that camp saying now that they think it should still be Biden. Yeah.

There's no tension around the decision to drop out now. There's no look back about it now. It's all forward. It's all forward. And I think the speech, you know, it's sort of hard to describe how it wound up being a 40-some minute speech. And this back half of that speech, people started to leave the arena. And I started to get texts from people who were in the arena that said things like,

Please make it stop. Why didn't he just do a seven-minute speech, ride the happy energy, endorse Kamala, and let everybody go home? Those are Democrats. Those are Democrats who were people who were supportive of Biden. And they all recognize now the political state that he is in and realize that it could have been

Tonight's speech on Thursday night and again for the next three months. But once he stepped aside, there was such a relief that he had done so. And now Democrats are to the point where they're as exuberant and excited as they've been probably since 2008 when Obama first ran. Yeah.

You know, we were recently at a Republican National Convention where folks felt pretty sure they were going to win because they thought that Biden was incapable of mounting a victory against Trump. And now that energy is night and day. And it seems as if Democrats are now the ones who are feeling that sense of confidence in a way that seemed pretty unfathomable when we were out in Milwaukee.

Yeah, I mean, that was really the low point for Democrats when we were in Milwaukee. I would not go so far as to say that the Democrats' level of confidence today is at the same level as the Republicans' was in Milwaukee, in part because Democrats have seen these elections slip away before. And so what I have been hearing the first couple of days here is Democrats talking about needing to continue to work

You know, I had a prominent governor say that he thinks Harris's chances of winning are 50-50 at best and probably less than that. And so they're... And you believe them. They're not just downplaying it on purpose. No, I think they are under no illusions about how hard it will be. And they recognize... I mean, they only won... Biden only won the last election by 100,000 votes across six states. And...

They know that if the economy slips, if Harris has some sort of stumble, that it could go haywire for them. They understand that there's a long way to go. Thank you so much, Reid. Looking forward to what you do the rest of the week. I'm for more Bulls content. Nice. The Run-Up is reported by me, Ested Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Caitlin O'Keefe, and Anna Foley.

It's edited by Rachel Dry and Lisa Tobin. With original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Sophia Landman, and Alisha Ba'i-Tube. It was mixed by Alyssa Moxley and fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Sam Dolnick, Larissa Anderson, David Halfinger, Maddie Maciello, Mahima Chablani, Jeffrey Miranda, and Elizabeth Bristow.

Do you have questions about the 2024 election? Email us at therunupatnytimes.com. Or better yet, record your question using the voice memo app in your phone. That email again is therunupatnytimes.com. Thanks for listening, y'all.

AI may be the most important new computer technology ever. But AI needs a lot of processing speed. And that gets expensive fast. Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic.

Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash nyt. oracle.com slash nyt.