Biden at the Democratic convention was unrecognisable from his disastrous debate Biden’s voice was strong and clear, and the crowd was far warmer to him as an outgoing president https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/20/biden-dnc-convention-speech Joe Biden took the stage and held his daughter, Ashley, in a long embrace, whispered some tender words and wiped tears from his eyes. She smiled and kissed the hand of her ageing dad. The pair seemed to be at the quiet centre of a storm. Around them more than 20,000 stood, applauded, roared and chanted, “We love Joe.” They held tall narrow signs that said, “We ♥️ Joe”. The US president walked to the lectern, smiling, pointing, looked pensive, smiled again and dabbed his nose with a handkerchief. “I love you!” he shouted back, knowing there won’t be another night like this. “That was my daughter!” The adulatory cheering continued for all of four and a half minutes. It was the culmination of a night that for Biden must have felt either like receiving an honorary Oscar or giving the oration at his own funeral. Among those holding a sign and chanting “Thank you, Joe” was Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives. Call her Pelosi the Pitiless. She was among the party leaders who decided to override the primary election and tell the 81-year-old president that his time is up. Asked by the New Yorker magazine if her long friendship with Biden can survive, Pelosi replied: “I hope so. I pray so. I cry so … I lose sleep on it, yeah.” That intervention changed everything at this Democratic national convention in Chicago. Biden had expected to give the closing speech after accepting the presidential nomination on Thursday night. Instead he was the opening act on Monday. His old foe Donald Trump observed on social media: “They are throwing him out on the Monday Night Stage, known as Death Valley.” Worse still, Biden did not appear until 10.26pm Chicago time – which was 11.26pm in New York and Washington. Yet again Democrats had decided that he was not fit for prime time. All of it shows the mercilessness of politics and, as anyone with an ageing relative understands, the mercilessness of time. How quickly the golden boy becomes yesterday’s man. There may be a kernel of Biden seething with a lifetime’s resentments. The needless plagiarism row that scuppered his first run for president in 1988. The failure to get off the ground in 2008. The way that Barack Obama gave Hillary Clinton the nod instead of him in 2016. He overcame it all to reach the summit in 2020, proving be the man for the moment of the bleak pandemic winter. Yes, his victory said, unglamorous strivers can be president too. Biden will forever be in the school textbooks as 46. But as a one-term president rather than two. He didn’t quite have the last laugh as Obama, Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries concluded that he had to hand back the crown. Somehow the old truism reared its head again: all political careers end in failure. “I’ve got five months left in my presidency,” he told his 13th Democratic convention. “I’ve got a lot to do. I intend to get it done. It’s been the honour of my lifetime to serve as your president. I love the job, but I love my country more.” The relief in Chicago has been palpable, as the ecstatic reaction to a surprise appearance by Kamala Harris on Monday night made clear. Democratic aides say it is the same plane with a different pilot but anyone in Biden’s shoes would surely be hurt by their eagerness to move on. The crowd was far warmer to him as an outgoing president than it would have been if he were still their last hope of defeating Trump. The irony of it all was that, despite the late hour, Biden came out with all guns blazing. Standing at the lectern, surrounded by white stars that resembled a Star Trek teleport pad, he was a man unburdened, liberated, unrecognisable from the doddering June debate. Biden 2028! He spoke for nearly 50 minutes, his voice strong and clear. He said pro-Palestinian protesters outside “have a point”. He articulated a vision for America in the world. And he issued a clarion call: “Democracy has prevailed. Democracy has delivered. And now democracy must be preserved.” He also hammered Trump with relish. “You cannot say you love your country only when you win.” And: “Donald Trump promised infrastructure every week for four years and he never built a damn thing.” Trump regularly speaks to blood, as in “bloodbath” or “poisoning the blood” of the nation. For Biden, it’s all about soul. Recalling the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, he said: “I could not stay on the sidelines so I ran. I had no intention of running again. I had just lost part of my soul,” a reference to the death of his son, Beau. Wistfully reflecting on the long journey here, he told delegates: “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career but I gave my best to you for 50 years. Like many of you, I gave my heart and soul to our nation.” Earlier, Jill Biden, the first lady who has been married to Biden for nearly half a century, recounted the moment that she saw him “dig deep into his soul and decide to no longer seek re-election – and endorse Kamala Harris”. No wonder Biden has a love of Irish poetry, unrivalled in its soulfulness. Of course WB Yeats’s lines, “When you are old and grey and full of sleep / and nodding by the fire,” seems all too applicable these days. But you can also imagine him telling Jill: “One man loved the pilgrim soul in you / And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
The DNC crowd chants LOCK HIM UP during the speech of... Hillary Rodham Clinton. What comes around, goes around. Hillary Clinton Listens to DNC Crowd Chants "Lock Him Up" About Trump Hillary Clinton pauses her remarks as DNC convention-goers chanted "lock him up" while she delivers remarks on former president and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump making "his own kind of history" with his felony charges. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5128841/hillary-clinton-listens-dnc-crowd-chants-lock-up-trump
Donald Trump RNC Speech Ratings: 28.4 Million Viewers . Jul 19, 2024 — The Republican National Convention averaged 25.4 million viewers on Thursday and peaked at 28.4 million during Donald Trump's speech.
RNC is more entertaining....Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, the Howard Stern effect of trump speaking etc... it should get more viewers.
Tonight Obama is queued up to speak at the DNC. I am sure we will hear from the MAGA crowd on how he is secretly running the White House. Obama made his DNC debut 20 years ago. He’s returning to make the case for Kamala Harris https://apnews.com/article/barack-obama-dnc-convention-harris-58f15df279a382be92040dfbc6adde13 Barack Obama was days shy of his 43rd birthday and months from being elected to the U.S. Senate when he stepped onto a Boston stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. A state lawmaker from Illinois, he had an unusual profile to be a headline speaker at a presidential convention. But the self-declared “skinny kid with a funny name” captivated Democrats that night, going beyond a requisite pitch for nominee John Kerry instead to introduce the nation to his “politics of hope” and vision of “one United States of America” not defined or defeated by its differences. Kerry lost that November to Republican President George W. Bush. But Obama etched himself into the national consciousness, beginning a remarkable rise that put him in the Oval Office barely four years later. And now, eight years removed from the presidency, Obama returns Tuesday night to the Democratic convention as the elder statesman with a different task. Speaking in his political hometown of Chicago, the nation’s first Black president will honor President Joe Biden’s legacy after his exit from the campaign while making the case for another historic figure, Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s poised to be a significant moment as she takes on former President Donald Trump in a matchup that features the same cultural and ideological fissures Obama warned against two decades ago. “President Obama is still a north star in the party,” said Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who credits the 44th president with helping her become her state’s first Black woman lieutenant governor. Besides Harris herself on Thursday, Stratton said, no voice this week is more integral to stirring Democrats, reaching independents and cajoling moderate Republicans than the former president. “He knows how to get across the finish line,” she said. Former first lady Michelle Obama, who is popular enough in her own right that some Democrats floated her as an alternative to Biden, will be speaking Tuesday night as well. Laying the groundwork Barack Obama’s two decades in public life have been defined by seminal speeches. His body of work features a range of tone and purpose — an array of choices as he seeks to strike the right balance for Harris as she tries to become the first woman, second Black person and first person of South Asian descent to reach the presidency. In 2004, Obama used his invitation from Kerry and then-Democratic Chairman Terry McAuliffe to mix lofty themes with storytelling, humor and his biography as the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. “Let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” Obama told delegates and a national television audience. McAuliffe, however, remembered Obama as an obvious rising star. “I’d known him ... done events for him” as he ran for U.S. Senate, McAuliffe said in an interview. Still, no one could have foreseen Obama’s performance and the reaction — because he’d never been on such a stage. “It was an electrifying moment,” McAuliffe recalled. “It obviously laid the groundwork for him to be successful, the nominee and candidate in 2008.” In 16 minutes — shorter than a typical nomination acceptance, inaugural address or State of the Union — Obama told his origin story, framed the 2004 election and talked up Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards. Obama was short on policy, but his sweeping indictment of divisive politics struck a chord. “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” he said in perhaps the most well-remembered passage. “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?” Two-and-a-half-years later, Obama reprised that theme when he launched his presidential campaign before thousands of supporters gathered outside the Illinois capital of Springfield. His campaign motto: Hope and Change. Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, the first Black person to occupy his office in the commonwealth, recalled watching that winter scene as a high school student. “That was the moment that clicked with me,” Davis said and, later on, “helped me to believe that I could achieve these things that I’ve achieved.” A different tone If idealistic, even nebulous themes brought Obama to the White House door, it was bare-knuckled politics and ice-water realism that got him through it. In March 2008, then-candidate Obama was being pilloried for his friendship with his Black pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had a record of critiquing the nation’s history of white supremacy. At issue, in part, was a video clip of Wright declaring “God, Damn America” from the pulpit of Obama’s home church. This time, soaring rhetoric wouldn’t do. Obama hand wrote a nearly 38-minute address explaining his relationship with Wright, with the context of U.S. history and race relations in the early 21st century. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the Black community,” Obama said, while rejecting Wright’s “view that sees white racism as endemic and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” The speech, titled “A More Perfect Union,” was rife with nuance — a risk in presidential politics. But it worked. Obama’s convention address that August certainly featured his characteristic promises of hope and change. The venue and crowd — 84,000 people in the Denver Broncos’ football stadium — affirmed his celebrity status. Another takeaway, though, was Obama’s blitz on Republican nominee John McCain. Having spent weeks resisting calls from Democrats to go after the Vietnam war hero, Obama hammered the Arizona senator as a rubber-stamp for the outgoing Bush administration, out-of-step with most Americans and weak on the world stage. “You know, John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow (9/11 mastermind Osama) bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives,” Obama said at one point. It would preview Obama’s most unsparing speech, his 2020 appearance at Democrats’ virtual convention. Speaking on behalf of Biden, his onetime vice president, Obama framed Trump as fundamentally unfit for office. It was the most scathing indictment of a sitting president by one of his predecessors in modern U.S. history. “This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,” Obama said, almost five months before Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden’s certification as the 2020 election winner. Weight of history McAuliffe said Obama’s role Tuesday, in part, is to reinforce the message of multiple presidents: Biden spoke Monday and President Bill Clinton speaks Wednesday. “They’re going to talk about what happens when you get a Democratic president,” McAuliffe said, especially on the economy. It’s Obama’s turn, McAuliffe said, to join Clinton as “explainer in chief” — a nod to Clinton’s 2012 convention speech when Obama was seeking reelection. The idea, McAuliffe said, is to set up Harris as the natural Democratic successor. For her part, Stratton said she expects to see the man she has seen connect with voters individually and en masse. A volunteer on Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, she remembers the then-president visiting his campaign’s Hyde Park office in Chicago on Election Day. “He was funny and down to earth” as he shook hands with volunteers and then began calling voters himself, she recalled. Four years earlier, Stratton and her four daughters were among the throngs in Chicago’s Grant Park for Obama’s first presidential victory speech. “Strangers were hugging and crying,” she said. “We saw this Black family come out, knowing they were headed to the White House. It was a remarkable moment.” On Tuesday, she said, there is space for Obama to bring heat on Trump, talk directly to American voters and honor the magnitude of Harris’ moment. “He was a historic candidate and president. He knows what this is like,” Stratton said. “There will be this sweet moment of the first Black president passing the baton.”
7 Best Zingers At Trump That Brought Down The House At Democratic Convention Joe Biden, Raphael Warnock, Hillary Clinton and more all dunked on the former president during their speeches on Monday night. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dnc-trump-zingers_n_66c43009e4b0972f8ace460bhttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/dnc-trump-zingers_n_66c43009e4b0972f8ace460b