U.S. President Joe Biden blows a kiss during Day 1 of the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, Ill., on Aug. 19.Alyssa Pointer/Reuters
Lou Gehrig’s farewell in Yankee Stadium in 1939. Douglas MacArthur speaking in 1951 of old soldiers fading away. Maurice Richard receiving an ovation that seemed never to end at the last game in the Montreal Forum in 1996. Ted Williams on a wheelchair holding aloft his cap at the All-Star Game in Fenway Park in 1999. Jack Nicklaus walking over the Swilcan Bridge on the 18th fairway of the Old Course at St. Andrews in 2005.
And now, one more auf Wiedersehen for the ages: Joe Biden at his 13th Democratic convention, bidding adieu to the party he served for more than a half-century in national office and hearing the crowd chant, “Thank you, Joe” and, “We love Joe.”
“I love you all,” he said, “and America, I love you.”
The crowd erupted. And then he took on former president Donald Trump.
“You cannot say you love your country only when you win.”
The crowd erupted again.
“We’re in a battle for the very soul of America.”
It was part of Mr. Biden’s Long Goodbye.
He’ll likely have a farewell address in January, like George Washington in 1796 (warning of any “permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world”) and Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 (warning of the power of the “military-industrial complex”). But when Mr. Biden does, in the last days of his presidency, he won’t have an arena full of devoted admirers in the audience as he did in Chicago’s United Center on Monday night.
It was a stemwinder by a man winding up his public career.
He called Mr. Trump “a loser” and “not worthy of being commander-in-chief.” He spoke of putting “a prosecutor in the Oval Office instead of a convicted felon.” He repeatedly used the locution “Kamala and I.” The vice-president, his possible successor, beamed – and when she joined him on the podium, television viewers were able to see her mouth the words, “I love you.”
Biden pleas to defend democracy at DNC as he passes baton to Harris
Mr. Biden concluded with an excerpt from the Norah Jones song American Anthem, a personal testimony as well as a valedictory remark: “America, America I gave my best to you.”
For decades Mr. Biden dreamed that one of these quadrennial Democratic conclaves would affirm his nomination, allowing him to stand amid the confetti and the crowd’s acclaim and issue a broad wave of triumph. By the time the perennial presidential aspirant claimed his party’s greatest prize, in 2020, he was in a pandemic retreat. His moment of accepting the nomination didn’t provide the moment in front of an appreciative crowd that he so longed for.
But he got that reaction when he, in effect, said “so long.”
So when, as the 46th president, he finally delivered a keynote speech at a Democratic National Convention, it was as a departing chief executive, proud of his record but humiliated at the nature of his departure, a leave-taking prompted by a mortifying performance at the June debate with Mr. Trump and by the desperate coaxing from his re-election campaign by the men and women he thought were his lifelong, loyal friends but whom he now regards as having betrayed him shamefully.
Nonetheless, the old warrior experienced, and delivered, one of the greatest farewells. And in doing so, he defied one of the characteristics of the sporting world. Long-distance runners seldom get the chance to pass the baton.
At age 81, Mr. Biden – bowed but not broken, tired but comforted by the echoes of his triumphs – did indeed pass the baton, handing it metaphorically to Kamala Harris, his chosen vice-president and then, under the duress of pressure to abandon his hopes for a second term, his chosen successor. No president, even Theodore Roosevelt in his 1908 embrace of William Howard Taft, ever performed that task with such drama and in so public a fashion.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris embrace on stage during the Democratic National Convention.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
And no departing president received the adulation from a convention that Mr. Biden received. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy died in office and thus were denied the party send-off that Mr. Biden received. The greatest presidential tribute of contemporary times came in 1964, but it was a speech by John’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who concluded his remarks by quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, “When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun” – a citation that infuriated the president’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, who believed that he was the reference to “the garish sun.”
There were no such suggestions or tensions Monday night.
Speaker after speaker saluted Mr. Biden, with the party’s 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, calling him “democracy’s champion” and Senator Chris Coons of Mr. Biden’s state of Delaware saluting the President’s “determination to heal the soul of our nation.”
The convention site was full of references to Mr. Biden, with his admonition (“History is in your hands”), delivered the day he withdrew from the race, painted on the stairs of every loge of the arena where the cheers ordinarily are for Chicago’s NBA Bulls and NHL Blackhawks.
The only disparaging word came days earlier when the Democrats’ dreaded rival, Mr. Trump, issued a statement on his Truth Social platform saying, “Kamala wants NOTHING TO DO WITH CROOKED JOE BIDEN. They are throwing him out on the Monday Night Stage, known as Death Valley. He now HATES Obama and Crazy Nancy [Pelosi, the former House Speaker] more than he hates me! He is an angry man, as he should be. They stole the Presidency from him – It was a Coup!”
But for Mr. Biden – for four years in competition with Mr. Trump on everything, including crowd size and response – it was a moment reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe’s 1954 return from a tour of Korea, when she told her husband, “You never heard such cheering.” Joe DiMaggio replied, “Yes I have.”
During the tearful 1963 farewell to retiring Boston Celtics basketball star, a fan yelled from the Boston Garden balcony, “We love you, Cooz.” That bellow echoed through the rafters of the United Center, directed at Mr. Biden, five months from being the former president of the United States.
Vincent Alban/Reuters