Tuesday, August 20, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 33
Democrats opened their convention in Chicago on Monday by sending off Joe Biden. And then the president closed the night – which ran significantly behind schedule – with a hand-off to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Biden said choosing Harris as his running mate in 2020 was “the best decision I made my whole career.”
His passing of the torch demonstrated the shift for Democrats. The party, which was deeply fractured just last month as pressure mounted on Biden to exit the race, was united Monday night behind Harris – and against her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump. Democrats attacked the GOP nominee over abortion rights. They highlighted the former president’s legal troubles and questioned his morality. And they argued that his policy beliefs would benefit the wealthy while Harris’ would better serve working people. The party also emphasized – in personal and historic terms – the potential for Harris to become the first woman to win the presidency.
Biden takes a bow
Biden in his own speech, which only began after a four-minute ovation, delivered a spirited message of support for Harris and running mate Walz, before dedicating his remarks to familiar yet scathing criticism of Trump and a detailed recollection of his administration’s legislative achievements.
He began by recalling the angst that gripped the country in 2020, as he campaigned during a global pandemic and national racial reckoning.
“I love my job,” Biden said at one point, “but I love my country more.” It was the closest he came to explaining why he chose, in the end, to give up his own campaign.
Clinton on Trump’s attacks: ‘Sounds familiar’
Though Clinton’s speech was largely an affirmative case for Harris, she seemed to revel in taking a few shots at her 2016 rival.
Referring to Trump’s convictions in New York, she said that the former president “made his own kind of history: the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”
A focus on abortion rights
Among the most poignant moments of the convention’s first night came as Democrats lambasted Trump for appointing conservative Supreme Court justices helped undo Roe v. Wade’s protections for abortion rights – resulting in a state-by-state patchwork of reproductive rights laws.
Amanda Żurawski, a Texas woman who underwent life-threatening pregnancy complications but couldn’t have an abortion in the deep-red state, said Americans “need to vote as if lives depend on it, because they do.”
Kaitlyn Joshua, a Louisiana woman who was denied health care after a miscarriage in another state with a near-total abortion ban, said that “no woman should experience what I endured, but too many have.”
Hadley Duvall, who was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant when she was 12, said she “can’t imagine not having a choice.”
“But today, that’s the reality for many women and girls across the country, because of Donald Trump’s abortion bans,” Duvall said.
Democrats downplay war in Gaza
There are few issues that have divided Democrats – by age, by ideology, sometimes by identity – than Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
Earlier in the day, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to a “bridging proposal” that could lead to a ceasefire. The next step in the negotiations, Blinken said, “is for Hamas to say yes.”
“Those protesters out in the street, they have a point,” Biden said. “A lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides.”
Biden’s remarks capped a day in which anti-war protesters filled the streets outside the convention; ceasefire advocates from the Uncommitted National Movement, so far unsuccessful in wresting a speaking slot from convention organizers, held a sanctioned panel about the issue earlier in the day; and activists in the hall unfurled a banner demanding the US government “STOP ARMING ISRAEL.”
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive lawmaker most likely to address the matter, largely kept on message during her remarks, only veering into talk of Gaza to cheer Harris’ work to end the fighting. “She is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home,” Ocasio-Cortez said to loud cheers.
Spotlight on Project 2025
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow stepped onstage Monday night with a large prop: a book containing the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” agenda, so big that it barely fit on the podium.
The moment reflected how eager Democrats are to tie Trump to what McMorrow called “a Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”
Though the former president has disavowed it, Democrats have framed Project 2025, a 900-page playbook for a second Trump term drafted in part by six of his former Cabinet secretaries and at least 140 people who worked in his administration, as the former president’s agenda.
Source: CNN
