The Joe Biden show is officially in reruns. Biden even got bumped out of prime time. His speech started at 11:28 p.m., in the hour when old sitcoms run in syndication.
That wasn’t an accident. The first night of the Democratic convention was losers night, featuring Biden and Hillary Clinton along with duds like Kathy Hochul and zealots like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Democrats lined up an endless list of speakers ahead of Biden to push his speech back as far as they could, so as few people as possible would hear it.
The speech itself was written as a celebration of Biden’s accomplishments – some real, many imagined – as president. The actual nominee was an afterthought. Biden spoke of Kamala Harris only as someone who helped him – not for anything she ever did on her own.
If the Harris campaign had any hopes that Joe would let them get distance from his record, they were dashed. “When I say we I mean Kamala and me,” he emphasized, reminding voters that there’s no turning the page by voting for Harris.
Biden tried to play the old hits, but they ring hollow now. He talked about Charlottesville and how he claims Trump as president “emboldened” and praised anti-Semites. “Hate has no safe harbor” in America, he says. But we saw how anti-Semites have safe harbors – literal encampments on college campuses, immune from the law – in Joe Biden’s America. Biden even said of the pro-Hamas protestors, “Those protesters out in the street. They’ve got a point.”
No, they don’t, Joe.
Just days after Tim Walz pledged that Democrats wouldn’t call their opponents names, Biden called Trump a “loser,” a “liar,” a “felon,” and a “sucker.”
Amid the usual rants about January 6, there were the usual bald-faced lies, such as the claim that the Biden-Harris administration “helped schools get back open” after COVID when in fact they ignored the recommendations of scientists to side with the teachers unions in protracting school closures. They expect us to nod along, knowing it’s not true.
Of course, the pretense of one big happy family had to be maintained. Biden denied that he was angry at the Democrats who forced him off the ticket. Nancy Pelosi stood in the front row holding a “We Love Joe” sign, just weeks after wielding the knife. She came to bury Joe, not to praise him.
Biden stayed mostly on script, leaning on the prepared text to keep him from wandering off. But he was shouty and glowering as a result. By the end, nobody would wonder why Democrats decided they needed to dump this guy.
The amazing thing is that they made it as far as July pretending he was up to the job.
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