Via Chicago: Day 1, 'For the people'
President Joe Biden delivered a powerful speech on the opening night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Andy Bailey illustration
Editor’s note: “Via Chicago” is Smoky Mountain News Politics Editor Cory Vaillancourt’s pop-up daily dispatch from the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Look for a new installment each day this week, through Friday.
It was an end of sorts, but also a beginning.
The first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago culminated with a speech by President Joe Biden, but it wasn’t exactly a misty-eyed moment of reflection on his substantial legacy of public service. That will come in time.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ job during this convention is to define herself better than her opponents can, and every speaker who stands behind the podium before Harris does has that same job — even the President of the United States.
Accordingly, some of the biggest names in Democratic politics turned up to do exactly that, all riffing on the night’s working-class theme — “for the people,” a clever double entendre based on what Harris, a former prosecutor, used to say when making an appearance in court.
En masse, leaders from the country’s largest labor unions — AFSCME, SEIU, LIUNA, IBEW, CWA and AFL-CIO — voiced their support for the Harris-Walz ticket before Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, recognized Biden and Harris for walking the picket line with the UAW.
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“For the UAW and working-class people everywhere, this election comes down to one question: which side are you on?” Fain said, calling former president Donald Trump and running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, “lapdogs of the billionaire class.”
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who six years ago was a bartender without health care coverage, carried the theme forward.
“We have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she’s from the middle class,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
In an emotional speech, former senator, secretary of state and 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton, who if things were different would be speaking at the conclusion of her second and final term as president, reflected on the historic nature of Harris as the party’s second female nominee.
Clinton’s speech came one day after the 104th anniversary of Tennessee ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in state and federal elections, but she too pivoted back to the working-class themes that prevailed throughout the night, including during a performance by singer/songwriter Jason Isbell.
“So as President, [Harris] will always have our backs,” Clinton said. “She will fight to lower costs for hard-working families, open the doors wide for good paying jobs and yes, she will restore abortion rights nationwide.”
When Biden finally took the stage late in the evening, he was greeted with a thundering ovation. Ever the team player — he didn’t want to drop out of the race, but he did — Biden did the job he came to do, spending half his time praising Harris and the other half excoriating Trump for nearly every objectionable statement or act he could recall.
Biden’s list was long but eventually the arc of his speech curved back toward the night’s theme.
“Wall Street didn’t build America, the middle class built America,” he said. “When unions do well, we all do well.”
Sharp, focused and fired-up but not without the occasional flub, Biden’s performance led some to ask openly, “Where was this guy during that disastrous debate, the one that sealed his fate?”
His speech wasn’t the end of his legacy, which is still being written. It was, however, a beginning — a beginning for Harris, as the torch is slowly passed over the course of four days. And if Harris loses, that legacy will be in tatters.
