From: januarybaybee@gmail.com   
      
   New York Times  Aug. 21, 2020   
      
      
   With the Speech of His Life, Joe Biden Becomes the Man for This Moment   
      
   Let’s be honest. One of the big questions attending Joe Biden’s big speech   
   at the Democratic National Convention was whether he still had enough gas and   
   enough grip to get to the end of it without losing velocity or swerving this   
   way and that.   
      
   He did. He absolutely did. Is he in the fleetest, shiniest, nimblest form of   
   his very long career?  No. And Donald Trump — no Ferrari himself — is   
   constantly trying to exploit that.   
      
   But as I watched Biden, 77, on Thursday night, I kept thinking that there’s   
   another way to look at all the miles on his odometer and the unusually long   
   road that he traveled to his party’s presidential nomination, which he first   
   sought, disastrously,    
   more than three decades ago.   
      
   He’s a paragon of stamina and stubborn optimism for a country that   
   desperately needs one.  In a period of great pain, he’s a crucial lesson in   
   perseverance.   
      
   “I understand it’s hard to have any hope now,” he said, fusing his own   
   story, one of extraordinary loss and extraordinary endurance, with   
   America’s.  “On this summer night, let me take a moment to speak to those   
   of you who have lost the most.”   
      
   He told them: “I know the deep black hole that opens up in your chest —   
   that you feel your whole being is sucked into it.  I know how mean and cruel   
   and unfair life can be sometimes.”  And, he said, “The best way through   
   pain and loss and grief    
   is to find purpose.”   
      
   It was a forceful speech, above all because it was a direct one, not   
   ornamented with oratorical curlicues but animated by his messy experience in   
   this unpredictable world. It had enormous credibility because it had enormous   
   heart — and because it came    
   from someone who, emotionally, has suffered mightily and come out the other   
   side.   
      
   That central fact about him was the theme of a biographical video that played   
   just before the speech began.  “Once again, Joe faced the unimaginable,”   
   the video’s unseen narrator said at one point, suggesting that   
   “unimaginable” was Biden’s    
   normal.  It’s our normal these days, too.   
      
   I’m not an everything-happens-for-a-reason type.  But I do think that our   
   political leaders are the distinct products of their moments, and that’s   
   true of Biden, who waited so long for his.  They tell us something about   
   ourselves that we’re longing    
   to hear, they point us toward virtues that we’ve lost touch with or they do   
   both. Biden does both.   
      
   Look at America right now.  My God.  We’re hurting like we seldom hurt.    
   We’re quarreling like we seldom quarrel.  We’re exceptional in our death   
   count, in our divisions.  It’s easy to feel hopeless.  It’s hard to press   
   forward.   
      
   Biden’s life is a parable of pressing forward.  He did that after his young   
   wife and daughter were killed in a car accident.  He did it after two brain   
   aneurysms. He did it after two previous, humiliatingly unsuccessful campaigns   
   for the Democratic    
   nomination.  He did it some six months ago, after a fourth-place finish in the   
   Iowa caucuses and a fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary cast his   
   latest and surely last presidential campaign as yet another moribund one.   
      
   He turned things around but, even so, seemed to be his party’s underwhelming   
   default option, its compromise choice.  From the vantage point of the   
   coronavirus pandemic, everything suddenly looks different.  He suddenly looks   
   different.  He looks like a    
   perfectly tailored message to the country.   
      
   “America’s history tells us that it has been in our darkest moments that   
   we’ve made our greatest progress,” he said.  “That we’ve found the   
   light.  And in this dark moment, I believe we are poised to make great   
   progress again.  That we can    
   find the light once more.”   
      
   Biden also provides a second, related message whose importance has risen   
   exponentially since Trump moved into the White House.  It’s about humility   
   — about the possibility of getting where you want to go not by beating your   
   own chest but by opening    
   your arms wide to others.   
      
   I found myself riveted on Wednesday night by another Biden video, one that   
   showed President Barack Obama awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.    
   As Obama did this, Biden grew so overwhelmed and uncharacteristically bashful   
   that he stepped away    
   from Obama and turned his back to both the audience and the camera, so that he   
   effectively disappeared from the frame.   
      
   I can’t in my wildest dreams imagine Trump having that reaction.  He’d   
   shove everyone else aside.  He’d consider the accolade his due.  He’d   
   complain out loud — or later that day in a tweet — that it was too long in   
   coming.   
      
   In its way, that video defined the convention, which often directed attention   
   away from Biden and toward the country that he aspires to lead.  Sure, there   
   were testimonials and montages about his many fine qualities.  But there was   
   as much focus on what    
   Americans are enduring and what they deserve.   
      
   They kept popping up to tell us.  Biden gladly and graciously ceded the   
   spotlight, an incredibly smart decision in the context of the current   
   president.  He was making clear that he wouldn’t rule as some self-obsessed   
   despot whose personal melodramas    
   sucked the energy out of everyone and everything else.  He wouldn’t rule at   
   all. He’d govern.  It’s a different, humbler thing.   
      
   And the compliments lavished on Biden across all four nights weren’t the   
   sort reserved for superheroes.  They were the kind applied to the best of   
   so-called ordinary folk.  We kept hearing that he was good.  Decent.    
   Sensible.  Honest.   
      
   And that was what he conveyed in his speech.  He promised a return to   
   normalcy. A return to kindness.  He promised to protect us.   
      
   And he promised, at least implicitly, to be an example to us.  When he brought   
   up President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he did it in a telling way.  He   
   didn’t just recall that Roosevelt “pledged a New Deal in a time of massive   
   unemployment,    
   uncertainty and fear.”  He also reminded us that “Stricken by disease,   
   stricken by a virus, F.D.R. insisted that he would recover and prevail and he   
   believed America could as well. And he did.  And so can we.”   
      
   In other words, personal fortitude is bound together with national fortitude.    
   Our leader’s arc is our own.  Biden was saying that toughness and faith go a   
   long way, toward a brighter day.  And he was telling us that he could show us   
   that path.   
      
      
      
      
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