Joe Biden’s bitter handover speech will leave a stain on his reputation

Shot through with barely concealed anger, the US president’s address to the Democratic National Convention showed why his party was right to force him to step aside, says John Rentoul

Joe Biden told the Democratic National Convention: ‘I gave you my best’ (AP)

He finally said it, right at the end of a speech that confirmed the wisdom of those who forced him to step aside as the Democratic Party’s candidate: he was “too old to stay as president”. Joe Biden has not, until now, given a reason for his withdrawal from the election.

It was a poor speech, not because he slurred his words and stumbled over phrases, but because it was one-note – literally a single, slightly shouted tone. But also metaphorically: one long, self-righteous tirade tinged with bitterness.

On the surface, the anger was aimed at Donald Trump and the threat he poses to democracy, but it wasn’t hard to hear the resentment at being pushed out of the arena to which Biden has devoted his entire adult life.

It was audible despite the repeated tributes to “Kamala and Tim”. He opened by asking delegates at the Democratic National Convention if they were “ready to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz”. (They were.) He boasted of his record in office: “We have had one of the most extraordinary periods of progress ever – when I say ‘we’, I mean Kamala and me.”

He gave the “vice-president-soon-to-be-president” star billing in the story of how “we finally beat Big Pharma”, as she cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to cut prescription drug prices.

She was even the beneficiary of the only humour in the 45-minute speech. “Like many of our best presidents, she was also a vice-president,” he said, referring to his eight years as Barack Obama’s deputy. “That’s a joke,” he added, too hastily.

But everyone knows that he had to be pushed into giving way to her. The Democratic Party’s guilt about what it, collectively, had done to its leader was expressed in an extravagant display of gratitude. The start of his speech, already long delayed, was held up further by five minutes of cheering and chanting – “We love Joe” and “Thank you, Joe” – and occasionally interrupted by more of the same.

Prominent among the wavers of “We ♡ Joe” placards was Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives who played the decisive role along with Obama in easing Biden out as the party’s candidate. Politics can be brutal sometimes.

The placards and chants were magnificently double edged, praising him while pleading with him to go quietly. “Thank you, Joe” for realising that your position had become untenable and for doing the right thing, rather late in the day, to improve the chances of defeating Trump. “We love you, Joe” for going with good grace, or at least the best grace you can muster publicly, and for refraining from dividing the party, which, as president, you could so easily do.

Despite the effusive show of love for Biden on the convention floor, party managers had done their best to relegate his speech, putting it in the graveyard TV slot of 11.30pm Eastern Time.

That means that most Americans will see only short clips: of Biden saying that the US is at an “inflection point” and that this election will determine the fate of the nation and the world for “decades to come”; or of him praising Harris as “tough”, “experienced” and with “enormous integrity”; or of him attacking Trump: “Trump says he’ll refuse to accept the result if he loses again – he means it; we can’t let that happen.”

They won’t see or hear the repetitive lists of Biden’s own achievements. They won’t hear him mangle the one attempt by his speech writers at a poetic analogy: “Now it’s summer” – an echo of Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” – as Biden reported that “democracy has prevailed… now democracy must be preserved”. And they won’t hear the unmistakeable, sustained note of anger underlying the long, unstructured address.

They may not hear why it was a speech that showed that the party was right to force him to step aside.