Essays and Videos

This year’s Democratic convention is heavy on biography, light on history. Speaker after speaker has told the story of Joe Biden’s personal life: his working-class roots, his family tragedies, his resilience. The message is that Biden cares about ordinary Americans because he sees their struggles as an echo of his own.

What no speaker has done is put Biden’s personal history in the context of American history. None has explained how the trajectory of his life has intersected with the country’s. For Democrats, that’s unusual. In …

The racial-justice movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd had two quite different effects on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. It intensified the pressure on Biden to choose a Black woman as his running mate. And it also intensified the pressure on him to choose a running mate with a history of challenging police brutality. Those two political imperatives collided in the debate over whether Biden should pick Senator Kamala Harris—a former prosecutor whom some progressives in California have characterized as too deferential to police.

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Almost halfway through Chris Wallace’s July 19 interview with Donald Trump, an exchange occurred that encapsulates the current state of the presidential race. The president claimed that his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, “wants to defund the police.” Wallace contradicted him, which led a furious Trump to instruct his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to “get me the charter” of the unity task force that the Biden campaign had created with Bernie Sanders supporters. After riffling unsuccessfully through the document, Trump muttered, “We’ll find it.” But, …