The Difference a Day Makes

For two weeks, I’d been struggling to write a blog that captured the nation-shaking body-blows that came faster than my pen:  Biden’s debilitated performance at the first debate, the Supreme Court decisions on Presidential immunity and the power of government agencies, and the assassination attempt on candidate Trump. On the other side, the rising calls for Biden to step down seemed a colossal waste of time added to the chaos. I kept Steve Bannon’s promise to upend our world. Then Sunday, President Biden stepped down and handed his candidacy to Kamala Harris—and did it in a way that redeemed my much tattered faith in democracy.

For weeks I’d been enraged at the way Biden’s age had subsumed his accomplishments, his mastery, his ability to do the undoable. In part, I think, this is because I’m discovering age’s power to eviscerate in my own life. It brought back my reaction when a friend struck with Alzheimer’s couldn’t remember ever having been a writer. I felt the same outrage as when I returned to northern Michigan after a long absence and found that a friend who had remodeled houses and run a much loved resort returned to childhood by Alzheimers also. They had been robbed of memory, age’s richest gift. As always, the poets say it best:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

                                           —Dylan Thomas.

So I was astonished and impressed that Biden and the Democrats managed to hand his candidacy to Vice President Kamala Harris in a way that not only unified the party but celebrates Biden’s presidency. Have we been under Trump’s influence for so long we’ve forgotten the power of honor and respect? Biden and his party have come together, victorious over their own dissentions and eager to engage the next fight—the defeat of Donald Trump. Donald reacted to this transformation like the whimpering of a spoiled brat denied a promised treat. On the Democratic side, in contrast, Kamala Harris  exactly set the tone when, in the already much-quoted paragraph, she returns to her past role of prosecutor well versed in the Trump’s type—self-serving, sex-abusing frauds. If you haven’t read it, do so. It’s a great example of the kind of contrasting I was promoting a while back—and it has gone viral.

Finally, the transformation brings the hope of a first woman president—a hope that returns e to the past. Long ago, I served on a federal grand jury, hearing a civil rights case where the key evidence against local Klansmen was brought by their wives. And I hear again Alexis deToqueville’s declaration that while the male would always be dominated by his ego, the women would bring moral restraint to American. And with those memories comes the whisper—maybe it was the women who had it right all along.