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When Joe Biden traveled to Miami Beach for his first Democratic National Convention in 1972, his presence generated little more than a footnote.
“Councilman Joseph R. Biden, D-Faulkland Heights, a non-delegate, also is attending,” reads the only reference to his being there, turned up in a Delaware newspaper archive.
On Monday, Biden will ascend the convention stage at the other end of his political life.
An arc that began as a long-shot candidate to become the youngest senator in Washington will conclude as the oldest sitting president in history, once hopeful for a second term but now resigned to watch his chosen successor assume the mantle of Democratic standard-bearer.
Aides said that in his speech the president would deliver a forceful argument for Vice President Kamala Harris’ election in November while casting her rival, former President Donald Trump, as a threat to democracy. Biden was revising his speech with senior aides at Camp David ahead of his appearance.
The 29-year-old who skipped a meeting of the New Castle County Council to attend his first convention in 1972 may never have imagined himself behind the podium as the incumbent president.
But Biden’s first foray into convention life was not his last. He would go on to attend a dozen of the gatherings over the years.
His stature may have begun modestly as a spectator. But by 1976, as a senator, he’d been elevated to floor manager and surrogate for Jimmy Carter, whom he’d been quick to endorse. His role expanded four years later, allocated an early-in-the-evening speaking slot.
The national media paid his speech little mind. But delegates from his home state were impressed. They held up a sign reading “Biden in ’84,” encouraging him to run for the White House.
“If I wanted it, I think I could take it,” he told the Wilmington Morning News.
But he didn’t want it, he insisted, and would attend the 1984 convention not as a nominee but simply as a participant.
His run for the Democratic presidential nomination four years later ended in embarrassment, forced to withdraw from the race following plagiarism allegations. He didn’t attend that year’s convention while recovering from surgery following a brain aneurysm. He won two votes for the nomination anyway.
The 1990s brought more prominence, including Biden’s first prime-time speech on a convention stage in 1996 advocating on behalf of President Bill Clinton. Delivered almost entirely in a loud yell, Biden embraced the law-and-order politics of the day.
“I’m here to tell you one thing: Bill Clinton is the best friend the cops in America have ever, ever had,” he proclaimed in Chicago.
In 2000, Biden traveled to Los Angeles to advocate on Al Gore’s behalf. But perhaps sensing the political winds, he prepared the ground for his own presidential aspirations as well, addressing delegates from Iowa on the sidelines of the main event.
By 2004, some now-familiar Biden-isms had made their way into his speech endorsing nominee John Kerry. He opened with a (slightly misquoted) line from William Butler Yeats: “The world has changed, it has changed utterly. A terrible beauty has been born.”
The keynote speaker that year was the young Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama. By 2008, Obama was the nominee and Biden his running mate. Granted a headlining slot for the first time, Biden was introduced by his son Beau.
Beau was there again in 2012 to formally renominate his father as vice president, a moment that brought then-Vice President Biden to tears. And his memory loomed in 2016, when Biden delivered an address after forgoing his own run for president following his son’s death a year earlier.
In 2020, after decades of conventions making the case for other Democratic nominees, it was at last Biden’s turn. Covid-19 denied him a raucous arena with a shower of balloons. But he made the most of the circumstances, delivering an impassioned speech in a mostly empty hall directly to camera.
“United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America,” he said.
