Joe Biden delivers farewell speech at DNC

CHICAGO — In President Joe Biden’s inaugural address in January 2021, he said America was in a “winter of danger and opportunity.” The COVID-19 pandemic had lasted nearly a year, months of racial unrest, and just weeks after the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Now, less than four years later, Biden shared some hopeful news in his farewell speech: summer has arrived in America, and winter is over.

“It is with a grateful heart that I stand before you now, on this August night, to proclaim that democracy has triumphed,” Biden said through tears. “Democracy has delivered. And now democracy must be preserved.”

The 81-year-old president was welcomed on stage to a nearly five-minute standing ovation from the crowd after hours of speakers thanking him for what they called his selfless decision to drop out of the presidential race. He went on a victory lap about his accomplishments, threw his favorite digs at former President Donald Trump and passed the torch to his chosen successor, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It has been the honor of my life to serve as your president,” Biden added. “I love this job, but I love my country more.”

In a 45-minute speech that echoed familiar lines from his speeches at rallies over the past five years, Biden said the country was at a turning point, in a “battle for the soul of America.”

He said he ran to rebuild the middle class and praised his administration’s work during the COVID pandemic, as well as creating jobs and boosting manufacturing. He acknowledged there is still much work to be done under Harris.

Throughout the night — and especially during Biden’s speech — the crowd began chanting “Thank you, Joe” and “We love Joe.” Delegates waved similar signs on the blue carpet of the United Center. The Pennsylvania and Delaware delegations sat in adjacent sections near the stage, representing the two states the president called home. When he took the stage, Delaware residents wore his signature aviator sunglasses.

Biden said selecting Harris as his vice presidential running mate was “the best decision I’ve made in my entire career.” He praised her as a respected world leader and robust prosecutor who would be a historic president if elected, the first president to be a woman or a woman of color.

“And like many of our best presidents, she also served as vice president,” Biden said to the delight of the audience.

Pennsylvania’s Third Senator

The evening was a far cry from what Biden had expected just weeks earlier: Instead of accepting the Democratic nomination for a second term, he made his final appearance, capping a 52-year career in national politics.

Biden withdrew from the race in a letter sent to X on July 21 amid mounting pressure from within his party, including from some he considered his most significant allies.

The decision to withdraw made him the first sitting president since Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to forgo his party’s nomination.

The departure is the culmination of a political career that began in 1972, when he was elected to represent Delaware in the U.S. Senate at age 29. He became one of the youngest senators in the nation’s history, a fact he alluded to in part of his speech.

“I was either too young to serve in the Senate, because I was not yet 30, or too old to be president,” Biden said. “I am, quite frankly, more optimistic about the future than I was when I was elected as a 29-year-old United States senator.”

Over the decades, Biden became an elder statesman of the Senate, chairing the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees. He maintained close ties to his Scranton roots — a point he made in his speech Monday — and was often called the third senator from Pennsylvania.

During the campaign, he was adept at connecting with ordinary voters, often talking about his working-class upbringing and his own personal history marked by tragedy. Biden’s first wife and daughter died in a 1972 car crash, and in 2015, his son Beau died of cancer.

After twice unsuccessfully running for president, Biden became vice president in 2009, serving alongside Obama, the first black U.S. president.

In 2020, Biden tried a third time, running against incumbent Trump, promising to restore decency to the White House and facilitate the country recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biden’s victory was sealed days after the election, when he won Pennsylvania, the state where he was born. In Philadelphia, where a batch of mail-in votes secured Biden’s victory, his supporters danced in the streets.

“There is nowhere else in the world that a child with a stutter and humble beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, could grow up to sit at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office,” Biden said. “That’s because America is and has always been the land of opportunity. Opportunity. We can never lose that. Never.”

“Thank you, Joe”

Prominent party officials have called Biden a patriot, a president who rebuilt a struggling country and a leader who put the good of the country above his own ego as he dropped out of the presidential race last month.

“Joe, thank you for your historic leadership, your lifetime of service to our nation and all that you will continue to do,” Harris said in a surprise speech on the first night of the Democratic National Convention. “We are forever grateful.”

While Democrats praised him, Republicans continued to criticize Biden and Harris’ record, calling massive government spending during his term a driver of inflation and high mortgage rates.

“We keep hearing about their economy,” Trump said Monday in New York. “Their economy is terrible, and inflation is eating everyone alive.”

Trump said Biden’s withdrawal was a “coup.”

Much of the first night of the Democratic convention was a tribute to Biden for his sacrifice in dropping out of the race, a look back at the state of the country when he took the White House in 2021 and a vision for the future under Harris, in which Democrats promised they would “not go back” to a Donald Trump presidency.

When speakers listed Democratic accomplishments under Biden, they tacked on Harris’s name, attributing each victory to the Biden-Harris administration. Biden himself did this at points: When the crowd interrupted him to chant “Thank you, Joe,” he replied, “Thank you, Kamala.”

Pennsylvania delegates credited Biden with saving American democracy by stepping down and endorsing Harris, who rekindled indifferent Democrats’ commitment to the presidential election.

The Rev. Charles Quann, an 85-year-old pastor from Montgomery County, said Biden “saved America” when he dropped out of the race.

“Frankly, he probably would have lost to Donald Trump,” Quann said from the floor. “But Kamala Harris really put a lot of energy into this in a short period of time and gave us hope that we would win this election because Biden did something extraordinary by stepping down and saving America.”

Justin Douglas, another delegate and a Dauphin County commissioner, said Biden has a long history of helping people who should be remembered, but called his resignation a particularly noble final act.

“We’re seeing that legacy, you know, coming to an end, and I think his willingness to be humble and step back and pass it on is something that’s never been seen or thought about in this realm of power and grasping and fighting for promotion. It’s just a beautiful thing.”

Journalist Anna Orso assisted us in preparing this report.