Former United States Vice President Joe Biden is officially the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee – a role he has sought on several occasions since 1988.
While both Senator Bernie Sanders and Biden received pledged delegates on the night from virtual locations around the country, only Biden has enough to exceed the threshold for claiming the nomination. On a night when several heavy hitters continued to make the case against President Donald Trump and for Biden, including former President Bill Clinton, former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell and Dr Jill Biden – the nominee’s wife.
Through a virtual road-trip to different locations around the country, delegates won during the primaries and caucuses were formally pledged to Joe Biden making him the party’s standard-bearer heading into the election.
“I’m pleased to announce that Vice President Joe Biden has officially been nominated by the Democratic Party as our candidate for President of the United States”, said Democratic National Convention Chair Bennie Thompson
“Well thank you very, very much from the bottom of my heart. Thank you all. It means the world to me and my family and I’ll see you on Thursday”, said Joe Biden
“If you want a president who defines the job as spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media, he’s your man. Denying, distracting, and demeaning works great if you’re trying to entertain and inflame. But in a real crisis, it collapses like a house of cards. COVID doesn’t respond to any of that. To beat it, you’ve got to go to work and deal with the facts. Our party is united in offering you a very different choice: a go-to-work president. A down-to-earth, get-the-job-done guy. A man with a mission: to take responsibility, not shift the blame; concentrate, not distract; unite, not divide. Our choice is Joe Biden”.
The Biden team continuing to court conservative voters in their showcase event – playing a video of the close friendship enjoyed between Biden and late Republican Senator John McCain. And this endorsement from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who served in the administration of President George W. Bush.
“Joe Biden will be a president we will all be proud to salute. With Joe Biden in the White House, you will never doubt that he will stand with our friends and stand up to our adversaries – never the other way around. He will trust our diplomats and our intelligence community, not the flattery of dictators and despots”.
But this was also a night to introduce a possible future first lady – who used an empty classroom as her backdrop at time when schools are struggling to straddle the fine line between public health safety and returning children to in-class learning due to a pandemic. Dr Jill Biden is herself an educator.
“As a mother and a grandmother, as an American, I am heartbroken by the magnitude of this loss-by the failure to protect our communities-by every precious and irreplaceable life gone. Like so many of you, I’m left asking: how do I keep my family safe?”
She extolled the virtues of her husband – a man of faith, who has faced immeasurable personal tragedy losing his first wife and daughter and later his eldest son – at a time so many families are grappling with tragedy and loss.
“We just need leadership worthy of our nation, worthy of you, honest leadership to bring us back together-to recover from this pandemic and prepare for whatever else is next, leadership to reimagine what our nation will be. That’s Joe. He and Kamala will work as hard as you do, every day, to make this nation better. And if I have the honour of serving as your First Lady, I will too”.
Wednesday night’s highlights will include Senator Kamala Harris making history by accepting the formal nomination to be the party’s Vice Presidential candidate followed by a closing argument by Joe Biden’s former boss, former President Barack Obama.
