Biden’s Holiday From History

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 biographical video that played at the 1992 Democratic convention, Bill Clinton said he recited Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech from memory as a child. He reflected on the fact that the assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy “broke the hearts and spirits of millions of people” and “changed a lot of things for my generation.” The implication was clear: As president, Clinton would return America to the path of moral progress it abandoned when those liberal giants died.