Takeaways from the first night of the Democratic National Convention

By CNN

Published August 19, 2024 9:04 pm

CNN

By Eric Bradner and Gregory Krieg, CNN

(CNN) — Democrats opened their convention in Chicago on Monday by sending off Joe Biden. And then the president closed the night – which ran significantly behind schedule – with a hand-off to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden said choosing Harris as his running mate in 2020 was “the best decision I made my whole career.”

“She’ll be a president our children can look up to. She’d be a president respected by world leaders, because she already is. She’d be a president we can all be proud of. And she’d be a historic president who puts her stamp on America’s future,” Biden said.

His passing of the torch demonstrated the shift for Democrats. The party, which was deeply fractured just last month as pressure mounted on Biden to exit the race, was united Monday night behind Harris – and against her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.

Democrats attacked the GOP nominee over abortion rights. They highlighted the former president’s legal troubles and questioned his morality. And they argued that his policy beliefs would benefit the wealthy while Harris’ would better serve working people.

“A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and our children, and our prayers are stronger when we pray together,” said Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who is also a pastor at the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.

The party also emphasized – in personal and historic terms – the potential for Harris to become the first woman to win the presidency.

Hillary Clinton said that though she’d fallen short eight years ago, she wanted her grandchildren and their grandchildren to know she’d been there for Harris when the “glass ceiling” finally shatters.

“This is when we break through,” she said. “The future is here.”

Here are six takeaways from the first night of the Democratic National Convention:

Biden takes a bow

A month ago, they were clamoring for him to go. But on Monday night, Democrats in Chicago were singing – and chanting – a different tune. One of gratitude for his decades of public service, personal kindness and, less comfortably, for passing the baton to Harris.

Biden in his own speech, which only began after a four-minute ovation, delivered a spirited message of support for Harris and running mate Walz, before dedicating his remarks to familiar yet scathing criticism of Trump and a detailed recollection of his administration’s legislative achievements.

He began by recalling the angst that gripped the country in 2020, as he campaigned during a global pandemic and national racial reckoning.

He then began a valedictory wave, weaving in jabs at Trump and, in true Biden fashion, an assortment of aphorisms about the value of good government and the scourge of greed, guns, disease and authoritarianism.

“Because of you – and I’m not exaggerating – because of you, we’ve had one of the most extraordinary four years of progress ever, period,” Biden said. “When I say we, I mean Kamala and me.”

And when the president flagged, or stumbled over a phrase, the audience willed him through. The anxiety and gripes of the spring and early summer, in the wake of his ultimately campaign-dooming debate with Trump, were gone. Democrats once again had a chance to enjoy Joe being Joe.

“I love my job,” Biden said at one point, “but I love my country more.” It was the closest he came to explaining why he chose, in the end, to give up his own campaign.

Clinton: ‘The future is here’

Eight years after Clinton made history as the first woman to be a major party’s presidential nominee, she was back at the Democratic National Convention, urging Americans to finally break the “glass ceiling.”

She said Americans who backed her in 2016 had “voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams.”

And after her loss, “we refused to give up on America. Millions marched. Many ran for office. We kept our eyes on the future,” Clinton said. “Well, my friends, the future is here.”

“I wish my mother and Kamala’s mother could see us. They would say, ‘Keep going,’” Clinton said. She invoked Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman nominated for vice president. “Shirley and Geri would say, ‘Keep going,’” Clinton said, as the crowd echoed her with chants of “Keep going!”

She also connected her own life – and her loss, and legacy – with Harris’ hopes in November.

Clinton said she’d put many cracks in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling,” and now Harris is “so close to breaking through once and for all.”

“When a barrier falls for one of us, it falls – it falls and clears the way for all of us,” Clinton said. “I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know I was here at this moment, that we were here, and that we were with Kamala Harris every step of the way. This is our time, America. This is when we stand up. This is when we break through. The future is here. It’s in our grasp. Let’s go win it.”

Clinton on Trump’s attacks: ‘Sounds familiar’

Though Clinton’s speech was largely an affirmative case for Harris, she seemed to revel in taking a few shots at her 2016 rival.

Referring to Trump’s convictions in New York, she said that the former president “made his own kind of history: the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”

The crowd responded with chants of “Lock him up!” – Democrats’ spin on the “Lock her up” chants about Clinton that were omnipresent at Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies.

Clinton paused and smiled.

Later, she said it was “no surprise, is it, that (Trump) is lying about Kamala’s record. He’s mocking her name and her laugh.”

“Sounds familiar,” Clinton deadpanned.

“But we have him on the run now,” she said. “So no matter what the polls say, we can’t let up. We can’t get driven down crazy conspiracy rabbit holes. We have to fight for the truth. We have to fight for Kamala as she will fight for us.”

A focus on abortion rights

Among the most poignant moments of the convention’s first night came as Democrats lambasted Trump for appointing conservative Supreme Court justices helped undo Roe v. Wade’s protections for abortion rights – resulting in a state-by-state patchwork of reproductive rights laws.

Amanda Żurawski, a Texas woman who underwent life-threatening pregnancy complications but couldn’t have an abortion in the deep-red state, said Americans “need to vote as if lives depend on it, because they do.”

Kaitlyn Joshua, a Louisiana woman who was denied health care after a miscarriage in another state with a near-total abortion ban, said that “no woman should experience what I endured, but too many have.”

Hadley Duvall, who was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant when she was 12, said she “can’t imagine not having a choice.”

“But today, that’s the reality for many women and girls across the country, because of Donald Trump’s abortion bans,” Duvall said.

Support for abortion rights has been Democrats’ most potent issue at the ballot box since Roe v. Wade’s reversal two years ago.

Duvall’s story was featured last year in a powerful ad by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who won reelection in one of the nation’s most heavily Republican states in large part by emphasizing his support for abortion rights.

“Donald Trump brags about tearing a constitutional right away from Hadley and every other woman and girl in our country,” Beshear said Monday night. “That’s why we must tear away any chance he can ever be president ever again.”

Democrats downplay war in Gaza

There are few issues that have divided Democrats – by age, by ideology, sometimes by identity – than Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Not that you would have known it from watching Monday night.

Earlier in the day, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to a “bridging proposal” that could lead to a ceasefire. The next step in the negotiations, Blinken said, “is for Hamas to say yes.”

In Chicago, it was Biden who spoke at the greatest length about Israel and Gaza, striking a sympathetic chord for all involved, from Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, to civilians in Gaza now.

“Those protesters out in the street, they have a point,” Biden said. “A lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides.”

Biden’s remarks capped a day in which anti-war protesters filled the streets outside the convention; ceasefire advocates from the Uncommitted National Movement, so far unsuccessful in wresting a speaking slot from convention organizers, held a sanctioned panel about the issue earlier in the day; and activists in the hall unfurled a banner demanding the US government “STOP ARMING ISRAEL.”

But for most of the speakers in prime time, the conflict in Gaza barely warranted a mention. Pro-Palestinian voices were absent, as were, in large part, mentions of support for Israel or condemnations of the antisemitism that has arisen during some protests. It is, quite clearly and unsurprisingly, an issue Democrats see little electoral upside in highlighting.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive lawmaker most likely to address the matter, largely kept on message during her remarks, only veering into talk of Gaza to cheer Harris’ work to end the fighting.

“She is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home,” Ocasio-Cortez said to loud cheers.

Spotlight on Project 2025

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow stepped onstage Monday night with a large prop: a book containing the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” agenda, so big that it barely fit on the podium.

The moment reflected how eager Democrats are to tie Trump to what McMorrow called “a Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Though the former president has disavowed it, Democrats have framed Project 2025, a 900-page playbook for a second Trump term drafted in part by six of his former Cabinet secretaries and at least 140 people who worked in his administration, as the former president’s agenda.

“Whatever you think it might be, it’s so much worse,” said the 37-year-old McMorrow, who shot to stardom after a viral 2022 speech pushing back against anti-LGBTQ rhetoric from a Republican colleague.

She highlighted one portion of the agenda that would give the White House more control of nonpolitical government jobs. Another, she said, would allow Trump to weaponize the Justice Department and “turn the FBI into his own personal police force.”

“That is not how it works in America,” she said. “That’s how it works in dictatorships. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump and his MAGA minions have in mind: an expansion of presidential powers like no president has ever had or should ever have.”

McMorrow left the stage with a pledge that the book would return Tuesday night, with an emphasis on what the Project 2025 agenda would mean for “your pocketbook.”