How Will Biden Pass the Baton at the Democratic Convention?

It’s not unusual for vice presidents to become president. About a third of VPs in American history—15 out of 49, including Joe Biden—have risen to the highest office in the land. It is rare, however, for a sitting president to speak at a political convention where his vice president is the nominee. Only three have: Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, Ronald Reagan in 1988, and Bill Clinton in 2000. On Monday, Joe Biden will be the fourth.

It is a surprisingly awkward task, as I learned in 2000 when my boss in the White House speechwriting office, Terry Edmonds, asked me to work with him on the address Clinton would give at that year’s Democratic convention in Los Angeles. The problem, as Terry and I learned, is that the interests and sentiments of the president and vice president are, to put it mildly, not fully aligned.

An outgoing president approaches the convention with two goals. The first is to detail his administration’s achievements and solidify his legacy in front of the largest audience he is likely to have before leaving office. The second is to boost his vice president’s chances of winning, which helps ensure that his achievements will not be overturned in the next term. By contrast, vice presidents are eager to show their own personas and agendas. While they will want to be associated with the administration’s policy successes, they also need to distance themselves from its failures. Complicating matters are the almost inevitable hurt feelings that accumulate between presidents and vice presidents who have worked together over the years under immense pressure and stark power imbalances.

Terry and I got an inkling of these sorts of tensions when, in the summer of 2000, we sent a memo to Vice President Al Gore’s office with our thoughts about how the president’s speech should be organized. We knew, of course, as did much of the country, that the once-tight relationship between Clinton and Gore was severely strained because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But we also knew, from a conversation we’d had with the president in the Oval Office, that Clinton was eager to use his speech to help Gore by framing the terms of the upcoming election. So, in our memo, we suggested that a third of the address be devoted to the past (the Clinton-Gore record of accomplishment), a third to the present (the challenges the country faces), and a third to the future (how a Gore administration will meet those challenges). Our colleagues in the VP’s office responded with a different preference: that the president focus 90 percent of his speech on the past. Whoakay, we said to ourselves. Kinda odd, but if that’s what they want, that’s what we’ll give them.

As it turned out, the request wasn’t that odd. Previous speeches of this kind, we discovered, were also mostly backward-looking. Eisenhower’s address to the 1960 GOP convention, the first of the genre, told what would become the requisite story—of a nation that had emerged from the hellscape left by the previous administration to the near paradise engineered by the current one, achieved against the irrational resistance of the opposition party in Congress. It did so in the dull, managerial, passive-voice prose Ike was famous for (“The enthusiasm I find throughout this Convention evidences your support of the domestic and international leadership that has been provided by Republicans during the past seven and a half years.”) It was a style that fit his moderate Republican philosophy, with its focus on fiscal restraint, to which he pointedly credited the prosperity Americans enjoyed and contrasted with the “free spending” ways of the Democrats. But the speech also included a few biting words that conveyed Eisenhower’s pique at the accusation by John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, that his administration had underinvested in defense and created a “missile gap” with the Soviets. (“[J]ust as the Biblical Job had his boils, so we have a cult of professional pessimists who, taking counsel of their fears, continually mouth the allegation that America has become a second-rate military power.”)

Most telling of all was what Ike’s speech lacked: any mention of Vice President Richard Nixon. Eisenhower had not been Nixon’s biggest fan—when asked by a reporter that summer for an example of an idea the VP had contributed to the administration, the president famously replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” Nixon, too, nursed grievances, including about the president’s refusal to juice the economy with federal spending in the months before the election.

The president and vice president tried to get past the tensions but to no avail. Nixon, wanting to be his own man, initially resisted deploying Eisenhower on the campaign trail. Eventually, Nixon relented, and Eisenhower’s stump speeches were good enough to rattle Kennedy. But Eisenhower’s health was delicate, so his wife and doctor asked Nixon to keep him off the trail in the campaign’s final weeks, frustrating the candidate and potentially costing him the election.

Reagan did not make the same mistakes. His 1988 address to the GOP convention in New Orleans brimmed with praise of George H.W. Bush, crediting the vice president with heading up a task force that reduced regulations and persuading the Soviets to sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty. Still, Reagan devoted the vast bulk of the speech to a detailed, spirited, and (one must say) masterful recitation of the advances achieved under his administration—all of it, of course, attributed to the American people’s hard work and good sense. It was in that speech that Reagan deployed the John Adams quote “Facts are stubborn things” to describe the misery of high inflation and unemployment from which his policies had delivered the nation. Like Eisenhower, he attributed his administration’s success to the small government and free market philosophy that informed his policies. The Gipper cast that philosophy as new and different from the heavy-handed liberalism that had come before and as one George Bush would carry forward. “We are the change,” he said—cleverly framing the race in a way that robbed Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, of a challenger’s greatest advantage.

Reagan also used the occasion to argue—defensively and unconvincingly—that the budget deficits that piled up on his watch weren’t his fault. Unsurprisingly, he did not reference the Iran-Contra scandal, which had sullied both his and Bush’s reputations. Nor did he mention the budget cuts and consequent rise in homelessness and farm foreclosures that led Bush, in his speech later at that convention, to try to put some distance between himself and Reagan by calling for a “kinder, gentler” nation. Reagan did not bristle and happily took to the trail for Bush in the fall.

In 2000, Vice President Gore was even more intent on separating himself from Clinton. Indeed, he would all but say so in the most quoted line of his convention speech: “I stand here tonight as my own man.” Gore’s speech would feature long passages about policy ideas for the future but only a handful of sentences about the Clinton-Gore record. His office had made clear that the job of telling that story fell to the president.

It was not an unwelcome assignment. Clinton was delighted to talk about his administration’s policy achievements. During speech prep sessions in L.A. (by this time, other senior White House officials and colleagues from the speechwriting office were involved), the president kept adding accomplishments and cutting other material to make room. Gore’s office had also requested that the president’s speech acknowledge the vice president’s role in specific policy wins; Clinton was happy to do that, too.

The vice president’s office put another condition on the speech: the president should not openly ask voters to cast their ballots for Gore and his running mate, Joe Lieberman. To accommodate that request, Clinton dictated language that framed the election as a choice the citizens must make between two futures. The president was convinced, he told us, that voters were “sleepwalking” into the election and that if they knew of how rightwing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney really were, they were more likely to choose Gore. He understood that it was not his role, as president, to be the attack dog making this case. But he was determined to make the point with a lighter touch.

Even if you don’t recall Clinton’s speech, you probably remember the video prelude—of the president walking, like a prize fighter, through a tunnel maze below the Staples Center towards a moving camera before emerging onstage to thunderous applause. The tone of his speech that night was triumphant but also playful. Like Eisenhower and Reagan, he reminded his audience of the sorry state of the country when he was elected—high unemployment and interest rates, rising crime and deficits, and widening income inequality. He blamed those conditions on his predecessors’ political philosophy. “Our government was part of the problem, not part of the solution,” he said, cleverly rephrasing Reagan’s own words to set up a discussion of his own “New Democratic” agenda. The centerpiece of that agenda was an economic plan to “get rid of the deficit to reduce interest rates, invest more in our people, sell more American products abroad.”

We sent our plan to Congress. It passed by a single vote in both Houses. In a deadlocked Senate, Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote. Now, not a single Republican supported it.

Here’s what their leaders said. Their leaders said our plan would increase the deficit, kill jobs, and give us a one-way ticket to a recession.

Time has not been kind to their predictions.

Now, remember, our Republican friends said then they would not be held responsible for our economic policies. I hope the American people take them at their word.

He followed up those tart lines with a machine gun-like recitation of statistics about the nation’s subsequent upward trajectory: 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the lowest Hispanic and African American unemployment rate ever recorded, and the highest home ownership in history, the largest deficit in history turned into the largest surpluses in history. The list went on and on, punctuated with this line:

You know, Harry Truman’s old saying has never been more true: “If you want to live like a Republican, you better vote for the Democrats.”

Clinton ticked off America’s progress in other realms—from rising school test scores to military victories in Bosnia and Kosovo. He offered a more somber peroration about how a wrong choice in November could undo all that had been accomplished and a description of the Al Gore he knew—forthright, engaged in the big decisions, a “profoundly good man” who “loves his children more than life” and “understands the future.”

Ultimately, we felt the president had done everything he could in that speech to help Gore win. In the end, whether it was the Lewinsky scandal (as Gore thought) or the vice president’s refusal to run on his own administration’s records (as we all thought), he came up short (or so the Supreme Court dictated).

Unlike Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton, Biden is an outgoing president who served a single term. Yet he has a list of achievements that rival and arguably exceed what the other three presidents each accomplished in two. Like them, he can point not only to the upward trajectory of statistics—in Biden’s case, from GDP growth to the number of NATO alliance members—but also to the institution of a new philosophy of government. The big difference is that, at least on the economy, most voters don’t yet recognize the improvements or, to the extent they do, don’t give Biden much credit for them.

For that reason and others, Harris could be forgiven if she puts some daylight between her and the president she served, as did previous vice presidents who sought the top job. But so far, she seems to be building on rather than rejecting his agenda.

By all accounts, Biden was unwilling to withdraw from the presidential race until he finally relented under the weight of internal party pressure and deteriorating poll numbers. That has left him with emotional wounds that would be hard for anyone to manage. But he can take some comfort in knowing that he is not the first president to have worked on a convention speech while nursing a wounded ego.

News reports indicate he has still not spoken to some party leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, who pushed him to withdraw. Yet he appears to hold no grudge toward Harris, who never showed a hint of disloyalty to him during the miserable weeks after the Trump debate. Harris was comfortable, even ebullient, on Thursday when introducing “our president” at a Maryland rally this week, touting their latest accomplishment, dramatically lowering Medicare prices for some of the top prescription drugs. The baton pass from Biden at next week’s convention could be the smoothest a sitting president has ever handed to his vice president.

When he steps to the podium in Chicago on Monday evening, it would be surprising if Biden doesn’t have to repress the feeling that he is the one who should be accepting the nomination. The tragedy of his exit from the race is the mastery he has shown, and continues to show, at the actual job of governance. The fortunate fact about these particular speeches, however, is that they give presidents the license—indeed the responsibility—to brag about their accomplishments. That’s a task I hope he enjoys because he’s earned it.