"Clinton’s ascendance, a generation ago, didn’t just mean a preference for pragmatism. It meant a belief in the transformative powers of youth."

"The Democratic Party of the nineteen-eighties—of Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Dan Rostenkowski, and Geraldine Ferraro—was a traditional operation, dependent on political machines in declining cities and the workingman politics of big unions. The Party that Clinton celebrated at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.... had been remade in his image: telegenic, optimistic, assured of its own expertise.... [T]he vision belongs to the Parkland survivors and the Sunrise Movement and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez....
"On Tuesday, the Party gave Ocasio-Cortez only the brief role of seconding the symbolic nomination of Bernie Sanders. She used it to dwell on some recent history that the Party might have been happy to paper over. Ocasio-Cortez praised the 'mass people’s movement' behind Sanders’s campaign: 'a movement striving to repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, and to propose and build reimagined systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past.' Was she speaking from inside the Democratic tradition or outside it? She didn’t mention Biden once.... [H]aving spent much of his career working in a party that was dominated by the Clintonite wing, Biden finds himself the standard-bearer at a moment when leading the Party means undoing that choice—to identify the Democratic Party fully with the Black Lives Matter movement, to take a more combative stance on capital and wealth, to supplant [Bill] Clinton’s legacy.... What the Biden operation has chosen instead is to include what it can’t reconcile. The work of embodying this reconciliation, on Tuesday night, fell to Jill Biden... 'You can hear the anxiety that echoes down empty hallways,' she said. 'There’s no scent of new notebooks or freshly waxed floors. The rooms are dark as the bright young faces that should fill them are now confined to boxes on a computer screen.... The indescribable sorrow that follows every lonely last breath, when the ventilators turn off.'.... At the end of the video, Joe Biden appeared in the classroom, 'surprising' his wife with a kiss, a mask dangling from his hand."

From "Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Shaky Unity of the Democratic National Convention" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells (The New Yorker).

Here's Joe Biden's appearance, replete with mask dangling and entangling — You can hear the anxiety!



Here are the 2 speeches in full: