Biden’s acceptance speech
Tomorrow, Joe Biden is going to give his acceptance speech. Today, I wrote it for him. Let’s see which is better. Here’s mine. (It’s just a bit longer than FDR’s classic acceptance speech in 1932, the first ever delivered by a presidential candidate before a convention.)
My friends, I accept your nomination for president. I regret that I cannot be with you, but I would never expose a large crowd to a deadly pandemic, which, under this administration, has brought this nation nearly to its knees.
In my campaign you will never see a debacle such as the one that the president produced in Tulsa, when he recklessly exposed thousands of people to a oft-lethal virus for the sole purpose of gratifying his infantile ego.
Fortunately, far fewer people turned out for his hazardous rally than he had anticipated, and we all remember the images of him returning to Washington a broken man after that fiasco of his own making.
Such are the times we live in, with a demented Captain Ahab at the helm of the ship of state, madly chasing the great white whale of a validation that he will never achieve. And I stress the word “white,” because white is all he wants.
I point out, too, that in Moby Dick, Ahab was trying not just to catch but kill the white whale. And that’s exactly what his policies are doing to the so many members of the white working class who put his trust in him in 2016 and whom he deceived and betrayed. The people who have suffered most under this administration were those who voted for him.
Every four years you are told that the national election is the most important choice you will face in your lifetime. This year, that’s really true. In fact, this year, I suggest that you vote as if your life depended on it — because this year, it really does.
Why? Because this year, 200,000 Americans and counting are dead from the corona virus, a disaster that could have been largely mitigated if not avoided, but for the malignant incompetence of the Trump administration.
Early on, before the contagion had gained a foothold here, Trump’s medical advisers begged him to take specific steps to blunt its spread. He ignored their pleas, rejected science, and whined about how the virus would go away “like magic.”
And here we are, six months later, a nation paralyzed by the Trump pandemic. Let us never forget that President Barack Obama instituted an office dedicated precisely to dealing with situations like this, and Trump liquidated that office because of his racist hatred of the former president.
Recently this president, in a televised interview, shrugged and said of this catastrophe, “It is what it is.”
It is what it is.
Apart from his constant insults, bombast and vicious sexist and racist slurs, those will be the signature words for which Trump will be remembered, and those words do not compare favorably to, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” They are more akin to, “Let them eat cake.”
Think about it, ladies and gentlemen. Two hundred thousand lives lost in six short months because of a pandemic that this president and his corrupt and incompetent administration refused to take seriously. To put that in perspective, in six months that is more lives lost than in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined, which wars lasted a combined 15 years. And what does the president say?
“It is what it is.”
We have per capita the highest Covid caseload and highest Covid death toll of any major industrialized nation in the world, and the onus for this catastrophe lies squarely with Donald Trump, and — he does not give a damn. In fact, he continues to work assiduously to destroy Obamacare when so many more people need it more than ever, and he works to cut off further federal aid to tens of millions in want.
This year, I suggest that you vote as if your life depended on it — because this year, it really does.
This year, tens of millions of jobs have been lost, evictions are at record highs, stores and factories have shuttered, farms lie fallow, Main Streets everywhere are deserted and boarded up. At one point the unemployment rate touched 25 percent, the record achieved during the depths of the Great Depression in the grim summer of 1932, with Franklin D. Roosevelt and The New Deal waiting in the wings.
That year, we watched incumbent president Herbert Hoover order soldiers to torch and bulldoze the shanties built by World War I veterans who, out of work and desperate to feed their families, were in the nation’s capital to peacefully petition Congress for early payment of the bonuses that had been promised to them.
This year, we watched President Trump order the gassing of peaceful protesters near the White House so that he could stand before a church and hold a bible upside down.
That year, Herbert Hoover went down to a historic electoral defeat. This year, the same will happen to Donald Trump.
As my running mate Kamala Harris said, Trump took a humming economy inherited from his predecessor, President Obama, and he did the same thing with it that he did with his own inherited wealth — he ran it into the ground.
Four years ago, in his inaugural address, he spoke of “American carnage.” He wasn’t promising it — but boy, he sure has delivered it.
This year, I suggest that you vote as if your life depended on it — because this year, it really does.
This year, we have seen an outpouring of peaceful but righteous wrath over the brutal death of George Floyd, and the beginning of a long-awaited reckoning with the history of race, racism and inequality in our country.
What did we see from the president in response? A naked series of racist appeals, a volley of threats to militarily attack peaceful protesters, and in general a lot of hateful, bombastic nonsense on his Twitter feed.
The protesters he had gassed in the nation’s capital just so that he could stage a photo-op in front of a church that he never attends, while holding upside down a Bible that he never reads, were those seeking racial justice in the aftermath of the George Floyd atrocity.
There are ten amendments to the original Bill of Rights in our Constitution. This president never met an amendment he liked, except for the Second Amendment, which I like too. I happen to like all of them.
The same number of commandments, ten, are listed in the Bible. This pious fraud, who has attacked my faith and actually said that I, a devout churchgoing Catholic, am an enemy of God, has never met a single commandment that he liked. In fact, he has violated all of them, with one exception, the First Commandment: Thou shall have no other gods before me. Only in this case, he has used his Sharpie to cross out God’s name and substitute his own.
This year, I suggest that you vote as if your life depended on it — because this year, it really does.
Make America Great again, indeed! He promised to drain the swamp — instead, he is the swamp!
I want now to talk about the future.
Build Back Better has been the theme of my campaign. But Build Back Better is a means, not an end.
I have said from the outset of my campaign that this is a struggle for the soul of America. That is what it means to build back — to take us back to a time before this president and his cowardly and corrupt enablers hijacked our country.
But we do not propose merely to turn back the clock to 2016. We do not offer a reset. We aim to build back — but to build back better.
From time to time throughout our history, there have been watershed moments, tipping points when the old ways would no longer do, and were swept away in favor of new arrangements, new compacts between the government and the people it is supposed to serve.
One such moment occurred in November 1863, at Gettysburg, a sanctified site that this president proposes to profane by delivering his acceptance speech from that hallowed ground.
In a speech just 242 words long, Abraham Lincoln forged a new compact with the people, exemplified by his vow of “a new birth of freedom.” It was a new freedom envisioned to include, not exclude, the freed slaves, but tragically, in the decades after Lincoln’s death, reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow.
Still, the war was ended and the slaves were freed, though they were kept suppressed by other means. But we must face the fact that every revolution eventually brings a counter-revolution, and two steps forward are always met by one step back.
We must also be honest about our history. Even Lincoln, sainted in hagiography, was a white man’s president. Before becoming president, he mused about the prospect of abolishing slavery and the status of people of color afterward. He said, and I quote: “My own feelings will not admit,” unquote, of making black people his equal.
Let’s face up to our history at last — not just the good, but also the bad and frequently the ugly. A great nation does not shy from its sins, but works assiduously to correct them.
In 1932, against the bleak backdrop of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt articulated his own new compact — a New Deal for the American people.
And over the next decade he pushed through scores of programs to put people back to work, protect bank accounts, succor the suffering, rebuild the nation, and provide a safety net in the form of Social Security for those too old too work.
But we must also be honest about our history. Roosevelt’s New Deal was mostly a “white’s only” affair — many of the benefits it bestowed were off limits to people of color. Roosevelt, great as he was in so many ways, also put loyal Japanese Americans, wholly innocent of any form of crime or treason, in prison camps after Pearl Harbor.
Let’s face up to our history. Let’s not make plaster saints of our heroes.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson articulated his own new compact, called the Great Society. It was a noble, sweeping vision of racial equality and Johnson pushed through programs addressing urban decay, medical care, civil rights, transportation, housing and education. It greatly expanded on the New Deal.
But Johnson was not without fault. He — let’s be honest — not just led, but lied us into the debacle of Vietnam, and while he did much for civil rights, in his personal life he repeatedly used racist slurs. Let’s face up to our history. Let’s not make plaster saints of our heroes. The truth will set us free.
I do not claim to be holier than thou. I freely admit that I am a flawed person but I can learn and walk with the wind. As the late, great John Lewis said, let us walk with the wind. And today, I know which way the wind is blowing. So do you. Friends, let’s walk with the wind together. It is at our backs.
On Day One, when I take office, my administration will tackle this Covid catastrophe, this Trump pandemic, with unbending fortitude.
We need a national mask mandate. Scientists tell us that if 95 percent of the population wore masks now, we would avert some 60,000 deaths in the next several months.
It is amazing to me that the simple expedient of wearing a mask has become embroiled in the so-called culture wars. Is it really so great a sacrifice to wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic that does not care about culture wars?
To those who say that wearing a mask encroaches on their liberties, I reply that no one has the liberty to subject others to disease and death.
But a mask mandate is not nearly enough. We need a nationwide testing and tracking program, a necessity not just ignored but actively opposed by this administration. We need a nationwide mobilization against this Trump pandemic that is every bit as serious as a mobilization in time of war. For the enemy we now face is stealthy, invisible, and all too often deadly, and it cannot be beaten back with half measures, wishful thinking, or science-denying tirades.
When and if we get a vaccine, we need to act with vigor to counteract the lies espoused the the anti-vaxxers, those who say vaccines are dangerous. Like everything else in life, including getting out of bed in the morning, vaccines carry a small risk. But the risk of not vaccinating, for corona virus or the measles or anything else, is far greater.
Vaccines abolished polio and smallpox, and, if we are fortunate, will do the same for the Covid that this virus brings, or at least greatly curb it. But I must tell you frankly that a safe and effective vaccine may be far off and our war against this viral enemy may last for years.
I must add here too that a certain component of vaccine opposition resides in the Black community, and with good reason — Blacks in the 20th century were unwilling and unknowing objects of experimentation and deliberate neglect, such as in the Tuskegee project, a 40-year experiment run by Public Health Service officials that followed 600 rural black men in Alabama with syphilis over the course of their lives, refusing to tell patients their diagnosis, refusing to treat them for the disease, and actively denying some of them treatment.
This is another example of the shameful legacy of institutional racism is this country, and while we cannot abolish the legacy — indeed, we must bring that legacy to the light so that we can learn from it — we can and will abolish the institutional racism.
To build back better, we must first beat back this virus. There can be no healthy economy without a healthy polity. But beating back the virus is not enough. We must also beat back economic inequality, beat back institutional racism, and beat back climate change. Only then can we Build Back Better.
Thanks to the Trump Pandemic, our economy is in shambles. We are going to need a national recovery plan every bit as ambitious as was carried out under the New Deal. If necessary, the government will put people to work. In a capitalist economy, government supported work is not considered ideal, but in times of national emergency, it is essential. Roosevelt proved that during his first four years in office, when, as a result of direct government action, the unemployment rate fell by a full nine percentage points — a result without precedent in American economic history.
We can put tens of millions of people to work right now by repairing and upgrading our decaying infrastructure and by expediting the transition from greenhouse energy to clean energy — wind, solar, and geothermal.
Do you remember when Trump, in 2016, promised a nationwide drive to repair and rebuild our roads, tunnels, train tracks and bridges? Yes, he promised that — and did not deliver. In fact, he did not even try.
The only thing he delivered was a massive tax cut for the rich that has blown a trillion-dollar hole in our national deficit. Remember that the next time Republicans complain about the unbalanced budgets and the national debt. It appears they only worry about those things when a Democrat is in the White House.
Do you remember how, in 2016, Trump promised to rehabilitate the coal industry? Miners carried signs: Trump Digs Coal. But under Trump’s watch, coal jobs and the coal industry have declined to historic lows. It was another lie he told to win votes.
I am not going to lie to coal miners and their families and communities. Your industry is in decline not because of any failing on your part, or on the part of the government. It is in decline because coal, which produces greenhouse gases in a rapidly warming world, is socially, economically and politically unsustainable.
But for every coal job that vanishes in the years ahead, a wise government policy will ensure that there will be multiple new jobs in clean, renewable energy. That is the wave of the future and we must ride it.
We must ride this wave because civilization, and perhaps even human existence itself, demands it. Climate change is not, as Trump so stupidly put it in 2016, a Chinese hoax. It isn’t a hoax at all. It’s real, it’s urgent, and it’s here, big time.
The Greenland ice sheet is melting. The Arctic is melting. The Antarctic is melting. Alaska is melting. Recently Death Vally recorded a record temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Recently it was 125 degrees Fahrenheit in Baghdad, and another day in that same city it was 118 degrees. The climate migration, as the New York Times recently reported, has already begun, as people in poor, hot nations are moving north, toward climes that, for the time being, are cooler.
My friends, let me tell that you that this odious corona virus, and all the misery that it has inflicted on us, is nothing but a dress rehearsal for the future, a sneak preview of calamities so terrifying that we can scarcely conceive them. Let me tell you plainly that at Wet Bulb 35, a combination of 95 degrees heat and 100 percent humidity, no mammal — and that includes humans — can survive for more than six hours. And let me tell you plainly that unless we change course, Wet Bulb 35 days are on the way, and they’ll be here to stay. And there is no vaccine for lethal heat.
We can rebuild our economy on sustainable, clean-energy lines that radically reduce and eventually eliminate the greenhouse gases that are driving us toward species suicide. We can do it, we will do it, indeed we must do it, if we value our own lives, and those of our children and grandchildren.
To that end, I have proposed $2 trillion in spending over the next four years with a clean-energy standard and with forty percent of spending devoted to low-income communities.
Because beating back climate change and beating back the Trump pandemic — building back better — requires much more than returning to the status quo of 2016.
Earlier I talked about how my running mate, Kamala Harris, said that Trump had taken a humming economy that he inherited from President Obama and did the same thing to it that he did with his own inherited wealth — he ran it into the ground.
But in truth, that economy, while humming, wasn’t humming for everyone. Good jobs were all too often replaced by low-paying jobs while — as has been the trend over the last forty years since Ronald Reagan took office — the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. And income inequality, like the Trump pandemic and climate change, disproportionately affects low-income communities and people of color.
When we Build Back Better, we will do so in a way that does not, as it has in the past, bypasses or excludes low-income communities and people of color. We are going to include and uplift everyone in rebuilding from the ruins of the nation and the world that Donald J. Trump has smashed to pieces.
We are going to green the economy and curtail global warming. We are going to provide good-paying jobs for tens of millions and we shall ensure that these jobs are union jobs — for the decline of unions over the past four decades, presaged when Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981, has been the surest guarantee of rising income inequality and the decline of the middle class.
We are going to expand Obamacare, and I will remain open to a Medicare for all solution to the problem of affordable health care. We are going to move back away from this administration’s fixation on private education and once again provide our public schools with the dollars and support that they need.
And who is going to pay for all of this? The great big Trump Lie Machine, fueled by Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlets like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and that pathetic joke of a rag called The New York Post, has been telling you over and over that programs like these will require a crushing tax increase on the middle class. That is a flat-out lie.
The truth is that we are going to repeal tax-cut giveaways to the ultra-rich and the money we raise from doing that will pay for all that we propose. In 1968, during Bobby Kennedy’s tragically truncated campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, some rich people asked him who would pay for the programs that he proposed. He looked them in the eye, jabbed a finger at them and said, “You will.”
I say the same thing today to those who have made out like bandits while tens of millions have suffered, from an income inequality that has been greatly worsened by the Trump pandemic: “You will pay for this.”
We are going to protect, not reject, the gay, lesbian and transgendered communities, and my friends, we are going to have to face these facts: the antiquated Electoral College, vote suppression, the filibuster in the Senate, and the packing of the Federal courts with unqualified right-wing judges pose an existential threat to our democracy. These things enable a minority of Republicans consistently to thwart the will of a majority of Americans. For example, 70 percent of Americans favor abortion rights, but those rights are now on the razor edge of repeal because of Republican-backed judges.
If we win a mandate from the American people, as I expect we will, and if we retake the Senate and expand our majority in the House, as I expect we will, then we will have to move swiftly and decisively to restore democracy to America.
This will include repealing the filibuster that allows a minority of lawmakers to block legislation favored by a majority of Americans.
It means expanding the Supreme Court and the federal courts to offset the court-packing by Trump and the Republicans with unqualified, right-wing judges. And frankly, it means doing something long overdue: admitting Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, with full representation in the House and the Senate. This is part of how we are going to rebuild democracy in this country and take back America from the liars, the deceivers, the frauds and the plutocrats.
Because of this dire domestic emergency, I have so far said little about foreign affairs. Just the other day, a Senate committee led by Republicans — Republicans! — laid out in detail the corrupt influence and connections of Vladimir Putin’s Russia with the 2016 Trump campaign. Those connections and influence continue today, because Putin knows that Trump is weak and is destroying America, and that is precisely what he wants. In a Biden administration, Putin will have no friends. He knows that and fears that.
Trump thought that the dictator of North Korea was his pal. He bragged about the wonderful letters that the dictator wrote him. He even met with the dictator. The stated purpose of all this was to curtail and ultimately end North Korea’s dangerous nuclear weapons program. And with what result? Today, North Korea has not just a few nuclear weapons, but an arsenal of them. The name “Trump” has become a synonym for the word “failure.”
He has succored our enemies and slandered our friends. He has destroyed our ties with Western Europe. He favors dictators over democrats every time. All these policies will be decisively reversed on Day One of a Biden administration.
Friends, I am a mild-mannered man who, unlike the current White House occupant, is not given to insults, gratuitous or otherwise. I can’t help but note, though, that in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt characterized the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, as a “fat, timid capon.”
For those of you who don’t know, a capon is a castrated rooster.
Now I would never say such a thing about my opponent, because I despise fat-shaming.
Moreover, I don’t think Donald Trump is in the least bit timid. You know all the stories, about the defunding of the post office to deter mail-in votes, the talk about delaying our national election, which has never been done before even in the midst of Civil War and Depression, and about setting himself up as president for life. This man is boldly, not timidly, trying to steal this election. I know that you will not let that happen .
The capon part? Well, I guess that’s OK.
I said earlier that Build Back Better is a means and not an end. What is the end?
Again, John Lewis articulated it beautifully, in a posthumous essay published in the New York Times. His goal, he wrote, was building “the beloved community.” I would amend that only slightly to say that my goal is building The Beloved Country. That is the new compact I offer.
To Build Back Better is to build, at last, the Beloved Country.
In the Beloved Country, institutional racism is forever abolished.
In the Beloved Country, tens of millions of clean-energy jobs, good, high-paying union jobs, are created, and catastrophic climate change is averted.
In the Beloved Country, the rich pay their fair share, the middle class is unswervingly supported, and the poor and aspiring are provided with a decent and humane safety net.
In the Beloved Country, the gay, lesbian and transgendered community are welcomed with open arms as our brothers and sisters that they are.
The Beloved Country is not a zero-sum game. White working-class Americans have nothing to fear from equality of opportunity and equality of respect for people of all backgrounds. I am from a white-working class background and I urge those whom I resemble and understand to reject and repudiate the lies told by the right-wing media, which tries to pit black against whites, women against men, and gays against straights. We all profit when all our brothers and sisters profit.
And in the Beloved Country, people like my running mate, Kamala Harris, whose story is America’s story, are not slurred and insulted and attacked, as has happened repeatedly on Social Media since I chose her.
Sadly, my friends, one of Donald Trump’s sons upvoted, on Twitter, a slur against her that called her a “whoreibble pick.” I hesitate to spell that out for you. The word horrible was spelled W-H-O-R-E-I-B-B-L-E.
This is the sewer of savagery, of national degradation, that Donald Trump has led us to. All of that is going to end when I take the oath of office on January 20 of next year. Of course, the haters will still hate and spread their hatred on social media and in other venues, but the key difference will be this: They will be out of power, and they will be out of power forever. Their day is done.
Join me, ladies and gentlemen, is this great cause, to Build Back Better in order to build the Beloved Country. And, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said in the final line of his own acceptance speech in 1932, give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.
Thank you very much.
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