When Hope and History Rhyme: Why Joe Biden Is Right on Time
Over the years I’ve collected a file of quotes that inspire me and help me to see the world with a bit more clarity and hope. As I watched Joe Biden’s soaring speech concluding the 2020 Democratic Convention, two of them came to mind.
The first is from Maya Angelou:
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The entire DNC Convention — a surprising and unprecedented concoction of pandemic-necessitated, staged-in-a-bottle video vignettes and small, hand-picked slices of a diverse representation of American culture and life — was memorable for both.
From 15-year-old Marley Dias, the African-American high school girl from West Orange, N.J., whose impressive appearance on the first night of the convention showcased her “1,000 Black Girls Books” campaign, to 13-year-old Brayden Harrington, who courageously discussed, and demonstrated, his stutter on the last night; from sober and heart-wrenching speeches by Michelle and Barack Obama on nights one and three, to Joe Biden’s expectations-exceeding-and-then-some acceptance speech at the close of the event. These and more were among myriad moments that were memorable both for what was said, and for how they made me feel: at home in my party, confident that it’s finally getting its act together, and genuinely hopeful for the future.
Those feelings became particularly pronounced at about the one-minute-and-30-second point in Biden’s acceptance speech when he said that, if elected, “I’ll be an American president, I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did.”
Will the Third Time Be the Charm? He’d tried to become president twice before — in 1988 and 2008 — with little success; his first campaign was considered calamitous even by his own party. But something now seems very different. Which brings me to the second quote from my file — words spoken by the late soul music genius, Curtis Mayfield. He said:
“I’m a great believer in the saying, ‘It may not come when you want it to, but it’s right on time.’”
How often in my own life I’ve labored through bitterness, frustration and cynicism because things I thought I deserved didn’t come. And then one day they did, when I’d worked longer or harder, or when circumstances changed and I could no longer be denied.
Joe Biden seems to have come to that day. Adding another entry in my file of powerful quotes, he cited the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who wrote:
“Once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up. And hope and history rhyme.”
In the Democratic presidential nominee’s case, we’re at a moment in our history as a nation when the shortcomings that weighed him down in the past — his incessant verbal gaffes, his old-school sensibilities and tendency to compromise with less principled opponents — seem less critical than the qualities he exudes effortlessly today: his empathy, decency, love of country and palpable self-conviction that it is his purpose in whatever time he has left to right the course of this nation and rescue our democracy.
He’s never said, as his adversary in the November election did, that “I alone can fix it.” But since outlasting the Democratic field and rising to the occasion of his acceptance speech, he has made a forceful case that, at 77 years old and after two unsuccessful tries to become president, hope and history are synchronizing in a way they seldom do. And at this moment, Joe is right on time.