The Democrats honored President Joe Biden, thanking him for stepping aside in his re-election bid to make way for Vice President Kamala Harris, who now offers what seems to be an increasing possibility of winning the election. The change was not without pain and doubt.
Biden has a 50-year career in American politics, and the decision to pressure him to end it was made by some of his oldest friends. But for Biden and them, not doing so meant accepting the certainty of a victory by Republican Donald Trump, whom they all consider a threat to the democratic life of the United States.
And they did it. It’s not going to be easy. The challenges facing both the candidate and the Party are present in a deeply divided country where the indirect method of electing the president could be an insurmountable obstacle, as it was for Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016 when she won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College to the same Donald Trump that Harris now faces.
And that, analysts say, is without considering that voters are discontent with the party in power and that the positions Harris held early in her political career—a tough liberal left, pro-immigrant, pro-union stance, a more pronounced feminism, and her biracial identity as the daughter of an Afro-Caribbean father and an Indian mother—offer multiple targets for the propaganda machinery of a right-wing Republican Party.
But the way Biden behaved and how he was bid farewell at the Democratic National Convention speaks to pragmatism, a phenomenon in current U.S. politics.
Political polarization is not new, but if the Republicans moved to the right, the Democrats consolidated on Monday night as a progressive left, social-democratic if you will, or left-liberal populist party if you prefer, with a strong commitment to defending women's rights, unions, and the environment. But they also maintain a promise of a tough stance on the border because that is what public opinion demands.
Shawn Feinn, president of the powerful United Auto Workers (UAW) union, defined the situation as "with us or against us" when expressing his and several other unions' support for Harris.
It’s also important to note that her running mate, Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota, comes from a rich populist tradition present in the Midwest for more than a century. But it was also, and above all, a pragmatic approach, which analyst Jonathan Martín described in Politico as a simple doctrine: "win." And if that requires changing the candidate, something unprecedented in U.S. history, then so be it. For now, they only have a growing possibility. But that’s much more than they had six weeks ago.
BY JOSÉ CARREÑO FIGUERAS
COLLABORATOR
JOSE.CARRENO@ELHERALDODEMEXICO.COM
@CARRENOJOSE1