I thought Joe Biden gave an effective acceptance speech last night, and one section resonated with me personally. I’ve been taking AmTrak between Washington and New York quite a lot in the past year. In fact, I’m taking a train tonight.
There’s truth in the romanticism of train travel. You wind through cities and neighborhoods and see things you can’t see from our interstate highway system. The stretch through Baltimore is especially eye-opening. From the tracks, you can see block after block of depressed neighborhoods. Some houses have boarded up windows. You can see people mingling on small porches and children playing in the street.
Biden describe his commute this way:
I’ve never seen a time when Washington has watched so many people get knocked down without doing anything to help them get back up. Almost every night, I take the train home to Wilmington, sometimes very late. As I look out the window at the homes we pass, I can almost hear what they’re talking about at the kitchen table after they put the kids to bed.
Like millions of Americans, they’re asking questions as profound as they are ordinary. Questions they never thought they would have to ask:
“Should mom move in with us now that dad is gone?”
“Fifty, sixty, seventy dollars to fill up the car?”
“Winter’s coming. How we gonna pay the heating bills?”
“Another year and no raise?”
“Did you hear the company may be cutting our health care?”
“Now, we owe more on the house than it’s worth. How are we going to send the kids to college?”
“How are we gonna be able to retire?”
That’s the America that George Bush has left us, and that’s the future John McCain will give us.
Biden’s speaks from ground level. He effectively paints a picture he is almost sitting with families at the kitchen table with his fellow Americans — hearing and sharing in their concerns.
Now contrast this to the closing paragraphs of Dick Cheney’s acceptance speech in 2000. He spoke about flying in a helicopter over Washington and Northern Virginia:
When you make that trip from Andrews to the Pentagon, and you look down on the city of Washington, one of the first things you see is the Capitol, where all the great debates that have shaped 200 years of American history have taken place. You fly down along the Mall and see the monument to George Washington, a structure as grand as the man himself. To the north is the White House, where John Adams once prayed “that none but honest and wise men may ever rule under this roof.” Next you see the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, the third president and the author of our Declaration of Independence. And then you fly over the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, this greatest of presidents, the man who saved the union. Then you cross the Potomac, on approach to the Pentagon. But just before you settle down on the landing pad, you look upon Arlington National Cemetery its gentle slopes and crosses row on row.
I never once made that trip without being reminded how enormously fortunate we all are to be Americans, and what a terrible price thousands have paid so that all of us and millions more around the world might live in freedom.
This passage has always bothered me because that italicized sentence includes a lie. Anyone who has ever been to Arlington National Cemetery knows that you don’t see “crosses row on row.” The headstones are tombstone-shaped. From the air, you won’t be able to make out crosses — or any other religious symbol for that matter — as you can see in this aerial photo.
(Cheney’s sentiment also proved dishonest, of course, because the Bush-Cheney policies have betrayed the legacy of these American heroes by asking our men and women in uniform to sacrifice not for freedom, but for incompetence and false objectives.)
But thanks to Biden’s words, I now realize that Cheney’s words were essentially true. Cheney and Bush saw it as their role to observe America from the air. While some Democrats have been getting tweaked for not caring about the so-called “fly-over states” — those “red states in the center of the country — Bush and Cheney have been conducting fly-overs of American families. We saw it when Bush rode Air Force One over New Orleans after Katrina. This is the enduring metaphor for this administration. They look down on real American households, never lingering long enough to mentally and spiritually internalize the family’s concerns.
I know that Biden’s speech, like all political speeches, is a product of persuasion and hyperbole. I may be nothing more than a wide-eyed true believer. But for me, at least, his words had power.
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