Biden formally wins Dem nomination at 3rd attempt

WASHINGTON: Standing in a school library with his wife, several grandchildren, and a few balloons, Democrat veteran Joe Biden formally secured the party's nomination for President on Tuesday after an online roll-call vote from 57 states and territories across the country on day two of the party's virtual convention.
“Thank you very, very much from the bottom of my heart. Thank you all. It means the world to me and my family, and I’ll see you on Thursday,” Biden, 77, said, after winning the nomination on his third shot, after failed attempts in 1988 and 2008. He will make a formal acceptance speech on Thursday.
In a speech from an empty classroom, his wife Jill Biden made an eloquent case for her husbands’ White House bid, saying schools, empty now because of the pandemic, “will ring out with laughter and possibility” if her husband is elected, and that the “The burdens we carry are heavy and we need someone with strong shoulders.”
“You can hear the anxiety that echoes down empty hallways,” Jill Biden said from a High School where she once taught English, referring to the havoc the coronavirus pandemic has brought and the Trump administration’s shambolic response to it. “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 confined to boxes on a computer screen.”
Two former Presidents Jimmy Carter, 92, and Bill Clinton, 72, also endorsed Biden in brief speeches, as did a slate of anti-Trump Republicans (notably Colin Powell and Cindy McCain, widow of late GOP Senator John McCain, who was Biden’s across-the-aisle friend in the Senate) and former administration officials who fell out with the Trump dispensation.
“If you want a president who defines the job as spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media, he’s your man,” Bill Clinton said in a five minute endorsement from his home in Chappaqua, NY. “Denying, distracting, and demeaning works great if you’re trying to entertain and inflame. But in a real crisis, it collapses like a house of cards.”
“At a time like this, the Oval Office should be a command center. Instead, it’s a storm center. There’s only chaos. Our party is united in offering you a very different choice: a go-to-work president. A down-to-earth, get-the-job-done guy,” he added. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are slated to speak over the next two days.
The lone discordant note on a day amid showcasing of party unity across the ideological and geographic spectrum came from firebrand New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortex, the youngest lawmaker on the Hill, who carrying the flag for the progressive left wing of the party, nominated Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and made no mention of Biden, in the 60 seconds she was allotted to speak.
She later explained she was not really a party pooper, that convention rules require roll call and nomination for every candidate that passes the delegate threshold (which Sanders did), and that she was asked to second his nomination.
“If you were confused no worries! I extend my deepest congratulations to Joe Biden. Let’s go win in November,” she tweeted.
The nomination process itself had echoes of the legendary Woody Guthrie’s anthem “This Land is your land.” Instead of delegates raucously shouting out support to the candidate under the banner of their states in a steamy convention hall, culminating in a balloon confetti celebration, it featured delegates remotely announcing their vote for Biden from stunning backdrops and locations across the vast nation: From cornfields in Iowa to cactus deserts in Arizona to Motown in Michigan and the Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada.
President Trump meanwhile was undertaking his own in-person campaign tour aimed at undercutting the Democrat online jamboree, telling his supporters –many without masks -- gathered in an airport hangar in Yuma, Arizona that "Joe Biden is the puppet of the radical left-wing movement that seeks the complete elimination of America’s borders and boundaries.”