Democrats pass the torch while playing the oldies

Officially, the theme of the Democratic National Convention is about turning the page.

The week will end with Vice President Kamala Harris being celebrated as the Democratic nominee as it began with President Joe Biden being ushered off the stage in an earlier last hurrah than he had anticipated a little over a month ago.

This switch-out has breathed new life into the presidential campaign, both expanding the electoral map for Democrats and narrowing the gap in the polls. Biden was trailing former President Donald Trump by 3.1 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average when he dropped out. Harris is leading by 1.5.

Instead of playing defense in Virginia, New Hampshire, and New Mexico, Democrats are on offense in North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia, all states that looked irretrievably lost to Biden last month.

Democrats also finally have a bench of young governors they can turn to in the future. After years of being battered in midterm elections, the Democratic cupboard was so bare and many of the options so left-wing that the party had little choice but to turn to an aging Biden to oppose Trump in 2020. The relative youngsters, including Harris, didn’t seem up to the task and the top alternative to Biden was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a committed socialist who was even older.

The torch is being passed in Chicago, and Democrats are completing the generational change in leadership they began when their nearly all-octogenarian House leadership team departed after the midterm elections, led by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Out with the old, in with the new.

Yet this message is complicated by the fact that the speakers lineup has been dominated by the Obamas, the Clintons, the Bidens, and Pelosi, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who was first elected to Congress the year Ronald Reagan won the presidency, joining them for good measure.

Republicans are often mocked, sometimes even by younger or more populist conservatives, for their reverence for Reagan 44 years after the 1980 presidential election. But Democrats have long engaged in similar behavior, venerating Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy for decades. Biden wanted to be compared to FDR, who died in office while the current president was still a small child, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Biden compared Trump to Herbert Hoover, a line that was dated by the time he was first elected to the Senate in 1972, the same year Republican presidential runner-up Nikki Haley was born.

Former President Bill Clinton sought to mock Trump’s perceived selfishness by framing the 2024 election as a choice between “‘We the People’ versus ‘Me, Myself, and I.’” If the latter is a hip-hop reference, the De La Soul album featuring that track, 3 Feet High and Rising, was released in 1989. This wouldn’t be anything new for Clinton: His 1992 campaign song, “Don’t Stop,” a symbol of his hipness and youth, was already 15 years old at the time.

The only non-boomer on either ticket this year is Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), which is probably why Democrats have scoured conservative podcasts for evidence that Trump’s running mate is the second coming of Tomas de Torquemada.

More importantly, Pelosi and former President Barack Obama played as large a role in forcing the switch from Biden to Harris as any of the younger Democratic leaders to whom they had ostensibly passed the torch themselves. And this probably understates their influence. Pelosi is at least still elected by the voters in her mostly San Francisco-based congressional district.

It is nevertheless critical for Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) to be presented as the candidates of change. Trump already served one term in the White House. Biden became so unpopular that a plurality of voters seemed prepared to brush aside warnings about the impending death of democracy to give Trump another term.

Democrats are always seeking an association with vigor, freshness, and youth, which they can more easily obtain through pop culture and A-list celebrity endorsements, whatever the actual ages of their candidates. But they are constantly searching for a new New Deal, new New Frontier, or new Great Society just as surely as Republicans seek to imitate the Reagan tax cuts. Harris has floated price controls in response to the economic conditions that preceded Reaganomics in the first place.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.