Joe biden

Chicago Everyone in the Democrats’ Convention centre – a bleakly corporate sports stadium on the edge of Chicago – is giggling. It’s an atmosphere properly described as bonkers. The Democrats have gone from wake to wedding party with no intervening period of sobriety. People whoop as they meet, knowing how miserable they were prepared to feel with Joe Biden still on the ticket, and how freed from misery they are now. I thought Chicago an oddly dangerous choice for the Democrats (1968 and all that) but I was wrong: I had forgotten what a great city it is. The centre is grand, the hotels capacious and snooty, one of them

About five minutes ago, the one Democrat more certain to lose to Donald Trump than Joe Biden was his widely ridiculed vice president. Party wonks despaired that their elderly candidate was handicapped by a veep whose prospective ascendence to the presidency terrified voters. Dems anguished about needing to sideline an unpopular ‘woman of colour’. Remember the many theories about how best to get shed of the woman – perhaps with the booby prize of a Supreme Court seat? Five minutes ago, Republicans gleefully celebrated that, by honouring the crude rubrics of identity politics, Democrats had burdened themselves with an incompetent diversity hire. I, too, briefly shrugged off Biden’s endorsement of

Believe it or not, I planned to write the gist of this column before Saturday night. However, a caveat. Unlike the newly christened Republican VP pick, J.D. Vance, I don’t directly blame hyperventilating Democratic rhetoric for last weekend’s attempt on Trump’s life. Responsibility rests with the would-be assassin. Nevertheless, the party’s off-the-charts argumentation has rankled me for the past year. From the get-go, Biden has framed his campaign as a defence of ‘our democracy’, echoing Britons’ sacred obligation to lock themselves in their cupboards to save ‘our NHS’. For Democrats, what’s at stake in this election is nothing less than the perpetuation of America’s form of government. Donald Trump’s threat

Last week, Lionel Shriver wrote a characteristically sharp piece about the narcissism of the ageing Joe Biden, egged on by his wife, in standing again for the presidency of the United States. The Roman poet Lucretius (1st century bc) might well have offered a similar opinion, but he would have presented it as an example of a universal and destructive human failing which he described in his magnificent poem On the Nature of the Universe – the dread of death. Romans, Lucretius claimed, feared the whole idea of dying, because they believed that they had an eternal soul which, after death, would be subject to hideous tortures and punishments if they had been