Breathing a little easier

I had been driving around Sunday afternoon with only my thoughts for company. This isn’t an unusual occurrence, especially on brief trips and local errands. It’s a holdover from many years of owning a car with a blank space where the sound system should be. But just before I reached my final destination at 1:47 p.m., I had the impulse to switch on the radio. What I’d hoped would be music was instead a tangle of words as regular broadcasting had been interrupted by a special report that was already in progress.

I drove past my house to circle the block to catch up on the context I had missed: President Biden had officially ended his bid for reelection.

It was done.

By the time I’d parked and gone in the house, the president had given his running mate, Kamala Harris, his endorsement for the Democratic nomination.

You might recall a few weeks ago in this space I advocated for unity around President Biden. I had held out hope that the polls would shift and the electorate would sway back into some semblance of comfort. I held firmly to the belief that one more unprecedented occurrence in this journey could sink the ship.

The candidate’s “Age,” I opined at the top of my voice (while waving my arms at all the other Trump-rages that went under-scrutinized) is just another baseless spin akin to “Her Emails.”

In my daily life, as my husband can attest, I could not ignore what had become an increasingly common belief in my circle of friends: That Biden was too old and had to go.

My Pavlovian response amounted to a minutes-long rant about primary voters and the built-in backup president who was already on the ticket. In my estimation, this was a knee-jerk reaction to a non-issue with a simultaneous attempt to erase Kamala Harris from the line of succession.

If people were beginning to avoid me, I can assure them, I have no hard feelings.

Now that it was over and Biden was out, I felt remarkably calm.

I stood silently watching a steady stream of television analysts breathlessly reporting what they knew and guessing about what they didn’t. All of the things that were still possible at that moment were the worst and the best thing possible at the same time: Schrodinger’s Election.

What came next – a smooth cascade of support for a Harris ascendence as the presumptive nominee – surprised and delighted me. Watching it happen over the course of 24 hours seemed like a bit of luck if not strategic brilliance or outright magic.

Yet the gravity of the place we find ourselves as a country, with individual rights across vast demographics in jeopardy, may have guided more than strategic sleight-of-hand.

In his address to the American people on Wendsday, Biden told us he was passing the torch but that his fire wasn’t extinguished. He reminded us that we have the power within us to meet this moment when our choices matter the most.

I truly believe that we have witnessed our democracy in action in all its messy glory during these last few weeks. And with Aaron-Sorkin-like hindsight, I hope it will see how our job in all of this is to use our votes to choose hope over hate.

In doing so we may come to understand that two things can be true of the Democrat’s 11th-hour substitution: that Joe Biden is still a sharp and masterful leader and that we are ready for a change.