The theme of the Democratic National Convention’s first night was “Democrats Donald Trump has vanquished.” The night’s keynotes were delivered by two of them. Hillary Clinton, the nominee who fell to Trump in 2016, gave a rousing, passionate prime-time address. She’s out for vengeance, however vicarious it must be. Madam Secretary will never be Madam President, but she thirsts to see Kamala Harris do what she could not and stop Trump.

Yet Trump also knows a thing or two about revenge, and he’s already requited himself against the only opponent ever to beat him. That was Joe Biden, whose career Trump brought to a prompt end after their first—and only—in-person rematch on June 27 this year. Yes, Trump defeated Biden—not just on that fateful night, when Biden’s wounds were mostly self-inflicted, but in the following weeks when Trump’s advantage over Biden became so commanding that the incumbent president was forced out of the race. 

Not since 1968, when the tag team of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. deterred Lyndon Baines Johnson from seeking re-election, had a sitting president been beaten like this, before the general election even began. And while Johnson’s heart might not have been set on his seeking a second term, Biden’s very much was. Trump destroyed his dream.

The Joe Biden who addressed the convention last night was already a ghost, one fated to haunt the White House until January 20. He’s an angry, impotent spirit. Heedless of his naked hypocrisy, he linked Trump to neo-Nazis in one breath and insisted in the next that he had been a president for all Americans, “demonizing no one.” On the contrary, he demonized Republicans relentlessly, not just last night but throughout his administration. “Democracy has prevailed, democracy has delivered, and now democracy must be preserved!” he shouted—after he, the democratically chosen nominee of the Democratic Party’s voters, handed the nomination over to a replacement who had never won so much as a single presidential primary. 

Biden’s age and anger have been hard to distinguish for a long time, to be sure. Even in 2020 he was unable to speak with emotional inflection—instead, he would have to shout or lower his voice almost to a whisper to convey effect. Four years later, Biden’s powers of expression aren’t improved. His remarks were full of the fills and asides that plug the gaps where his thoughts should have been—not just little ones like “Listen…” and “Folks…” but repeated variations on “No, I’m serious, think about it, not a joke…” The speech was a chopped-up, 45-minute montage of Biden’s stump declamations. Perhaps he wanted to enjoy shouting them out one last time.

The contrast between Clinton and Biden was pitiful, but revealing. She’s 76 years old herself, but Clinton remains vigorous and sharp, if not exactly easy on the ears. She was better last night, in fact, than she ever was in 2016. So why had Biden made it to the Oval Office when she didn’t? Even four years ago, he was hardly fit for the job—a fact concealed only by the pandemic conditions in which the 2020 election took place.

But for Democrats seeking the White House, less is more. The ideal Democratic candidate in the 21st century wouldn’t be a human being at all, but a Shepard Fairey poster. Barack Obama was more than that, yet Obama the politician was never as appealing as Obama the religious icon; that is why he bucked the trend of reelected presidents and actually won fewer votes the second time around, when he had a record to defend in 2012, than he had received in 2008. That earlier, imaginary Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize eight months after his inauguration, at which time he had achieved practically nothing for the cause of peace. That didn’t matter—what mattered was the way the judges wanted to see him.

Clinton couldn’t be reduced to a feel-good progressive symbol, not given her votes on the Iraq War or her association with her husband’s neoliberal administration. So she faced a serious challenge for the 2016 nomination from Bernie Sanders. And while she couldn’t win the true love of the socialist left, she also struck Middle American voters as culturally elitist, especially after she wrote off millions of them as a “basket of deplorables.” She was too woke for the hardhats, but not woke enough to fully satisfy her party’s left wing, which expressed its reservations over her economics by backing Bernie.

In 2020, Democratic hopefuls like Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris upped the ante of identity politics, but not enough to break Bernie’s economic hold on the activist left. So the party’s grandees tried the opposite strategy—they threw their support behind an old white Irish-American Catholic from what was once the moderate wing of the party. JFK would make a good Shepard Fairey poster, and that’s what Biden would have to be. He was old—too old for the office, as was already apparent to critics back then—but he could serve as one last symbol of what the Democratic Party used to be. That was all the more convenient in a virtual campaign against Donald Trump, whose Republican populism had taken the middle ground that Democrats had vacated. 

The stratagem succeeded—in getting an incompetent elected president. But once elected, and once he had to face Trump in a fully real rather than virtual campaign, Biden couldn’t hide his incapacities any longer. He ceased to be a symbol once the reality couldn’t be ignored. And that meant the strategy that had put him in the Oval Office needed someone else to become the poster. With Bernie beaten, it was now safe to try Harris, promoting her as the second coming of Obama, with “hope” giving way to “joy.” The fact that the real Harris is anything but a joy to work with, as the unhappy experiences of so many of former staffers attest, need not matter, any more than Biden’s decrepitude mattered in 2020. The aim is to win—governing is an afterthought.

(This isn’t the case with the GOP and Trump, by the way: Republican grandees persist in thinking that some hypothetical generic candidate could be doing better than the Donald. Yet Republicans voters chose Trump, freely and fairly, first in 2016 and again this year, because they believe in what he stands for and will do if he’s in office. There’s plenty of symbolism attached to Trump—much of it distracting, or worse—but he fundamentally represents a new approach to government. Democrats like Biden actually acknowledge this, in their own polemical way, when they hype him as a threat to “democracy,” by which they actually mean rule by a progressive elite regardless of which party is nominally in power. That elite can rule as long as someone like Trump doesn’t come along and use politics to assail its position in the institutions that shape education and culture.)

Hillary Clinton is just woke enough to remain relevant to the 2024 party, and her invocations of glass ceilings and Geraldine Ferraro are marching music to the ears of the feminists who increasingly make up the 21st-century core of the party. Biden, on the other hand, is someone whose remarks can be put off until nearly 11:30 pm Eastern time. He may be president, but he only represents the past. Biden has been used and discarded. And he knows it, of course. “All this talk about how I’m angry at all those people who said I should step down, that’s not true,” he said at 12:07 am. The words belie the sentiment—“all this talk,” “all those people”; all this smoke, all this fire. Biden’s ablaze, even if, for the sake of his family, he can’t afford to say so. Their interests demand he keep the peace with the party that betrayed him—the party that allowed Donald Trump to beat him before the first ballot was cast.