Exit Ghost- Watching Joe Biden say good-bye.

Watching Joe Biden say good-bye. Like a lot of people, I find myself affectionate toward a woman I had little use for 20 minutes ago. The normal amount of excitement about Kamala Harris is the amount that was shown her in 2020 during a bloodless, procedurally banal primary. Harris is a former prosecutor with cop energy, a little remote, and not, in Washington, particularly loved.

- By Kerry Howley

People don’t survive to tell the tale of what it’s like to live through senescence. We can only look on from the outside, which most of us, most of the time, decline to do, though on July 24, millions put themselves through the agony of watching a man flicker in and out of focus. The performance was one of immense, sustained effort. It was impossible not to be aware of his corporeal form, the way his body had come a little loose from his mind. What are his arms doing now? And his eyeballs? Should he blink? As his hands with unbearable slowness clenched and unclenched, he said all the expected things. Biden’s words long ago ceased to matter. If you had simply read the transcript of this speech, you would know less than if you’d spent that time communing with the moon.

“I revere this office,” he said, but the spaces weren’t there between the words; they fused—reverethisoffice—into a single statement. It did not say: I revere this office. It said: I got through this line. I’m on to the next one. You can breathe now. He came back, he faded, he found a mostly natural way to point and say something about the economy. His eyes were unnervingly fixed on the teleprompter as if the sight line were a string holding him erect. “That time and place is now,” he said, tapped the table, swallowed audibly. It was a little moment of vigor that made you wonder if he had overspent himself, borrowed too much from the future.