Tomorrow, Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling to the Milwaukee area for her first rally since announcing her presidential campaign Sunday evening. It will be her ninth visit to Wisconsin since becoming Vice President and her fifth visit to the state this year. We’re proud to welcome Vice President Harris to Wisconsin, a state she once called home, where she will rally excited supporters after announcing her presidential campaign.

The Vice President’s visit comes as every major Democratic elected leader in Wisconsin has endorsed her presidential campaign, including Governor Tony Evers and every Democratic statewide elected official; Senator Tammy Baldwin and Congressmembers Gwen Moore and Mark Pocan; both state legislative Democratic leaders, the Mayors of Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, and many cities across the state; the Democratic Party of Wisconsin; and over 90% and counting of Wisconsin delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Joe Biden is more than this moment.

The crisis the president has struggled with for the past month should not erase his some 50 years of near-continuous service to the American people. Among other things, he has delivered time and again for Black America. That will be Mr. Biden’s legacy.

It’s for that reason that Democrats must now support the woman who has stood alongside him throughout his presidency. In the 2020 election, more than 81 million Americans voted for her to lead in the event that the president could not. We should give her the support she deserves in this moment. The attacks on her, as the highest elected Black woman in American history, will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

I have been thinking in recent days about a conversation I had with Mr. Biden when he was running four years ago. He told me in private he decided to come out of a well-deserved retirement because of what he saw in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. A violent parade of neo-Nazis and Klansmen taking over the streets and a spineless president who could not muster the courage to denounce racism, disgusted him enough that in his late 70s, he decided to put himself and his family through the wringer to save the soul of our nation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/22/opinion/al-sharpton-kamala-harris.html

President Biden’s decision to exit the 2024 presidential election is a fitting coda for a man whose life has been devoted to public service. Mr. Biden has served the nation well as its president. By agreeing to step down when his term ends in January, he is greatly increasing the chance that his party is able to protect the nation from the dangers of returning Donald Trump to the presidency.

Majorities of Americans have consistently said they did not believe Mr. Biden could lead the nation for another term, citing longstanding fears about his age and fitness that have only grown in recent months. Had he remained at the top of the ticket, he would have greatly increased the likelihood of Mr. Trump retaking the presidency and potentially controlling both houses of Congress as well. Mr. Biden himself has consistently warned that specter presents a profound threat to the nation and its democratic traditions.

Mr. Biden has now done what Mr. Trump never will: He has placed the national interest above his own pride and ambition.

Mr. Biden’s departure gives Democrats an opportunity to refocus public attention from questions about the president’s fitness to the manifest moral and temperamental unfitness of Mr. Trump — and to the dangers of rearming him with the considerable powers of the presidency.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/opinion/editorials/joe-biden-drops-out-courage.html

On the cliffs of Normandy, in a small holding area, the president of the United States was looking out at the English Channel. It was only six weeks ago, on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and President Biden had just finished his remarks at the American cemetery atop Omaha Beach. Guests had been congratulating him on the speech, but he didn’t want to talk about himself. The moment was not about him; it was about the men who had fought and died there. “Today feels so large,” he told me. “This may sound strange — and I don’t mean it to — but when I was out there, I felt the honor of it, the sanctity of it. To speak for the American people, to speak over those graves, it’s a profound thing.” He turned from the view over the beaches and gestured back toward the war dead. “You want to do right by them, by the country.”

Mr. Biden has spent a lifetime trying to do right by the nation, and he did so in the most epic of ways when he chose to end his campaign for re-election. His decision is one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history, an act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington, who also stepped away from the presidency. To put something ahead of one’s immediate desires — to give, rather than to try to take — is perhaps the most difficult thing for any human being to do. And Mr. Biden has done just that.

To be clear: Mr. Biden is my friend, and it has been a privilege to help him when I can. Not because I am a Democrat — I belong to neither party and have voted for both Democrats and Republicans — but because I believe him to be a defender of the Constitution and a public servant of honor and of grace at a time when extreme forces threaten the nation. I do not agree with everything he has done or wanted to do in terms of policy. But I know him to be a good man, a patriot and a president who has met challenges all too similar to those Abraham Lincoln faced.

Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden. With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump’s presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He staved off an authoritarian threat at home, rallied the world against autocrats abroad, laid the foundations for decades of prosperity, managed the end of a once-in-a-century pandemic, successfully legislated on vital issues of climate and infrastructure and has conducted a presidency worthy of the greatest of his predecessors. History and fate brought him to the pinnacle in a late season in his life, and in the end, he respected fate — and he respected the American people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/22/opinion/joe-biden-american-hero.html