Her speech is expected to highlight the personal side of former Vice President Joe Biden as a loving father who pulled his family back together after the death of his first wife, Neilia, and 1-year-old daughter Naomi in a car accident in 1972. She will also speak to the other great tragedy of Biden's life: the death of his son Beau Biden, the former Delaware attorney general, from brain cancer in 2015 when Biden was serving as vice president.
"How do you make a broken family whole? The same way you make a nation whole: with love and understanding, and with small acts of compassion; with bravery; with unwavering faith," Jill Biden plans to say, according to excerpts of her speech that were released by the party.
"There are times when I couldn't imagine how he did it -- how he put one foot in front of the other and kept going," she plans to say. "But I've always understood why he did it. ... He does it for you."
The former second lady will also speak as a teacher, delivering her speech from Brandywine High School in Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught English. She will speak to the difficulties and uncertainties that many parents are facing as they decide whether to send their children back to school in the middle of a pandemic.
"You can hear the anxiety that echoes down empty hallways," she will say. "There's no scent of new notebooks or freshly waxed floors. The rooms are dark and the bright young faces that should fill them are confined to boxes on a computer screen."
While her husband was vice president, Jill Biden continued to teach English full time at a community college in Virginia. She earned her doctorate in education from the University of Delaware in 2007.
With the night's programming centered on the theme "uniting America" the keynote speech will take an unusual format featuring 17 rising stars in the Democratic Party. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the star of the freshman class, will also speak and leaders will conduct the virtual roll call formally selecting Biden as the nominee of the Democratic Party.
Former President Bill Clinton will play an unusually peripheral role at a Democratic convention, a venue where he has been a star performer since the 1980s, including during his own campaigns, his speech in 2012 that made the case for a second term for President Barack Obama in a way the incumbent never managed and speaking about his wife in 2016.
The 42nd President's influence in a party that has moved left in recent years has waned and his centrist policies on welfare and crime are now frowned upon by many progressives. The #MeToo era has cast his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in an even more dubious light.
But Clinton will recall his forensic political skills with a takedown of the current President.
"Donald Trump says we're leading the world. Well, we are the only major industrial economy to have its unemployment rate triple," Clinton is to say, according to an excerpt of his remarks released by organizers.
"At a time like this, the Oval Office should be a command center. Instead, it's a storm center. There's only chaos. Just one thing never changes -- his determination to deny responsibility and shift the blame. The buck never stops there."
The evening will also feature a video about the cross-party friendship between Biden and late Sen. John McCain, narrated by the Arizona Republican's widow, Cindy, a senior Democratic official told CNN.
The Senate veterans once traded barbs on foreign policy but bonded across party lines in a friendship dating to when McCain served as a military aide after returning from years as a prisoner in the Vietnam War.
The former vice president delivered a powerful eulogy for his friend at his memorial service after he died of brain cancer in 2018.
"My name is Joe Biden. I'm a Democrat. And I love John McCain," he said.
The video, entitled "An Unlikely Friendship," may trigger President Donald Trump, who long feuded with McCain and still brings up his thumbs-down vote three years ago that scuppered a Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare.
Another prominent Republican -- former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who served under President George W. Bush -- will offer a video testimonial about Biden during Tuesday night's program as part of the Democrats' effort to draw in Republicans and independents who are frustrated with Trump's leadership and his divisive tactics.
Though Powell, who was also chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush, served under Republican administrations, he has voted for Democrats in the three most recent presidential elections.
In his video message, Powell will say that America needs a commander in chief who will take care of US troops the same way that he would take care of his own family.
"For Joe Biden that doesn't need teaching, it comes from the experience he shares with millions of military families sending his beloved son off to war and praying to God he would come home safe," Powell will say in the taped address.
Entering the conventions, Biden was leading Trump 51% to 42% nationally, according to a CNN Poll of Polls on the general election matchup. But a CNN poll conducted by SSRS released Sunday showed a tighter race, with Biden at 50% and Trump at 46%.
One reason why Trump's standing had improved in the CNN poll released Sunday was that he had solidified his support among more conservative voters. Back in June, 8% of Republican or Republican-leaning independents said they would back Biden -- but in the new poll only 4% planned to support the former vice president.
The poll showed an opportunity for Democrats in the final months, however, because Trump's voters were more likely to say they could change their minds (12% said they could) than Biden's (only 7% said so).
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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August 19, 2020 at 07:17AM
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Jill Biden takes center stage as Democrats focus on uniting the country on convention's second night - CNN
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