The best, worst and weirdest moments of Democrats’ final convention night

Joe Biden wasn’t going to get the minute-long roar of a packed arena when declared he would accept the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday.

So instead of giving TV viewers at home a typical convention speech without thousands of delegates cheering him on, Biden’s campaign and Democratic officials instead staged his acceptance speech like a presidential address from the White House.

The camera stayed tight on the former vice president throughout his remarks. Unlike Kamala Harris’ speech on Wednesday night, he wasn’t glancing side-to-side at an audience that wasn’t there, and there weren’t cutaways to a “convention floor” populated only by a handful of reporters and staff.

For Biden — who has been all but sidelined from the campaign trail because of the coronavirus pandemic — it brought him into Americans’ living room, where we’ve all been for so much of the past five months. He delivered an impassioned, almost intimate appeal calling on Americans to reject what he called the “season of darkness” wrought by President Donald Trump’s leadership.

Here are POLITICO’s superlatives from the fourth and final night of the Democratic convention:

Best stagecraft: Joe Biden

Everything that didn’t work about the speeches during the course of the week — which, to be fair, mostly went off without major hitches — succeeded for Biden.

Those awkward seconds before the speaker begins talking, or the speakers who started before the announcer finished introducing them? Solved by the stage lights, which came up to signal Biden to walk forward and begin speaking.

The wide shots of the mostly-empty event space during Harris’ acceptance speech? Eliminated to keep the focus on Biden.

Biden was standing, not seated, for his speech. But on the screen, with his hands often folded in front of him on top of the lectern, it otherwise could’ve been an Oval Office address. On NBC, Savannah Guthrie compared it to a “fireside chat,” the frequent radio addresses President Franklin Roosevelt delivered during the Great Depression and World War II.

As for the content of his speech, Biden delivered a stinging indictment of Trump’s handling of the virus, along with the call for unity that has characterized his campaign since its beginning last April. In his announcement last year, he cast a second Trump term as a grave threat to the country’s “soul,” and he used the pandemic to underscore what four more years of Trump as president would look like — without ever actually using the president’s name.

“This president, if he’s reelected, you know what will happen,” Biden said. “Cases and deaths will remain far too high. More mom-and-pop businesses will close their doors — this time for good. Working families will struggle to get by, and yet, the wealthiest 1 percent will get tens of billions of dollars in new tax breaks.”

Shortest acceptance speech: Joe Biden again

Biden has not been known for brevity during his nearly five decades in politics. But according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California-Santa Barbara, his speech — which didn’t include the typical applause breaks — took him only 24 minutes and 28 seconds to deliver. That’s less than half as long as the 57-minute speech Hillary Clinton gave just up the road in south Philadelphia four years ago.

Veteran convention watchers will not be surprised to learn that Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, owns the modern record for the longest Democratic acceptance speech: one hour and six minutes, during his reelection campaign in 1996.

Trump has the overall record, set four years ago in Cleveland. The then-first-time candidate took an hour and 15 minutes to deliver his acceptance speech.

Most ‘Brady Bunch’ moment: The defeated candidates gather

It’s the story of a guy named Cory.

Unless your party is renominating the incumbent president, the quadrennial conventions always feature vanquished candidates coming together to support the victor of the primaries. (Or throwing a curve ball and getting booed off the stage, in the case of Ted Cruz.)

But the video presentation of seven onetime Biden opponents sharing stories about their interactions with him on the trail had a “Brady Bunch” or “Zoom call” feel to it: boxes on the screen featuring all the candidates Biden ultimately defeated, in a conversation hosted by a wise-cracking Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.).

“You could think of this sort of like ‘Survivor,’ on the out interviews of all the people that got voted off the island,” Booker said in the first seconds of the video, as the other six Democrats awkwardly chuckled along in their boxes.

The video included the third appearance by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who spoke on Monday and participated in Minnesota's roll call segment on Tuesday. Conspicuously absent? Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).

Biggest ‘Huh?’: Mike Bloomberg

This superlative goes to the former New York City mayor for a weird utterance when he questioned Trump’s insistence that he should be reelected because of the strength of the economy before the virus struck. (The text of his speech as prepared for his delivery included both a question mark and an exclamation point: “Huh?!”)

But it could also apply to why Bloomberg was in the final night’s convention lineup in the first place.

It was prime real estate for the entire Democratic Party, less than a half-hour before Biden’s speech. And it was reserved for a billionaire who didn’t identify as a Democrat until recently — and whose $1 billion bid for the presidency flamed out in a matter of months, under the withering criticism of his liberal opponents.

When he was running for the Democratic nomination, Bloomberg pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars even if he lost to defeat Trump. Some of that is already happening. Earlier this week, an adviser to the former New York mayor told The Washington Post he would spend $60 million to bolster Democrats’ House majority — which is generally considered secure.

Democrats want more, though. The party, which gave Bloomberg a coveted speaking spot on Thursday, is hoping he will spend to help down the ballot in the fight for key state legislative chambers, or perhaps to capture the Senate — even though Bloomberg helped protect some GOP senators in 2016, like Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Biggest ‘Get out!’ homage: Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Early in the broadcast, the program shifted from a segment on Biden’s Roman Catholic faith and a tribute to the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the civil rights icon who died last month. Host Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ segue was clunky, to say the least.

“Just remember: Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t even need tear gas and a bunch of federalized troops to help him get there. No one fought harder for your right to vote than John Lewis,” she said.

Unlike the women who served as TV studio hosts for the first three nights of the convention — Eva Longoria, Tracee Ellis Ross and Kerry Washington — Louis-Dreyfus is a veteran of three classic comedy shows, “Saturday Night Live,” “Seinfeld” and “Veep.” And she brought a number of barbs aimed at Trump throughout the night — some which landed better than others.

The Where’s Waldo award: Hunter Biden

Trump and his allies have been asking, “Where’s Hunter?” — an attempt to turn the past business dealings of Biden’s son into a campaign weapon. On Thursday, after months of public seclusion, Hunter Biden emerged via video to help introduce his father’s acceptance speech.

Hunter appeared with his half-sister, Ashley Biden, to tout their father’s character and conviction leading up to a 10-minute biographical video that was aired on most TV networks. It was a rare appearance for Hunter, who also has also drawn a series of sordid headlines about his personal life, including taking up with Beau Biden’s widow after his brother’s death.

Ashley Biden, meanwhile, created headaches for her father early during his service as vice president, when tabloid stories swirled about her drug use as a young woman.

Biden’s family and his personal tragedies were a constant theme of the course of four days, as they have been since he entered the national political scene when he won election to the Senate at age 29 — and his then-wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident a month later.

Video clips throughout the night featured his son Beau, the then-Delaware state attorney general who died of cancer in 2015. Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor who ran for president, spoke about Beau Biden during his address on Thursday. And Harris spoke Wednesday about her service with Beau when she was California’s state attorney general, prior to her joining the Senate.

Most unintentional metaphor: Steph Curry

When it was announced earlier Thursday that Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry, his wife, Ayesha, and his daughters, Riley and Ryan, would appear in a video clip to endorse Biden and urge viewers to vote, it was easy to see a parallel between the Warriors’ basketball exploits and the Democratic Party’s current plight.

Famously, the Warriors followed up their 2015 championship by winning a league-record 73 out of 82 games the following season. Then, in the 2016 NBA Finals, Curry and his team won three of the first four games against the Cleveland Cavaliers — only to blow that 3-to-1 lead to LeBron James and the Cavaliers and lose the title in a shocking upset.

The Warriors would come back and win the championship in 2017, beating James and the Cleveland squad in the third straight match-up between the two teams.

POLITICO’s James Arkin remarked Thursday that Democrats could learn something from Curry “about losing narrowly in 2016 after underestimating the Midwest and changing it up next time around.”

Of the six states that Trump flipped from Democrats in 2016, five are in or near the Midwest: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa.