“History says, Don’t hope on this side of the grave.

“But then, once in a lifetime, The longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme”.  –  The Irish Poet Seamus Heaney

The thing that most got my attention during the Democratic National Convention was this image I can’t shake: the wussy empath and these fierce women.

This is the unprecedented,  very radical, and significant new coalition forming around the Democratic Party for the first time in my lifetime.

This once unimaginable gathering – they are calling it a Coalition Of Conscience – is what is going to save our democracy.

This is what Donald Trump could not imagine and cannot understand how to fight.

I’ve noticed this very curious thing.

So many people are afraid these days, biting their nails and fretting over each day’s news.

But Kamala Harris is not afraid. The moms are not afraid. The black women mayors are not afraid. The Black Lives Matter protesters are not afraid. And the Me Too women are not afraid. And surprise, neither are the suburban women.

Trump practically lives off of frightening people.

He has no emotional or intellectual strategy to fend off women like this, he never knew them, was never around them, cannot imagine them as tough and strong as he is, let alone smarter.

Wow, I thought, watching Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser speak. They are not afraid at all.

They shine with spirit and joy, as befits people whose time has come. Biden’s time is long past, but sometimes, a tidal wave can rise, and hope and history rhyme.

The Democratic Party has never been nearly as united as the Republicans. Because they are a somewhat open tent, they are necessarily a collection of very different and usually quarreling tribes.

All Republicans are not alike, but they are getting more so – white and wealthy and wary of anyone else. They are almost shrinking before us as their world crumbles, and the world takes a different shape.

Can’t you feel it and see it?

In this new reality, it’s the men who wear their hearts and souls on their sleeves, and it’s the women who take to the streets and blow tear gas away with leaf-blowers and chase off the men with the guns and defy Presidents and Governors who are dumb and blind enough to challenge them.

The only thing as strong as they were was the young man who delivered an astonishingly brave speech, 13-year-old Brayden Harrington, who stutters and who Joe Biden befriended during a campaign speech.

You couldn’t possibly make this kid up or create him. It was a gift from the Gods for Biden, a sign they are smiling down on him. I watched it a dozen times and cried twice. I’ll watch it again.

I’ll never again fret about riding a bike.

Think of it, a male Presidential candidate running on empathy, surrounded by attack dogs and bodyguards who are almost all women. Who can deny that change is coming? Isn’t it here?

I would hate to be on the other side of Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris,  the words stung like steel; they never stopped smiling or being warm.

Poor Trump, even when he thinks he is being nice, he is mean.

This is no longer work for me; this is a joy to be able to see and watch.

There could hardly be a sharper contrast to Joe Biden than Trump, busy preparing a gloom and doom convention that is not going to be about light and empathy.

When they talk about fighting for the soul of the country, they are not kidding.

Trump’s convention is almost sure to be overly and strangely produced because he is producing it. And just as he can’t let anyone else deal with his pandemic; he won’t let anyone else deal with his nominating convention.

His tragic flaw.

This year, everything about politics has been upended. I would be sorry to miss it.

It was startling to see grumpy and resentful Bernie Sanders cheerleading for Joe Biden every single night. It was shocking to see radicals, progressives, liberals – people who might never have given Joe Biden a look support him, promise to vote for him, urge their followers to vote for him, and zip up their many complaints and reservations about old establishment Democrats like him.

It was easy to forget that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her powerful new progressive army have been knocking off old establishment farts like Biden all over the country. But she insists she is supporting him.

Ocasio-Cortez is the future of the Democratic Party; she is brilliant, tough as nails, gorgeous and eloquent, as lethal a combination in politics as there can be. She is not ready for the Presidency, and the country is not ready for her. Why should she be? She just turned 30.

But she will learn and grow and almost certainly will be the star of her own convention one day.

Like her or not, she has her finger right on the pulse of the New America. She has all the tools, she’s the Queen of this new nation.

But not yet.  This is the moment for Joe. In the same cause.

Ocasio-Cortez is supporting Joe, perhaps through gritted teeth, but still. Another gift from Trump to Joe Biden. When our President told Ocasio-Cortez to go back where she came from, it was the equivalent of the Queen knighting a member of her kingdom.

At the end of the Democratic Convention Week, I found myself marveling at the forces massing to unseat the Mad King: a soft and touchy-feely man and some of the toughest women in American public life.

If it weren’t for Donald Trump, Biden would seem sappy. Instead, he is our salvation.

This is the world turned upside down.

This is the equivalent of the great Hobbit Army rushing across the plains to crush the Trolls. This is the real legacy of Donald Trump, who will not be seizing control of the country.

When I was a reporter, I spent a lot of time in Irish Bars in Boston and Philadelphia. There was always a Joe Biden there, a gregarious, friendly and empathetic Irishman holding forth at the bar or one of the tables.

These Irish men were much loved, they talked about their families, they listened to everybody’s story, they adored their wives and grandchildren, they love poems and stories, and they always had an ear and eye out or a $5 spot for a kid in need or trouble or a beer.

They were just the nicest men, never as macho as the other men, careful in their drinking, eager to get home to their kids, and always – always – keen on helping somebody who was in need.

They didn’t mind a drink or two.

Men like this don’t usually get to run for President, and Biden almost failed again. The truth is, they are just too nice.  They are the soft men of politics; much loved but always pushed aside or run over.

If not for Donald Trump, Biden wouldn’t even be running now, let alone leading. And these women have formed an iron ring around him. He can be as nice as he wants, they are all street fighters behind those smiles.

Biden tried three times before and didn’t make it. He was getting his brains beat out in the primaries until a lot of Black Women in South Carolina – they knew him as the man who stood behind Barack Obama, the President they never expected to see –  voted for him in mass.

It is a mystery to me that so many people would rather be frightened then engaged, while the people who are engaged are not frightened at all.

These women turned defeat into victory for Biden.

Then a lot of other tough women came running, towards the battlefield, not away from it  – Black Lives Matter, the moms, the black mayors, the new congresswomen,  Me Too people, suburban women who have blown away the housewife stereotypes of them, and Biden’s charismatic new partner Kamala Harris, who has given all of those women a reason to join this army.

She is the balance and the sword.

Like Biden, Frodo was a happy, singing Hobbit before the war.

Afterward, he couldn’t return to being happy. He had to go and do the right thing. As Heaney wrote in his poem, a compelling old story, but we never stop loving it.

Frodo had been stabbed poisoned and lost a finger. Like his creator J.R.R. Tolkien, he had survived tragedy and suffering a new and different man.

So did Biden, who lost his first wife and child, and then his beloved son.

I’ve always understood that the only men I like and can be friends with were either tortured as children or humiliated as adults.

Biden speaks to that. He’s just so nice.

Pain opens men up when almost nothing else does, and Biden has had lots of pain, he has lived to see his moment, his rhyme with history, come around to him.

Trump was ranting all week about how Joe Biden doesn’t come out of his basement to fight.

But he doesn’t get it.

Trump simply can’t focus on anything but himself, and he knows nothing about himself. His self-destruction was inevitable. As Biden demonstrates his warmth, Trump sets one Fire Tornado after another.

As President Obama said eloquently, and in a few words, he just can’t.

Biden is happy as a clam sitting at home in Deleware, calling every one of his children and grandchildren every day, going through his contacts to check on the hundreds of people he befriended while campaigning to see how they are.

Every day he sits down there, he seems nicer and safer, the national grandpa we have been yearning for. Maybe our Mister Rogers, direct but always loving.  Outside of  Delaware, the storm rages. Trump just seems crazier and meaner. Enough says a weary nation.

But with Donald Trump, there is never enough.

This isn’t surprising any longer, but it is still worth noting because it is why Donald Trump will lose this election in November, for all the intrigue and plotting and subverting of democracy.

He doesn’t know how to be a human. This year, a President who can’t be human can’t be President next time around.

His walks up the ramp with Melania are painful, I get cold just watching them, and it’s impossible to imagine Trump canceling a trip or golf outing to do something with his son, who seems as detached and remote as the Ice Queen Melania herself.

We’ve talked and fantasized and plotted for years about what our country would be like if women came to power and had real authority.

I am not going to waste my remaining years worrying, I have a window seat on history, and I will soak it up like one of those frosted beers those sweet Irish men loved so much.

Do not be afraid. We are in good hands. Listen to the sound of hope and history rhyming.