Hakeem Jeffries had refused to discuss it.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” the top House Democrat would insist whenever reporters asked about the prospect of becoming the first Black speaker of the House, a historic distinction that eluded him two years earlier when Democrats suffered disappointing losses up and down the ballot, from then-Vice President Kamala Harris on down.
But after a historic blue wave swept the nation last night, flipping both chambers of Congress from Republican to Democratic control, the 56-year-old finally had his redemption.
“I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, a union household raised in the Cornerstone Baptist Church,” he told dozens of supporters at a hotel in Washington’s Navy Yard just before midnight. “I learned very early on that a setback was nothing more than a setup for a comeback. Today begins the great American Comeback.”