CHICAGO — Vice President Harris accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday with a powerful, patriotic speech.
But she also took on former President Trump with her combative style.
Harris has reached this point following an extraordinary series of events that began with the disastrous June 27 debate between Presidents Biden and Trump.
After Biden announced on July 21 that he would not run for a second term, Harris transformed from a vice president with low approval ratings and an uncertain future to a narrow front-runner in the race to become the first female president.
The vice president spoke for just under 40 minutes before a packed United Center of cheering Democrats.
The main points are:
Passionate Patriotism
It’s not surprising that candidates’ acceptance speeches strike a ritualized, patriotic tone.
But Harris did much more than that.
She positioned her presidential run as an effort to inspire new hope and unity at home and to boost respect for the United States around the world.
“I see a nation ready to move forward for the next step in our great American journey,” she said at the end of her speech. “I see an America holding fast to the fearless beliefs that built our nation and inspired the world.”
Harris’ critics will argue that describing her campaign in such broad terms is narcissistic, but the vice president is clearly building a campaign that relies on inspiration, something Biden has rather lacked.
At the same time, Harris criticized Trump and his allies as fundamentally unpatriotic, saying they tend to focus on what they see as the country’s shortcomings.
Harris said her opponents are always “putting America down and saying everything is awful.”
Read between the lines of the speech, the appeal to patriotism also seemed like an attempt to protect Harris, a black woman of South Asian descent, from attempts to “otherize” her.
Only time will tell if she will be successful in fighting off those attacks, but she tried hard.
Harris relies on the power of biography
The election will likely be decided by a small number of undecided voters, and it’s fair to assume that many of them don’t yet have a firm opinion of Harris.
She served as vice president for nearly four years and was a senator before that, but many Americans were unaware of the finer details of her background until Thursday.
Harris tried to assuage that curiosity in the most vivid parts of her speech, when she spoke about her family and upbringing.
She recalls a “house filled with laughter and the music of Aretha, Coltrane and Miles Davis.”
She spoke fondly of her childhood in a “beautiful working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers.”
Perhaps most moving of all, she recalls her mother as “a brilliant, five-foot-tall, brown woman with an accent,” before quickly adding, “As a child, I saw how the world sometimes treated my mother.”
Harris also said her early career as a prosecutor began with a difficult period in her adolescence when her friend, Wanda, confessed that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather.
Harris said she would later become a lawyer “to protect people like Wanda… everyone deserves safety, dignity and justice.”
Violent attack on President Trump
“We fight and we win” has become one of the slogans of Harris’ campaign and the convention, and the vice president launched a scathing attack on Thursday night.
In one of her most striking remarks, Harris called Trump a “clumsy man” but warned that “the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House will be extremely serious.”
She spoke harshly about President Trump’s actions around January 6, 2021.
She called Trump’s false claims of election fraud an attempt to “squander votes,” adding that as the rioting continued, “politicians from Trump’s own party begged him to disperse the mob and send help, but Trump did the opposite.”
There were also implicit but clear criticisms of Trump, such as when he promised veterans that he would “never disparage their service and sacrifice,” and when he vowed to “put country before party and myself” and follow a “peaceful transition of power.”
Equally notable is Harris’ assertion that Trump would go even further if elected to a second term.
“Imagine Donald Trump without the guardrails,” she warned.
Enthusiasm but no change in policy towards Gaza
The issue of Israel and Palestine has so far been the most divisive among Democrats, who are eager to unite around Harris.
The protests there did not reach the scale or level of disruption that some had expected.
Harris addressed the issue passionately in her speech, but there were no notable changes to policy.
She said it was time to get the hostage deal done and launched into a forceful defense of Israel’s right to self-defense.
“The Israeli people must never again face the horror unleashed on October 7 by the terrorist organization called Hamas,” she said.
She then acknowledged that “what happened in Gaza” – more than 40,000 people killed, according to local health officials – was “devastating.”
She called the suffering “heartbreaking” and said she hoped the Palestinian people would one day be recognized with the right to “self-determination.”
It will be a frustrating response for activists who are most upset by the Biden administration’s support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Harris is betting that ultimately she will lose few votes on this point, and believes failing to defend Israel could make her election even worse.
Coming to the forefront on abortion and defending immigration
Many Democrats expect abortion to be a major issue in this year’s election, with Republicans countering that immigration is their party’s greatest weakness.
So it’s not surprising that Harris has leaned strongly toward the former and sought to mitigate the political dangers of the latter.
She pointed to some of the effects of the invalidation of Roe v. Wade and argued that a second term for Trump would allow the former president and his allies to “restrict access to birth control, ban medication abortions, and enact nationwide anti-abortion laws.”
On immigration, she noted that President Trump played a central role in blocking a proposed bipartisan border deal earlier this year.
She asserted that she recognizes the importance of border security and suggested there is a need to “reform our broken immigration system.”
Critics will say such a promise is hackneyed, and Republicans believe it will leave them politically vulnerable to Harris.
But she at least made her case forcefully and tried to push back against Trump.
