The 2024 Democratic National Convention wrapped up Thursday, with Vice President Kamala Harris giving the best speech she possibly could, galvanizing a Democratic Party that is absolutely determined to not make the same mistakes as it did in 2016.
Harris Thrills the Crowd at Chicago’s Mandatory-Joy Convention
Conservatives likely hated the substance, but that was probably about as good a performance as Kamala Harris can give. I know a lot of you out there want to hear that it stunk and she was terrible, but Harris was poised and self-assured, confidently and competently delivering a well-crafted speech.
With that said, her remarks were highly selective in which issues they addressed. Words that never appeared in Harris’s acceptance speech include “inflation,” “energy,” “gas,” “oil,” “trade,” “fentanyl,” “addiction,” “deficit,” “illegal” (whether in reference to immigrants or anything else), “Constitution,” “Covid,” “pandemic,” “vaccine,” “infrastructure,” “roads,” “bridges,” “green” (whether in reference to the “green new deal,” or in any other context), “affirmative action,” “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “domestic” (whether in reference to terrorism or in any other context), “antisemitism,” “Afghanistan,” “Taliban,” “Taiwan,” “Uyghur,” “Mexico,” “Houthi,” “Hezbollah,” “nuclear weapons,” “transgender,” “nonbinary,” “campus,” “university,” “black,” “United Nations,” “diplomacy,” “human rights,” “migrant,” “asylum,” “library,” “minimum wage,” “income inequality,” “unemployment,” “poverty,” “homeless,” “religion,” “Christian,” “Jew” or “Jewish,” “environment,” and “welfare.”
This was a terrific speech for a challenger running against the failed record of President Biden. Harris pledged:
As president, I will bring together labor and workers, small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs, grow our economy and lower the cost of everyday needs — like health care, housing, and groceries.We will provide access to capital for small-business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders. We will end America’s housing shortage and protect Social Security and Medicare.
Even a candidate as erratic as Donald Trump can recognize the counterpunch: You’re the current vice president. Where have you been? Why haven’t you done any of that for the past four years? Why can’t you do any of that now? What is it that you want to do that Joe Biden won’t let you do?
Harris promised, “as commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” I guess the vice president was a quiet internal dissenter to the defense cuts that the Biden administration kept proposing. These cuts. Those cuts. And those cuts over there.
Perhaps the best part came early:
I wanted to be a lawyer and when it came time to choose the type of law I would pursue, I reflected on a pivotal moment in my life. When I was in high school, I started to notice something about my best friend Wanda. She was sad at school and there were times she didn’t want to go home. So, one day I asked if everything was alright. And she confided in me that she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. And I immediately told her she had to come stay with us. And she did.That is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor: To protect people like Wanda, because I believe everyone has a right to safety, to dignity, and to justice.
The years 2019 and 2020 were just about the worst possible years to run for the Democratic presidential nomination as a longtime prosecutor. Before there was George Floyd, there was “the police acted stupidly,” Ferguson, and President Obama declaring “when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” A few Democrats contended that “abolish the police” was merely a metaphor for reform; an activist helpfully wrote a New York Times op-ed, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” The Democratic Party’s suspicion of police and the justice system ran deep, and some progressives argue that Harris’s criminal-justice record is what torpedoed her 2020 presidential campaign.
So, it was a little jarring to hear Harris declare last night, “After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security.” Where was this four years ago?
Of course, a lot of Harris’s lines generated applause; no doubt they’ve been poll-tested and focus-grouped to death. There are certain politicians who have a gift for taking ideologically charged, controversial, radical ideas and making them sound like ordinary common sense. Barack Obama is phenomenal at it, and J. D. Vance is no slouch, either.
The gap between Harris’s rhetoric and her policies is still a little too wide to bridge. “I will be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations. A president who leads — and listens. Who is realistic, practical, and has common sense.” And that’s why I want the federal government to set the prices for food.
The banality of much of the speech underlines how no major-party nominee in recent memory has ever been such a complete cipher.
Harris the Vice President, Missing from Much of Her Speech
As mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Harris’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillion, recently contended: “We all know who the vice president is, but the American people don’t really know her that well, and they don’t know her story.”
Is that it? Or is it that the American people do know her, and they’re not all that impressed? Harris’s job-approval rating over at FiveThirtyEight after a month of gushing coverage is . . . 41.3 percent. Gallup found that the percentage of U.S. adults who have a favorable opinion of Harris has increased from 34 percent in June to 47 percent in August. But that’s driven by Democrats improving from 77 percent to 93 percent, and independents improving from 28 percent (!) to 41 percent. (Five percent of Republicans approved, then and now.)
Thursday night at the convention, every speaker and everyone in attendance chose to believe that Kamala Harris had been a great vice president in a great and successful administration. You don’t have to be a Donald Trump fan or an arch-right conservative to know that just isn’t true.
You can make the argument that this isn’t all her fault, and that the Biden administration didn’t know what to do with her for much of the past three and a half years. You may recall that in November 2021, CNN ran an in-depth report describing her time as vice president to that point as marked by “entrenched dysfunction and a lack of focus,” and reported that she and her “frantic” supporters felt she’d been “sidelined,” “constrained,” “abandoned,” “annoyed,” and “hobbled,” and that “her staff failed her.”
But these sorts of stories of dysfunction, disorganization, and stumbling, sidelined, ineffectiveness never really stopped.
December 2021, the Washington Post:
Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.
July 2022, historian Jeffrey Frank, writing in the New York Times: “[Harris] hasn’t been given the sort of immersive experiences or sustained, high-profile tasks that would deepen and broaden her expertise in ways Americans could see and appreciate. . . . Her bonds with [Biden] and key administration officials are relatively thin. It’s no small matter that she’s had only a handful of private lunches this year.”
January 2023, the Washington Post: “Harris’s tenure has been underwhelming, [a dozen Democratic leaders in key states] said, marked by struggles as a communicator and at times near-invisibility.”
February 2023, the New York Times: “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”
March 2023, Reuters: “Democratic sources say Biden has frustrations about some of her work. . . . ‘I don’t think that the president sees her as somebody who takes anything off of his plate.’”
The Atlantic, October 2023: “Shortly after the [Lester] Holt interview, White House aides began leaking to various news outlets about top-to-bottom dysfunction in Harris’s office and Biden’s apparent concern about her performance.”
Harris fans can say this is just the sour-grapes grumbling of staffers who couldn’t handle the job. (She had 92 percent staff turnover during her first three years as vice president.)
None of that goes away just because of a well-delivered convention speech.
On Wednesday, Cleve Wootson of the Washington Post wrote a detailed article about “the reinvention of Kamala Harris.” And yes, since taking over for Biden a month ago, Harris has thrilled those who attend her rallies and been more disciplined in her messaging.
It’s also a reflection that Kamala Harris has now become, effectively, “too big to fail.” She’s all that stands between the country and another four years of Donald Trump, a scenario that many Democrats genuinely believe represents the end of American democracy.
This week at the convention, we saw “all hands on deck” from the Democratic Party. The Obamas, Oprah, Lil John, Stevie Wonder, John Legend, and Samwise Gamgee all made appearances. Beyonce and Taylor Swift didn’t show up, but Pink did.
Nor should Republicans count on a Harris flameout like the collapse of her 2020 campaign. That ignoble fate reflected the fact that in the 2020 field, Democrats and like-minded media had a long menu of options — Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Mike Bloomberg, etc.
Right now, Democrats and like-minded media have no other options. Either Harris wins, or they lose everything they hold dear. Very few Democrats are operating on the assumption that they can vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West and things will still turn out okay.
