Kamala Harris competently delivered a convention address that capped what has been an extraordinary run for her over the last month.
Since her ascension as the Democratic nominee, of course, the path has been greased for her. The sheer relief among Democrats that their fate is no longer tethered to that of Joe Biden and boosterish media coverage have transformed the race, with Harris narrowly ahead in most national polls whereas Biden was falling increasingly behind prior to his defenestration.
Harris wants to portray herself as a fresh, new force who is not Donald Trump or Joe Biden; this may be her greatest political advantage, and it was a major theme of her speech.
She represents, she assured us, a New Way Forward, as the nation “has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past.” Whether she succeeds in making this argument will have much to do with the outcome in November. There is no doubt that Trump’s shtick is getting long in the tooth, and he’s trying to run as the outsider who was president less than four years ago. But, rather than an agent of change, Harris is a representative of a Biden administration status quo that a majority of Americans consider with dismay.
To the extent that Harris is differentiating herself from Biden, it is by moving to his left, although she didn’t put the accent on that in her speech. Instead, it was a paint-by-numbers collection of clichés. She’s from and for the middle class. She’ll be a president for all Americans. She’ll fight for this country. Anything is possible in America.
She spoke of policy in only the gauziest of terms, pledging to solve the housing crisis, protect voting rights, and sign pro-abortion legislation. She leaned heavily on Project 2025 in making the case against Trump. She also suggested, erroneously, we are afraid, that Trump already tried to cut Social Security and Medicare and would restrict abortion at the federal level.
She made a strong pro-Israel statement, then immediately vitiated it by talking of the suffering in Gaza without noting that Hamas is ultimately responsible for it. She also called for Palestinian “self-determination” in the absence of a credible leader who recognizes Israel’s right to exist.
Another emphasis in her speech — in keeping with how she’s tried to define herself over the last month — was that she was a tough prosecutor. But she was soft by the standards of the time, then ran away from her record during her 2019 presidential campaign and became a fellow traveler of the BLM rioters in 2020. Now, she’s supposedly Wyatt Earp again.
The banality of much of the speech underlines how no major-party nominee in recent memory has ever been such a complete cipher. Harris was the beneficiary of one of the more extraordinary events in recent political memory — an incumbent president getting dumped from his party’s ticket — and we never heard in her words what she made of it or about her role in the transition. She selected a vice-presidential nominee and didn’t sit for an interview to explain her choice. And now she’s completed her convention, again without an interview or press availability.
Without a teleprompter in this campaign, she’d be rendered practically mute.
It’s impossible to conclude anything other than that Democrats swapped out one nominee they feared putting in spontaneous situations for another they fear putting in spontaneous situations.
There is plenty for the Trump campaign to work with here, from her left-wing positions to her obvious phoniness. But it is confronted by a much more difficult political problem — the Biden debate turns out to have been a catastrophic success for Trump. Even if it gets harder for Harris from here, he has much less margin for error than he did just a month ago.
One of the obvious contrasts in the Harris and Trump convention addresses was that she stuck to the script, thus delivering exactly the message she wanted and doing it in under 40 minutes, while Trump stepped all over his own speech with random riffs and lengthy digressions that made it an interminable mess. This lack of discipline is one reason that he is now vulnerable to potentially losing to a wholly unimpressive candidate who at least has the sense to listen to her minders.
