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Maureen Dowd
Kamala Takes Chicago
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Chicago
Kamala Harris had a message for America about Donald Trump and JD Vance on Thursday night.
“Simply put, they are out of their minds,” she said to cheers from thousands of Democratic convention delegates in United Center.
She was talking about their draconian abortion stances but it could have applied to so much more.
“One must ask,” she continued, “why exactly is it that they don’t trust women? Well, we trust women.”
Harris has to prove that she is a woman America can trust, as she tries to get the country to do something it has never done before: elect a woman as president. She seized the moment from the very start of her speech — “let’s get to business” — to her section on foreign policy, which was the best part of her address.
Looking crisp in a navy pantsuit and a blouse with a bow, Harris played it safe by casting herself as a common-sense moderate, but also played it smart by casting herself as a tough-as-nails champion of the middle class, America’s allies and anyone who has had their rights stripped away by Trump. She promised that she would “proudly” sign a bill restoring abortion rights across America. Aside from that, she barely talked about gender and didn’t dwell on race, shrewdly positioning herself as a Black female nominee ditching identity politics.
It was a strong speech but not particularly lyrical: She started slowly and built the drama, giving Americans plenty of details to get a better picture of her. But none of the lines were especially memorable. She made her case like a lawyer, not a poet.
For weeks she had been pitching herself as a “joyful warrior,” as her husband, Doug Emhoff, put it — the bright, inclusive, graceful antidote to Trump’s dark, repudiating gracelessness. On Thursday night, she was all those things but she was scorching, too, calling out Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election and then sending “an armed mob to the United States Capitol” to achieve his ugly ends, saying he “fanned the flames.”
“Our nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward,” Harris said. “Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”
She added, “I promise to be a president for all Americans.” In a blast at Trump, she said she would cherish the nation’s democratic principles — everything from “free and fair elections, to the peaceful transfer of power.”
Tim Walz won the vice-presidential spot partly because he offered a new formula to attack Trump: Don’t say he’s destroying democracy, because that threat has worn thin. Simply say that the former president and his running mate are “weird.”
Harris straddled the two approaches, saying: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences — the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious. Consider not only the chaos and calamity when he was in office but also the gravity of what has happened since he lost the last election.”
She also knew she had to put the “warrior” in joyful warrior. “As commander in chief,” she said, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” She said she would not cozy up to dictators. “They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself,” Harris said. And she promised to protect the border by bringing back the bipartisan border bill that Trump helped squash.
In the hardest needle to thread in the speech, Harris said she would “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” (A few in the crowd screamed “Free Palestine!”) But then she showed empathy for Palestinians in a way that President Biden rarely did, saying she was working toward a world where “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
If she was light on policy about the economy — even though it’s the top issue for voters — Harris joined Walz as an avatar of the middle class, unlike Richie Rich, gilt-loving Trump. (Gretchen Whitmer’s best line earlier in the night was that Trump’s first word was probably “chauffeur.”) Casting Trump as caring only about tax cuts for his billionaire friends, Harris promised that “building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. This is personal for me. The middle class is where I come from.”
Decades after George H.W. Bush campaigned against Michael Dukakis at a flag factory and talked about America being on the side of the Republicans, Harris tried to reclaim patriotism for the Democrats, wearing a flag pin on her lapel while casting Trump’s flag-hugging as cheap. Before her speech, the Chicks, who once denounced George W. Bush for his misbegotten Iraq invasion plan, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” a cappella.
“I love our country with all my heart,” Harris said, adding that she wanted to move forward “in the incredible journey that is America.”
The nominee’s biggest personal challenge is that she must conduct her compressed campaign at crackling speed, trying to fill in the tabula rasa that is Kamala Harris.
So far, the 59-year-old has been mostly content-free, an appealing vehicle for a multitude of dreams — but also a cipher that Trump can try to define as too big a risk for Americans to take.
Like J.F.K.’s “Camelot,” “Kamalot” may be a mythical kingdom, a “congenial spot for happily-ever-aftering,” as the song from the musical goes. But sometimes myths can be useful as a template for white knights unseating black knights.
Harris is not close to her father, Donald Harris, a leftist economist born in Jamaica who was divorced from her mother when Kamala was young. Her origin story centers on her mother, Shyamala, a petite Indian immigrant who was a breast cancer researcher. “A brilliant, five-foot-tall woman with an accent,” Harris said on Thursday night. Shyamala died of colon cancer in 2009 at 70.
“I miss her every day,” the candidate said.
Shyamala was a no-nonsense woman — “tough, courageous, a trailblazer,” Harris said — who “kept a strict budget” and taught her daughter to avoid self-indulgence, to be fair, and, she wrote in her memoir, to “fight systems in a way that causes them to be fairer, and don’t be limited by what has always been.” Her mother also taught her and her sister “to never do anything half-assed,” Harris said, laughing.
In the past, male candidates ran as patriarchs, the good father who would protect the family home from an invasion. Harris, too, cast herself as a protector — a protector running against a predator. “A total badass,” Whitmer called her.
Harris talked about how in high school, when her friend Wanda was sad, she pressed her and learned that Wanda was being sexually abused by her stepfather. Harris insisted that she come stay with her own family.
“This is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor,” Harris said in her speech. “To protect people like Wanda.”
“To be clear, my entire career, I’ve only had one client: the people,” she said in her speech. She said she would tell survivors of crime: “No one should be made to fight alone. We are all in this together.” (Later, she will have to address the criminal justice issues that she flipped on in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and why she’s trying to flip back now.)
Presidential candidates have always been expected to slay a dragon on their hero quest. In the old days, with Dwight Eisenhower and Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush, that meant their exploits in war. Bill Clinton, who did not join the military, offered his story about standing up to an alcoholic, abusive stepfather to protect his mother. Hillary Clinton survived the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Harris’s role as a protector, both as a child and as a prosecutor, is her version of slaying the dragon.
But to become the first Madam President, Harris will have to show that she is capable of slaying a big orange dragon.
She has a lot of people by her side heading into battle, with chants of “U.S.A.!” and flag-waving throughout the convention hall. In their speeches on Tuesday night, the Obamas bequeathed her their hope and change message but with an edge — the knowledge that they miscalculated the 2016 race, thinking Democrats could beat Trump and paying the penalty when he got elected and ran roughshod over Barack Obama’s legacy. This time, the hope and change were mixed with urgency and anxiety.
And Harris has star power, as Obama did and as Trump does, in his opera bouffe way. Just as Obama’s magical smile once sparked a movement, now Harris’s ensorcelling smile has become the beacon for her followers, a symbol of possibility, a promise of the American dream, like the shimmering green light at the end of the dock in “The Great Gatsby.”
But that green light turned out to be a mirage.
After tonight, the Harris campaign has to stop looking out at the ebullience and thinking it’s a political strategy; It needs to undergird all the talk of “joy” with cold reality about the troubled mood of the country and a detailed plan about how Harris will govern. She should keep in mind that, for some, joie de vivre is a sign that you’re not paying attention.
Michelle Obama gets this. Coming out for her socko speech on Tuesday night, she tried to hush the elated crowd. She was not about the joy. She was about vengeance. She wants Donald Trump punished for his racism, his smears against her and her husband and his campaigns designed to stoke fears against Black and brown people.
“We cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right,” she said, warning Democrats not to get involved in ego snits or in making perfect the enemy of the good.
Harris’s aides know that, starting with Thursday’s speech, she has to reveal herself and be more “out there,” as one put it. But they also note that when Harris and other women candidates reveal themselves, with their belly laughs or personal anecdotes, there can be backlash — which ends up making them more guarded. So it can be a vicious circle.
Like George Bush senior, whose mother was so insistent that he not focus on himself — “the big I” — that he began dropping personal pronouns, Harris wrote that she was raised “not to talk about myself.” Emhoff tried to help, painting a warm picture of domestic Kamala, involved with his children, teasing her about his inept wooing methods, having fun. “I love that laugh!” he said.
No matter how she laughs, she is a welcome relief from the schoolmarm types often nominated by the Democrats, nominees who lectured rather than inspired.
Still, there’s work to do. Kamala herself had to do the bulk of the work toward that goal of making America trust her — by explaining how her record as vice president has prepared her to be president.
Biden did her no favors with his speech on Monday. He was in a position to limn a portrait of her in action in the Oval and on foreign assignments for him, to testify to her toughness and readiness. But instead, he gave the speech he would have given if he were nominated, all about his own accomplishments. It was not the moment to brag on the “PACT Act;” it was the moment to brag about his loyal vice president.
But the Democrats aren’t there yet. For the moment, they are happy just cruising in a cool car. No one wants to kick the tires or look for sawdust in the transmission. Not much has changed since Alexander Burns wrote this assessment in The Times during Harris’s brief 2019 presidential bid: “Democratic voters have thrilled to her as a messenger, yet the content of her message remains a work in progress.”
In that race, Harris’s associates described her as nonideological with no “vision thing,” as Bush senior called it. Harris told Burns: “Policy has to be relevant. That’s my guiding principle: Is it relevant? Not, ‘Is it a beautiful sonnet?’”
One of her aides told me she focuses on the question: “What’s the end result and how do we get there?”
On Thursday night, she vowed to be a president “who is realistic. Practical. And has common sense.” The danger is that she lapses back into talking like a stoned philosophy student, musing as she once did about how “you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you” — or a stoned math major, enthusing: “I love Venn diagrams. There’s just something about those three circles and the analysis of where there’s the intersection, right?”
But like Buddhists, Democrats are living in the moment. After years of Trump carnage, after years of Covid confinement, after years of feeling stifled by Biden’s stubborn refusal to step aside for a younger candidate who could better duel with Trump, they cavorted around Chicago on cloud nine.
Harris looked happiest on Thursday night when she was joining in the fun, talking about how her parents laughed and played music — “Aretha, Coltrane to Miles” — in the house when she was young, before they divorced.
Her choice of the Beyoncé anthem “Freedom” has underscored the party’s switch from keening about democracy in peril to trumpeting that they will protect American freedoms — from a woman’s right to control her body to the freedom to send your children to school without worrying they will be shot.
Harris seems confident onstage, like the Broadway understudy who becomes an overnight sensation when the star of the show is unable to go on.
But what lies beneath? She is known to be tentative behind the scenes, blaming aides when she is not well enough prepared and holding an elaborate rehearsal before a dinner with Washington reporters. Former aides to Harris said the shorter run-up to the election is working in her favor, because she has a tendency toward analysis paralysis. Harris told Drew Barrymore that she did not want to be limited by “other people’s perception” of her, and she bristles at being categorized.
Democrats are, for a change, high on their own supply. And that should buoy Harris’s confidence. As with Bridget Jones, the delegates here loved Kamala just the way she is. (Although some top Democrats privately, and a bit condescendingly, stress that the team around her will be essential to her success.)
But in my experience, it is when pols get to the top, ratified by voters’ approval, that their gremlins and insecurities come out. It’s counterintuitive, but it happens.
J.F.K. let the C.I.A. talk him into the Bay of Pigs, even though his gut told him no. W. let Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney talk him into invading Iraq without provocation or verified evidence of W.M.D.’s.
And Donald Trump is lurking just out of view, like Sharon Stone with an ice pick. He lies, as Michelle Obama pointed out in her speech, and he’s going to lie about Harris and Walz, viciously.
“It’s his same old con,” Mrs. Obama said. “Doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”
And she had the best line of the convention: “I want to know — I want to know — who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him, that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”
Harris ended her speech as the patriotic and joyful warrior, talking about “the privilege and pride of being an American.”
“Together,” she said, “let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”
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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. @MaureenDowd • Facebook
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