The Kamala Harris Moment Has Arrived
And we can all share.
Last month, Vice President Kamala Harris was riding shotgun on a presidential ticket headed into a ditch. Now, 32 days after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, Harris has accepted her party’s nomination for president, the second woman in history to lead the ticket and the first Black woman, damnit.
Many who believed that Harris provided Democrats their best shot against Donald Trump still assumed that she was accepting a poison pill. Harris would likely lose but at least she wouldn’t drag the party down with her. However, Harris doesn’t plan to just settle for a more dignified defeat.
Harris has filled arenas with enthusiastic supporters who are very much live and not Memorex or AI. In just 10 days, she had more total donors to her campaign than Biden had managed in the past 15 months. Back in 2016 and 2020, whenever Bill Clinton and especially Barack and Michelle Obama would appear at a campaign event, it felt like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were bringing in the big guns — the political equivalent of Ringo Starr’s 1973 self-titled album that featured the three other Beatles. Now, there’s no question that Kamala Harris is the headliner.
This is her moment.
The Speech
When Kamala Harris took the stage on what was also her 10th wedding anniversary, she appeared unburdened by the tremendous weight of history. She spoke about her “unlikely journey” to this moment: Her immigrant parents who provided Kamala and her sister Maya a childhood filled with joy. She recalled her father’s uplifting words: “Run, Kamala. Run.” “Don’t be afraid.” “Don’t let anything stop you.” Her parents split up when she was in elementary school, but young Kamala’s joy and fearlessness remained. Her mother mostly raised her and Maya, and they lived in a working-class neighborhood in San Francisco’s East Bay. It wasn’t a “hellhole” and the people weren’t radical Marxists. They were Americans who looked out for each other without judgement. Life wasn’t idyllic. Harris saw firsthand the prejudice her mother experienced, but her mother taught her a valuable lesson — “never complain about injustice but do something about it.”
That is what led Harris to help her classmate Wanda, whose step-father was sexually abusing her. It’s what inspired her to pursue a career in public service and eventually the presidency.
As a prosecutor, when I had a case, I charged it not in the name of the victim. But in the name of. “The People.”
For a simple reason. In our system of justice, a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us.
I would often explain this, to console survivors of crime. To remind them: No one should be made to fight alone. We are all in this together.
Every day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and said five words: “Kamala Harris, for the People.”
And to be clear: My entire career, I have only had one client. The People.
And so, on behalf of the People, on behalf of every American. Regardless of party. Race. Gender. Or the language your grandmother speaks.
On behalf of my mother and everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey.
On behalf of Americans like the people I grew up with. People who work hard, chase their dreams, and look out for one another.
On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth.
I accept your nomination for President of the United States of America.
Harris swiftly moved from humble biography to the ass-whooping section of her speech. She declared Donald Trump an “unserious man” but stressed that “the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” She correctly claimed that dictators are “rooting for Trump” to win, and he won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat.
Hillary Clinton warned voters in 2016 about Trump’s “dangerous ideas” but she was ultimately ignored like a modern day Cassandra. The key difference is that Trump’s first reign of terror is a reality, not a prophecy. The January 6 Capitol attack that Trump incited exists on video, which the DNC aired on Wednesday night. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick’s brother addressed the convention on Thursday and directly placed the blame for his death where it belonged. All week, Republicans who’d voted for Trump and even served in his administration delivered speeches condemning him.
“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,” Harris said. “Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes. When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers. When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite. He fanned the flames. And now, for an entirely different set of crimes, he was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans. And separately, found liable for committing sexual abuse.”
These are all true statements about the man Republicans willingly nominated for a third time. Harris reminded voters that while her one client as a prosecutor was the people, the only client Trump ever served was himself. She opened the door for the remaining reasonable Republicans who are willing to help her defeat Trump, perhaps for good this time, but she spared no words when describing the current Trump-infected GOP’s plans to further erode reproductive freedom and enact a national abortion ban: “Simply put, they are out of their minds.”
Harris hit the policy points that will obviously please reliable Democratic voters — voting rights, gun safety, abortion, and climate, but she also tacked to the center on immigration and foreign policy. The latter is not so much a concession as an acknowledgement that the Democratic Party is inarguably the pro-American party. Trump’s GOP loathes America’s multicultural democracy, yet for too long, many on the Left have surrendered the flag and patriotic displays to the worst among us. It’s as if they agree that America isn’t truly diverse and thus belongs to MAGA. This year’s DNC has joyfully claimed freedom, democracy, and the red-white-and-blue for all of us.
The Bag of Doritos
When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination on August 28, 2008, his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain released a video congratulating him on his historic achievement.
“Too often, the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed. So I wanted to stop and say congratulations,” McCain said. “Tomorrow, we’ll be back at it. But tonight, Senator, job well done.”
Donald Trump, a malignant narcissist and diseased maniac, is incapable of such grace. He tried to steal Harris’s moment Thursday with a pathetic live-tweeting of her speech. “Where’s Hunter!” he posted, still frustrated that he no longer has Biden to kick around in the polls. (The more relevant question was “Where’s Beyonce?”)
Trump, who rambled incoherently about Hannibal Lecter during his own acceptance speech, wondered why Harris thanked so many people. He pointed out that Harris’s running mate was only a mere assistant coach, as if he missed the entire point of why Walz was a coach in the first place. Trump lacks true human feeling. It’s fascinating to watch a dumber, less eloquent Richard III, but we don’t need him in the White House again.
Trump desperately wanted to spoil Harris’s moment, just as he did in 2016 when he was elected president on the same night that Harris won her Senate race.
“It was incredibly bittersweet,” she’s said in a campaign email. “When I took the stage for my acceptance speech — to represent California in the Senate — I tore up my notes. I just said, ‘We will fight.’”
“Then I went home and I sat on the couch with a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos. I did not share one chip with anybody. Not even Doug. I just watched the TV with utter shock and dismay. Two things are true eight years later: I still love Doritos and we still have not stopped fighting.”
The second Black woman elected to the Senate and she can’t fully enjoy the moment. She must prepare for a bleak, uncertain future, but first she fortified herself with “little pieces of gold.”
(During a family trip to Disneyland, my friend Molly told me how Doritos were invented at the theme park in the early 1960s. The restaurant Casa de Fritos, now Rancho Del Zocalo, in Frontierland took all the extra tortillas, cut them up, fried them, added some seasoning and the result were Doritos, a variation on the traditional Mexican snack totopo that if you squint right sort of resembles the Mexican breakfast dish chilaquiles.)
Republicans feigned horror over the Doritos story, as if Trump didn’t reportedly spend his evenings as president in bed, binging TV and eating cheeseburgers like someone on a mental health watch.
Harris wiped the Doritos dust off her hands and went to work. Now she’s ready to bring the fight to Trump. She said we have “a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.” May we all seize this opportunity together and perhaps this time we’ll celebrate with a bag of Doritos on election night.
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Last night, we watched history being made. All of the long, long decades of unwavering support for what is RIGHT —the civil-rights marches, the anti-war protests, the rallies for women’s rights, the ongoing fight for free speech, the neverending support for politicians who helped make the American Dream more available to EVERYONE — were funneled into that one moment of Kamala Harris, standing on that convention stage and accepting the nomination for President of the United States. It was an even better, more emotional moment than when Barack Obama did the same, in 2008. No we will NOT go back, ever. Never!
That is an amazing summary, chock-full of great information and references.
I am inspired and fired up. Let's get the job done and roll President Klan Robe and his lickspittles up and down the ballot. His unreconstructed party must be defeated. And be sure to check your registrations; Republicans are looking to destroy them in places they control so you cannot vote!
Mount up!