Harris Gives Bracing Speech but Doesn’t Leave It All on the Field | Opinion

Last night Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a relatively brief, bracing acceptance speech that ran for fewer than 40 minutes. For Harris, the first nominee in either party who didn’t compete in a single primary or caucus since Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, this was a speech of unparalleled importance. She’s been barnstorming the country for weeks, but her primetime acceptance speech (which the DNC managed to start almost an hour earlier than the headliners from the first few days of the convention) was a single-serve opportunity to define herself to a country eager to learn more about her. And while what was there was flawlessly executed, she might ultimately regret not taking another 15 or 20 minutes to defend the Biden administration (and her role in it) and to put even a little bit of gristle on the bones of her policy agenda.
First, the good. There’s been a lot of chatter about Harris’s joy and ebullience on the trail. But for those who haven’t seen it up until now or remember her only from her acerbic grilling of Supreme Court nominees in the Senate or her contentious primary debate tussles with then-candidate Joe Biden in the summer of 2019, her beaming exuberance was unmistakably uplifting. Neither party’s nominee has seemed this happy and unburdened since Barack Obama in 2008. She was practically bouncing off the stage. Harris is clearly comfortable with herself and the extraordinary historical role that she has been thrust into. To be this poised and ready just weeks after her unexpected elevation to this position is an achievement that no other candidate could possibly have been able to muster.
It’s been a long time since the Democratic nominee wasn’t eligible to collect Social Security, and the benefit of a younger, dynamic candidate was obvious from the second she stepped on the stage. Especially in contrast with the flub-filled, often excruciating speeches Americans have endured from the past two elderly presidents, her speech was flawlessly executed and compelling. It was nothing new structurally—except in the hands of the rambling, word-salad-tossing mania of former President Donald Trump, these things have a familiar shape: a biography filled with stories and quotes from family members meant to make the nominee relatable, followed by a vision and a policy agenda flecked with attacks on her opponent. Hers was no different.
Like nearly everyone who seeks the presidency—again except for Trump, who has now three times made his off-putting, relentless divisiveness part of his primetime pitch—Harris promised to bridge divides, bring Americans together and to “be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations.” None of it was especially original, but it was tightly delivered.
Her narrative of Trump’s threat to democracy was refreshingly direct, pointed and coherent. “He sent an armed mob to the United States capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers,” she noted. She asked voters to “consider his explicit intent to set free violent extremists” who participated in the insurrection. She talked about Trump’s threat to deploy the military against Americans in American cities. “Just imagine,” she warned, “Donald Trump with no guardrails.” Unlike President Biden, she was not only able to talk with precision about the full range of Trump’s post-2020 coup attempt, but also to consistently point to Trump’s new and dangerous plans instead of mumbling incoherently about Jan. 6.
If you were hoping for a bullet-pointed list of policy proposals drawn from hot-off-the-presses white papers, you were probably disappointed. As many people have been begging Democrats to do for years, instead of wonking out she outlined aspirational goals and didn’t get bogged down in details. “We will provide access to capital for business owners and entrepreneurs and founders,” she said. “We will end America’s housing shortage.” And so on. She outlined an end point to work toward and then she moved on. Whether this leaves you hot or cold depends on whether you think candidates should hand you a manifesto or a vision. Harris chose a vision.
Harris did another extremely important thing that Biden couldn’t – she talked movingly and evocatively about the reproductive tyranny that Trump’s Supreme Court has ushered in. She noted that Trump brags about appointing the justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, and that he plans to appoint a “national anti-abortion coordinator” to harass and surveil women even in states where abortion remains legal. “Why exactly is it that they don’t trust women?” she asked. Again—direct, plain language that cut straight to the heart of the matter.
At times it was a fairly conservative speech, and likely disappointed the left flank of the party’s coalition. She promised to maintain the U.S. military as “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” She hit Trump for torpedoing the bipartisan border security bill and promised to “bring it back and sign it.” She sounded more hawkish on Russia than Mitt Romney was in 2012 and advocated for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” A generation ago, it was Democrats who were accused of coddling authoritarians. Harris, on the other hand, argued that dictators think Trump is “easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.” She claimed the mantle of American world leadership. That’s been the Democratic play during the Trump era, it’s been pretty effective and with this speech she has clearly made the decision to continue appealing to disaffected Republicans and independents.
Occasionally she obliquely signaled potential shifts to the left that progressives may have been hoping for, but didn’t commit to much. “What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months has been devastating,” she said. She talked about the “desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety” in Gaza and said that the Palestinians deserve their “dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.” Exactly what she will do differently than the Biden administration was left to the imagination.
It was, surprisingly, a short address as far as these things go—Trump’s acceptance speech this year was 92 unendurably long minutes. And I can’t help but think of what she might have left on the table. It is understandable that she wants to distance herself from some of the Biden administration’s policies, or at least public perceptions of its failures in certain issue-areas, for example, but it might also have been a lost opportunity to defend weak points for which she conceivably shares some responsibility. Why not talk about her role working with countries in Latin America to decrease migration? Why not push back on the Trump campaign’s fearmongering on crime like many of the other convention speakers? Why not highlight what’s working in the economy?
The unmistakable impression Harris left was that she was so eager to get this done that she had little time to waste on a long-winded speech. We’ll know in a few months if that was the right call, but to paraphrase the convention’s tag line—there’s no going back.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.