Kamala Harris will tonight face the biggest test of her political life so far when she addresses the Democratic national convention in Chicago in a bid to persuade American voters to defeat Donald Trump in November’s presidential election and put her in the White House.
The vice-president’s rocket-fueled campaign is still barely a month old following Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from seeking re-election in the face of a disastrous debate performance and questions over his age and mental acuity.
Harris, and her vice-presidential pick Minnesota governor Tim Walz, have quickly overturned the election’s narrative, turning a solid Trump lead in the polls over Biden into a slight – but clear – advantage over the former Republican president.
In addressing the Democratic convention on Thursday night – and by proxy the wider US electorate watching in their millions on television – Harris will be making a direct pitch to voters to back her vision for the United States.
Harris’s campaign has sought to portray a more optimistic, future-focused view of the country than her rival, and perhaps also than that of the president, who based much of his pitch on dark warnings of Trump’s autocratic sympathies.
Over the course of the week at the convention, the audience has heard from the Democratic party’s most powerful players, who threw their support unequivocally behind Harris. Biden, Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi all gave primetime speeches, as did some of the party’s rising stars, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Now it is expected that Harris’s speech will seek to lay out her personal story as she bids to become a historic president: the first woman president and the first woman of color due to her south Asian and Black background. Her speech is likely to focus on her work as a prosecutor, defending victims of crime.
But her speech will also lay out a sharp contrast between her positive view of the country’s future prospects and Trump’s almost wholly grim warnings about the state of the nation and his focus on immigration and crime.
Across three days so far, speaker after speaker has already hailed Harris as a change-agent who would not only defeat Trump but lift the country higher, ushering in a new chapter of possibility and seek to return US politics to some semblance of normality since Trump came onto the political stage eight years ago.
The Harris campaign – and especially the outspoken Walz – has also displayed sharp elbows and an ability to insult and poke fun at Trump.
The switch in the polls and newfound edge has impressed many observers. “She has had a very good month not just because of a honeymoon, but because of the way she’s presented herself, the way her campaign has positioned her,” David Axelrod, a former top aide to Barack Obama, told the Guardian.
Certainly it seems to have unsettled Trump and his campaign. Trump has adopted a policy of directly insulting Harris and inventing a series of nicknames for her while trying to paint her as a leftwing extremist and questioning her racial identity. But the jibes have had little effect and even drawn criticism from some senior Republicans.
They have not blunted her lead. Harris consistently tops Trump by three or four points in recent head-to-head surveys and has also improved her standing in the handful of key states that are crucial to victory. While the electoral contest remains impossibly close, she has widened the battleground once more from the Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to once again include Sun belt states like North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.
Throughout the convention so far, Democratic speakers have tried to make Trump seem small and diminished. They have sought to keep him on the backfoot and in a reactive mode, responding to attacks and being kept off-balance.
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The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, compared Trump to an “old boyfriend” who has spent the last four years spinning the block, trying to get back into a relationship with the American people.
“Bro, we broke up with you for a reason,” Jeffries said.
“Kamala Harris has always understood the assignment,” said Laphonza Butler, a California senator and friend of Harris’s.
“Kamala, your mom would be so proud of you,” said Doris Baptiste, a family friend who was close to Harris’s mother.
On Wednesday night, Walz offered a full-throated attack on Trump, a defense of his record running Minnesota and a passionate advocacy for Harris. After criticizing the Trump campaign, he led the crowd of cheering delegates in a chant of: “We’re not going back! We’re not going back!”
Turning to the theme of freedom – which was the focus of the night’s convention programming – Walz said: “That’s what this is all about, the responsibility we have to our kids, to each other and to the future that we’re building together, in which everyone is free to build the kind of life they want. But not everyone has that same sense of responsibility. Some folks just don’t understand what it takes to be a good neighbor. Take Donald Trump and JD Vance.”
Walz said Trump and his running mate had an agenda to only benefit the “richest and most extreme” people in the US. Walz added: “It’s an agenda nobody asked for. It’s an agenda that does nothing for our neighbors in need. Is it weird? Absolutely, absolutely. But it’s also wrong. And it’s dangerous.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
