Night Four at the Democratic National Convention: Kamala Harris Tells Her Story
For a lot of voters, the Democratic ticket is made up of two familiar-seeming people they are just getting to know
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Watching the last speech of a political convention is like seeing a movie after consuming a few weeks of tweets about it. You find yourself nodding along at the plot points, almost saying lines aloud. Kamala Harris was a prosecutor. Her mom’s name is Shyamala. Yet something felt new, startlingly new, when Harris took the stage on Thursday at the United Center. History is moving really, really fast.
Joe Biden dropped out of the race one month and one day before Harris spoke. Thirty-two days! Harris seized the nomination, picked Tim Walz as her running mate after a round of speed vetting, and saw a bounce in the polls.
The first thing Harris had to do Thursday was fill in the narrative gaps left behind after her sudden promotion. She began by talking about her mother. Shyamala Harris was a “brilliant, 5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent,” she said. Shyamala Harris came from India to America when she was 19 so that she could cure breast cancer. When she was raising Harris and her sister, Maya, she worked all the time.
Throughout the week, speakers had tried to make Harris’s upbringing feel familiar. “Her story is your story,” said Michelle Obama. “She is us,” said Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Harris cast her mom as a moral instructor: “Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”
Harris talked about Wanda, her best friend from high school, who was sexually abused by a relative. Harris told Wanda to come live with her family. That incident inspired her to become a lawyer. Earlier in the night, the words “The Protector” had flashed on the screen at the United Center.
Biographical sketches are a time-honored part of conventions. Sitting in the upper deck, I wondered how many of these details voters—even ravenous media consumers—knew before Thursday night. Kerry Washington, the night’s emcee, performed a funny sketch with Harris’s grandnieces about how to pronounce “Kamala.” Glancing at the teleprompter, I noticed Harris’s name was spelled out phonetically for certain speakers. There was at least one “Tim Walls” thrown in there, too. For a lot of voters, the Democratic ticket is made up of two familiar-seeming people they are just getting to know.
Harris’s second task Thursday was to convince voters who never thought of her as a plausible president, even a month ago, that she could do the job starting in January. Her speech was serious. Much of the night was serious. You don’t put Leon Panetta in prime time if you want to leave America laughing.
Political speeches usually have moments of fun, cringey fun, that let an audience breathe before the candidate gets to the meat of the thing. Harris’s speech, which was written with former Obama-ite Adam Frankel, had almost none.
As Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin pointed out, Harris spoke like the California prosecutor Democrats expected to see during the 2020 primaries. Harris sounded prepared, precise, and, to use her word, lethal. She rolled through her case: on abortion rights, border security, foreign policy, patriotism. When she spoke of “the privilege and pride of being an American,” the biggest line of the speech, the crowd waved flags.
There was patriotism flying around the room on Thursday. What coach speak was to night three of the convention, flag-waving was to night four. I haven’t heard this many U-S-A chants since an ’80s WrestleMania.
Earlier this month, that chant broke out, seemingly spontaneously, at the first Harris-Walz rally in Philadelphia. Now, Democrats are trying to make it break out as much as possible. The first chant on Thursday started after a performance by … the Chicago Bulls drumline. At the end of a speech by Ruben Gallego, the Arizona congressman and Senate candidate who served with the Marines in Iraq, the teleprompter instructed Gallego to “lead a chant of USA USA USA.” The American flags got bigger throughout the night.
This mandatory patriotic fervor made it feel a little like Democrats were slapping their own hands after they’d leaned into celebrity guests. The big news of the night was a rare miss by TMZ’s newsbreakers: Beyoncé did not come to the convention. Even so, Thursday’s non-Beyoncé lineup consisted of Washington, Tony Goldwyn, D.L. Hughley, The Chicks, and Pink. And that doesn’t include a biographical film about Harris that was narrated, inevitably, by Morgan Freeman. (Question: How many of these people would have shown up for a convention led by Biden?)
The seriousness of Harris’s speech gave the convention a kind of narrative structure. Conventions always get bigger as they progress toward the nominee’s acceptance speech. They don’t always get more focused—see Donald Trump’s tribute to excess in Milwaukee. Harris’s speech was a sober talk at the end of a big party. Get to November 5 safely, OK?
For the entire history of the Resistance, Democrats have struggled to find a way to talk about Trump. In 2016, Trump was cast as a goofball who couldn’t possibly win the election. Whoops. Biden preferred the opposite approach, calling him the slayer of American democracy. The tag, while effective, might no longer move voters like it once did. (A video the Democrats showed that used body cam footage from Capitol police on January 6 would be a good antidote to antidemocracy fatigue.)
Harris landed on a happy medium. “Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. But the consequences of what he does, she continued, are “extremely serious.” It beat Barack Obama calling Trump a jerk neighbor with a leaf blower.
Making it to night four of the convention felt like arriving at the end of a long award show—and not just because of the celebrities. “It’s Thursday,” conventioneers and media members said to one another. Of course, it felt like Thursday on Tuesday.
Together, we swallowed one last power-up. By 5 p.m. Central, the upper deck of the United Center was packed. I saw multiple big-deal New York Times reporters sent away by the ushers. Ta-Nehisi Coates was sent away. People without a seat posted up in the aisles and on the stairs. They got chased away by ushers, then came back after the ushers had disappeared.
As we gazed down at Harris, who stood in a ring of glowing stars on the stage, the moment of her nomination felt inevitable yet also startling. She’s the candidate. She could be the president. There are 74 days until the election.
