Kamala Harris’s speech was fine, and delivered with assurance. I prefer “Ask not what your country can do for you” to “Never do anything half-assed,” but tastes vary. Too soon we were hearing phrases like “assure access to capital.” The text didn’t have the feeling of a story being told from some previously unknown inner depth. It stuck to résumé values and life experiences, rather than a sharing of her thinking. I’m not sure it advanced her position with those who aren’t already with her.
There is a small but persistent cloud that follows her, which can be distilled down to the idea that she was swiftly and mysteriously elevated to her current position, that we don’t know everything about how that happened, and that people aren’t fully comfortable with it. I don’t think she succeeded in lightening or removing the cloud.
The convention itself was a great success, with some sharp and memorable moments. The crowd chanting a full-throated “Bring them home” when Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg made an eloquent, pitch-perfect appeal for the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, including their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23. Seventeen-year-old Gus Walz crying, pointing at his father at the podium, and saying, “That’s my dad” was another. The fabulously human and hokey roll call of the states—unexpectedly, my eyes filled as they played “Born in the U.S.A.” and Gov. Phil Murphy spoke one of New Jersey’s unofficial anthems: “We’re from Jersey, baby, and you’re not.”
The convention’s overall impression was summed up by a relative who, watching on the second night, observed: “This is what they’re saying: ‘We’re a grand coalition, we’re more of a vibe than a party, and we’re not him.’ Plenty of people will want to join that.”
There was hunger—“We’ll sleep when we’re dead”—and boldness, too. They stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own. Also impressive was the degree to which they cast a magic conjuring sorcery spell in which viewers got the feeling the whole purpose of the Democratic Party is to break away from a grim and doom-laden reigning regime . . . when they’ve been in charge for 3½ years.
Something else. The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.
And now the race. It’s a toss-up, no one knows where this is going.
Ms. Harris is limited in this respect: She never had to be anything but a person of the left to rise in the Democratic bastion of California. She never had to talk to a conservative or a Republican. What she had to do to succeed in her Democratic state was juggle different party coalitions. She could commiserate with big donors at a Bel Air fundraiser and roll her eyes at some reference to those Democratic Socialist of America types. Yes, they get a little carried away. She could meet with members of a progressive social-justice organization and roll her eyes again when they complained of donor clout: Look, we have to live in the real world; we need money to do what’s right. That’s where her political muscles were developed.
This week she appeared before some smallish crowds and gatherings, holding a mic, walking along a stage, and speaking publicly in a way that might have been planned but wasn’t scripted. And here you saw her limit as a public figure: Unscripted, she’s word-saying. She isn’t having a thought and looking for the right words to express it, she’s saying words and hoping they’ll amount to a thought. She isn’t someone who never had a thought. She seems more like someone who has learned to question whether her thoughts should be expressed.
She’ll have to get over that. She just did a pretty good job of talking to America. Now she’ll have to do it every day.
Donald Trump is famously off his game. He knows his old insult shtick isn’t working. Some of his supporters say, “All he has to do is read from the teleprompter!” but they’re wrong. He’s no good when he reads from the prompter, he doesn’t respect what’s on it. It bores him, and he talks like a tranquilized robot. He knows what he does well—shock, entertain, mention two or three big issues. He’s having trouble making a stinging critique of Democratic policy because he’s insulted everything over the years, and when he says something’s bad now it just seems part of his act and doesn’t land.
You can see him at the podium mentally ruffling around in his toolbox, looking for the right wrench or hammer. Will he find it? Or revert to form and do “Commie Kamala” and “Low IQ”? His fortunes may depend on the answer.
Trump supporters have too much invested in what a disaster Ms. Harris’s campaign was in 2019, and it was. They expect a repetition. But five years ago she was a lone rider out there on her own. This time she’s vice president, with a wholly committed party behind her and a deep bench of expertise. Trump people assume she’ll have a series of gaffes, and they’ll just have to say, “See?” They think in the Sept. 10 debate he’ll walk in like the Hulk and squish her like a peanut. I’m not sure this will happen. She’ll show discipline this time.
Her people will figure out how to finesse the question of giving interviews. Maybe they’ll start with a star-struck and sympathetic local reporter, to build her confidence. Maybe they’ll graduate to a sit-down with a rising network star (old phrase!) who very much wants to be a White House correspondent and tailors his questions accordingly. As for news conferences, maybe there won’t be a big one, or three, but a series of five-minute “impromptu” ones, perhaps near the plane, where reporters won’t get to plan or strategize questions. Maybe the relative regularity of it, and the unofficial character of it—her hair blowing in the wind—will start to give the impression she does a lot of press conferences.
In any case, her weak points aren’t really what the Trump people think—popping off in arias that go nowhere, fumbling when pressed. Her real weak point is policy. She will be perceived by many voters as farther to the left than they want to go.
One of the reasons Democrats had such unity this week is that with Ms. Harris’s elevation, the progressives kind of won a long struggle. The moderate Hillary Clinton was defeated by the seemingly more progressive Barack Obama in 2008. The moderate Joe Biden beat all comers to his left but, in his economic and social policy, tugged progressive because that’s where the rising power in his party was. Ms. Harris is of and from that rising power. We’re going to start hearing the phrase “pragmatic progressive” in the coming months.
This is going to be all about policy.