Harris gives Americans the chance to make history

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

Chicago (CNN) — Kamala Harris promised Americans a future that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden could deliver, showing how profoundly she has changed the 2024 election.

The first Black woman to claim a major party nomination on Thursday styled her “unlikely journey” to the Democratic nod as the springboard to lift the country to a new place after years being torn apart by its bitter divides.

The vice president, who no one thought would be the candidate even five weeks ago, offered voters a clear choice in a steady and patriotic Democratic National Convention address in Chicago.

Americans can take the road of “chaos and calamity” in a new term under Trump, whom she called “an unserious man” who nevertheless poses a “serious threat” to democracy and basic American freedoms.

Or, Harris said, the country can recommit to values that she evoked in detailing her upbringing as a daughter of immigrants nurtured by a loving California community of unofficial aunts, epitomized by “Freedom. Opportunity. Compassion. Dignity. Fairness. And endless possibilities.”

Instead of Trump’s American carnage and threats of retribution, Harris is presenting herself as the catalyst for America’s quintessential capacity to renew itself. The vice president leveraged her past as a prosecutor, pledging to always be “for the people” while accusing the Republican nominee of serving “the only client he has ever had: Himself.”

“With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past,” she said.

“So, let’s get out there and let’s fight for it. Let’s get out there and let’s vote for it. And together, let’s write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”

But Harris, the sudden wildcard candidate now topping the Democratic ticket, is not just offering a break from Trump. She is also conjuring possibilities that were beyond Biden.

Overtaken by the ravages of age at the CNN debate in Atlanta, the 81-year-old president could neither convincingly evoke the future nor present himself as the implementer of change that so many Americans crave.

Harris, who is seeking to meet her moment despite a vice presidency that rarely soared, had not previously offered evidence that she could be a transformational political figure.

But Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPac, a Black-led advocacy organization, explained that Harris was offering a chance for “America to become its best self” after years of discord. “What are our aspirations? Who do we believe ourselves to be? How do we understand the highest ideals of this country in terms of a multi-racial democracy?”

“It’s been eight years of chaos, of destabilization, and Joe Biden became a transition point. And I think what we’re seeing right now (is) that people are saying, ‘We can be better than the worst version of ourselves,’ which they attribute to the Trump campaign and the Republican Party,” Shropshire said in an interview.

How five weeks can change a race

Harris leaves her convention with an exuberant, united party behind her. Democrats are electrified by the metamorphosis of the ticket, backed by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who has become America’s coach.

Trump wrapped his own nominating party a month ago certain that his felony-defying White House comeback bid was on course. But Harris’ rise saddled him with huge problems, as he frets over her crowds and bemoans his vanished polling leads but won’t forsake insult politics for the issues that could win him back the White House.

Yet all conventions are self-reinforcing bubbles. For Democrats, preaching joy and partying with celebrities is a risk with many people hurting after years of high prices, economic insecurity and as America’s foreign foes mock its power.

Harris and Democrats offered hope, happiness and harmony, with promises of lower prices and more housing.

Yet her convention was also a festival of style over substance. Harris, who has so far avoided one-on-one interviews and swing state town halls, hasn’t explained how she’d widen access to health care, prescription drugs, affordable housing, cheaper child care, quell corporate greed or save the environment. Voters now know more about second gentleman Doug Emhoff’s rambling voicemail before their blind date and Walz’s high school football plays than how Harris would counter China.

That policy vacuum, as well as the contempt for Trump that radiated for four days, may offer a lifeline to the Republican campaign and the hopes of an ex-president who turned victimhood and a persecution complex into a potent political force. He’s seeking to portray Harris’ proposed use of government to forge social outcomes and to cap grocery store prices as Venezuela-style socialism.

“That dark message really doesn’t gel at all with the idea that somehow the Democrats are the joyful party,” Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper Wednesday. “There’s a lot of attacks on Donald Trump, a lot of criticism of what he’s done and what he’s said. Not a whole lot of positive vision for how Kamala Harris is going to fix the problems that plague the country.”

It’s important for campaigns to be honest about policy — not just so voters know what they are voting for, but to construct a foundation for the presidency that Harris hopes to lead once the euphoria of the campaign subsides.

Yet elections are also won by emotion, poetry and candidates who offer themselves as inspirational vessels on which voters can imprint their aspirations. This year, a message that proffers voters a way to end Trump’s eight years of daily assaults on the national psyche may get Harris to the 50%-plus threshold needed to win the White House — a level the GOP nominee has never reached.

Old ghosts still haunt Democrats

Still, scratch the happiness rocking the United Center this week and fear of old defeats lurk, especially that of 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton to Trump. Party elders warned Democrats that joy doesn’t necessarily equate to votes. Former President Bill Clinton, clearly still haunted by the election that could have made his wife president, warned: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen.”

And former President Barack Obama cautioned Democrats that as they lambast Trump, they should not disrespect his supporters, apparently seeking to avoid any repeat of the “deplorables” terminology used by the former secretary of state eight years ago.

“If a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people,” Obama said Tuesday night. “We recognize that the world is moving fast, that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.”

Democratic leaders will view their convention as a success.

For three days, the party’s former presidents, first ladies and its future stars sketched a character profile of Harris, who once flipped Big Macs while in college, as a champion of the working and middle classes. They painted a blend of joy and toughness of a nominee, who, along with her small-town Midwestern dad running mate Walz, gets ordinary Americans and feels their sticker shock when they fill their grocery carts.

The convention also ushered Biden off the stage, avoiding damaging splits and completing a generational switch. While in vacation in California, he’s barely been heard from since — allowing Harris to emerge as a distinct political force and to run as a candidate of change even as an incumbent member of a battered administration.

The scenes inside the hall didn’t just epitomize a party feeling political deliverance after Biden’s exit, they showcased its diverse, young and female rising leaders. This gave base voters whom Harris needs a reason to show up in November that many lacked with Biden topping the ticket. And by keeping pro-Palestinian demonstrations at a distance, Democrats dodged a sequel to the 1968 Chicago convention and avoided bolstering GOP narratives of a nation ripped apart.

New shifts in a neck-and-neck campaign

This convention’s tightly choreographed last three days also revealed critical new shifts in a turbulent campaign already marked by unprecedented courtroom dramas, an assassination attempt and the eclipse of a president.

Democrats reengineered their case against Trump for the final stretch. While Biden preferred a lofty conceit that the GOP nominee’s anti-democratic impulses stain the “soul of the nation,” the Obamas and the Clintons savaged Trump with mockery, belittling him as a small and ridiculous man unworthy of a vote.

Obama, demonstrating his undimmed hold on his party eight years after leaving power, dissed Trump’s grating societal impact as akin to an annoying neighboring constantly running his leaf blower. “From a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous.” Former first lady Michelle Obama, meanwhile, cast Trump as a racist product of White billionaire affirmative action who didn’t understand that the presidency may be a “Black job.” And a venerable Bill Clinton, who celebrated his 78th birthday in Chicago, relished being younger than Trump, turning the tables in the age debate that powered Trump’s campaign when Biden was the nominee.

The Chicago gathering also sharpened the party’s doctrine — countering Republican charges that it’s turning into a Venezuela-style socialist clone — by coopting conservative and libertarian language to redefine the concept of “freedom.” Democrats hear “freedom” and see rights on which conservatism encroached – reproductive and voting rights and the liberty to go to school without fear of being gunned down.

One of the biggest impediments in recent years to a sense of freedom has been the punishing aftermath of the pandemic and high inflation fueled by some of the big-spending Biden administration emergency relief programs.

In lambasting supermarket giants, Harris also cemented her populist reboot on economics. It’s a dual strategy intended to mitigate her biggest weakness — her association with high inflation during the Biden administration — and to court rural working-class voters and suburban voters who could decide swing state races.

But the economy, like immigration, remains a vulnerability for Harris, which is one reason why despite Trump’s unpopularity, the election remains a toss-up

Walz warned Wednesday night: “Team, it’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball.”

Now with the convention over, Harris must prove she can become a singular political figure worthy of the past four days of tributes who can drive her party to victory. The next test comes on September 10 at her critical first debate with Trump.

In the words of the advertising slogan that epitomized Michael Jordan, the greatest athlete to peform in the arena where she spoke, it’s now time for Harris and her supporters to “Just do it.”

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