Whither the politics of joy? Kamala Harris’s solid if unspectacular closing argument for why she should be elected US president was not about Kamala Harris. It was first and foremost about Donald Trump.
The Democratic nominee’s big speech in Washington mentioned Trump by name 24 times and Joe Biden only once. It confirmed that, even when Trump is not commander-in-chief, he still commands the American psyche.
A week before election day, Harris chose her venue carefully: the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House. Trump “stood at this very spot nearly four years ago”, she noted, adding that he sent an armed mob to the US Capitol to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
A very different, more diverse, larger crowd – some estimated 75,000 – gathered here on Tuesday, basking in unseasonal afternoon heat, wrapping against an evening chill. They waved “USA” signs and the stars and stripes and wore wristbands glowing blue or red. They chanted “Kamala! Kamala!” and “We’re not going back!” They were surrounded by great symbols of the republic: the Washington monument, the Jefferson memorial, the White House itself.
Speaking at a lectern behind protective glass, Harris went on to warn of Trump’s enemies list and intention to turn the military against those who disagree with him. “This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better,” she said. “This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”
The vice-president went on to sketch out some of her own biography as a prosecutor and law enforcement officer fighting for the people. Yet somehow the argument again came back to the Republican nominee. “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she said. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
It was a far cry from the start of the Harris candidacy, which launched with joyous euphoria and her running mate, Tim Walz, branding Trump and his allies “weird”. That felt like a refreshing tonic after years of anxiety and misery in the Trump era. At the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia, speaker after speaker mocked Trump and made him seem small (Barack Obama even parodied his manhood).
Notably, even then, Harris began to adopt a more serious tone about the threat he poses, and in recent weeks she embraced former Trump officials’ use of “fascist” to underline his authoritarian ambitions, though she did not deploy that word here. His rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, and its echoes of a pro-Nazi rally that took place there in 1939, provided more fodder.
There is some political logic to this choice: make the election a referendum on Trump rather than Harris; make him seem like the incumbent and Harris the change agent. “It is time to turn the page on the drama and conflict, the fear and division,” she said. “It is time for a new generation of leadership in America.”
That would explain why she has sought to distance herself from Biden and is reportedly brushing off his offers to campaign for her. Although her Tuesday rally in Washington was Bidenesque in its dire warnings about the Trump threat, it used the president’s favoured word, “democracy”, only once. Instead, the word “freedom” was spelled out on three giant blue banners, along with “USA”.
Some Democrats are also eager for Harris to separate herself from Biden on the issue of the war in Gaza. A protester was led away shouting: “Stop arming Israel! Arms embargo now!” But Harris did not throw a bone to the peace movement during her remarks.
Whereas Biden used to tout job growth and economic good news, Harris again offered some practical promises: tax cuts for working people and the middle class, the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on groceries, a cap on the price of insulin and help for first-time home buyers.
These were important things that ought to win votes. But they were not accompanied by a grand vision. Mario Cuomo’s old adage was campaign in poetry, govern in prose, but there was not a great deal of soaring rhetoric in Harris’s address. A decade of Trump had been bad for the soul.
The vice-president did deliver a memorable image towards the end, however, recalling how, nearly 250 years, America wrested itself free from a petty tyrant (British monarch George III) and how generations of Americans have preserved that freedom. “They did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said. “The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
Then, from fear, a pivot to hope: “The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised. A nation big enough to encompass all our dreams. Strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us. And fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.”
Doug Emhoff joined Harris on stage with a hug and a kiss as the crowd cheered. Next Tuesday, they will be back in Washington for the most nail-biting presidential election since George W Bush v Al Gore in 2000. They will be hoping this Democratic vice-president fares better than Gore did. A wafer-thin margin of a few thousand votes in a swing state or two may determine whether Harris’s closing argument looks like strategic genius or a catastrophic miscalculation.
She told the crowd: “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That’s who he is. But America, I am here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.”
The phrase “this is not who we are” has been used often in the Trump era. Sometimes the evidence says otherwise. Next week, the country will find out who we really are.
