NOTEBOOK: Harris closes
Eleven brief thoughts on the vice president's summation
That was a very strong closing argument from Kamala Harris. Framing the threat of fascism as not an abstraction but a distraction from a focus on your problems. Promising to move us away from the chaos and division of these years and heal families and communities.
She very deftly pitted who he is against who we are and dared people to show that their country is much better than he is.
She pulled off the bank shot: saying we have to save a democracy, yes, but save it for a reason, which is to make your life better. It is a complicated maneuver, and she did it well tonight.
She invited men to stand up for the women in their lives.
She talked about the border, but then quickly and rightly pivoted to the fact that we are nation of immigrants, a fact we should celebrate.
Her reclaiming of freedom and patriotism is a coup, the good kind of coup. The crowd’s embrace of patriotism and “U.S.A.!” chants tonight shows how much that message has been transmitted and left an imprint.
There was something raw and personal when she talked about how she just is irked by unfairness. It just doesn’t sit right with her. It felt like a statement of motivation that was much richer than the generic fact of being a middle-class kid. It got somewhere visceral.
We are all so exhausted by fascist threat mitigation that we forget all the awesome stuff we could be doing instead. So her section on building houses also served as a reminder that building in general, creating, dreaming, can again become our focus when he is finally gone from our lives.
She is, on a deeper level, attempting a rebranding of the Democratic Party away from big program creation, dating back to FDR, and reorienting it around quality of life improvement. Don’t talk about the programs you want to create. Talk about the pain points you want to solve.
Many of the best arguments of recent years are weaving together now. Trump’s narrow, hateful vision isn’t who we are. His project is all about him, not your problems. The soul of the nation is good and can be reclaimed. The divisions can end. Let’s build stuff instead of fight.
Most powerfully, she invoked American history from end to end, and vowed that a country founded in defiance of a petty tyrant must refuse to submit to another.
Watch the full speech here: