When asked who Kamala Harris really is, the answer was that even the overwhelming majority of her ardent supporters couldn’t care less. Before July, there were no ardent Kamala Harris supporters. In reality, Democrats aren’t voting for Harris, even if they may come to love her over time; they’re voting for Democrats, a powerful political vertical that can draw on the best image-building talent in the country. The goal the entire party could agree on was to defeat Donald Trump, and that was exactly what Harris’ acceptance speech was designed to do.
The first part of that speech was a masterpiece that embodied Harris perfectly. Written in classic American language, at once uplifting and direct, and interspersed with more recent immigrant stories, it recounted Harris’s childhood and adolescence in a working-class neighborhood in rough Oakland with her hard-nosed mother, who was a doctor and traveled all the way from India to America to cure cancer. There were touching memories of moving vans before the family found a home in a middle-class neighborhood where a host of friendly neighbors were on hand to help when Mom worked long hours.
No doubt the details of this story are all verifiable. But as an autobiographical narrative, they omit as much of Harris’s upbringing as they reveal—the early estrangement between her parents that culminated in a bitter divorce and custody battle, after which her mother relocated Harris and her sister to, of all places, Montreal, where Harris actually went to high school and where the official language in schools and other public places is French. There was little mention of her African-American heritage, which the party emphasized through the rather performative blackness and hairstyle of her sister Maya. What happened to her relationship with her father after she was a toddler? Do they at least take turns speaking? Didn’t her mother die of cancer rather than cure it?
As a prime-time soap opera, the Harris story still has some problems to work out. But from the cheap seats at the top of the arena, for the first quarter of the speech, you could imagine you were witnessing a historic event, like Obama’s 2004 inaugural or 2008 acceptance speech. We saw something new, or at least the unveiling of a promising new product line aimed specifically at the party’s core demographic of single women, with potential for growth among married women as well – Obama Lite.
Then it all fell apart because someone on the script committee decided to abandon positivity and rehash old attack lines against Donald Trump, which is the kind of job best left to surrogates at the wedding reception. No one wants to hear the bride herself become negative. Harris’ demeanor audibly changed as she delivered the attack lines, and her voice became uncomfortably salacious and cynical. The script itself was lazy and made the candidate seem uncomfortably like a scribbler. The spell was broken.
Having maneuvered herself into a dead end, Harris managed to extricate herself by passionately and with real feeling supporting both Israel’s right to real security and unlimited American support and arms and, at the same time, the absolute right of the Palestinians to freedom and self-determination, presumably in a free and independent Palestinian state. That these two miracles can be achieved simultaneously and actually enable each other is one of the magic formulas of American Middle East diplomacy that appears to have no basis in reality. But for a moment, Harris made the pairing seem convincing. And more importantly, she conveyed strength, passion and toughness in doing so.
One takeaway for the party’s scriptwriters should be that Harris is at her best when she conveys strength. She sounds like a warrior. That’s because she is a prosecutor at heart, not a social justice advocate or deep thinker. Conversely, she sounds at her worst when she seems cynical about the law, an occupational hazard for prosecutors, or when she tries to explain geopolitics or spout poetry. Leave that to Obama, who held the crowd in the palm of his hand Tuesday night by spouting tranquilizers about overcoming the political divide that has been instilled in decades-old National public radio It worked, however, because Obama wields his stiletto in the dark and his level of political skill and intuition is unmatched.
All in all, the Chicago Miracle, as it will no doubt be called, was a reality-shattering magic trick, akin to your grandmother getting up from the dinner table and perfectly mimicking Olga Korbut’s famous “Doom Loop” from the 1972 Olympics. Less than two months ago, Democrats seemed to be in bad shape—and that was before Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and responded by pumping his fist in the air and yelling “Fight!” That, too, was magic.
“All in all, the Chicago Miracle, as it will undoubtedly be called, was a reality-shattering magic trick.”
Now an even greater magic trick has occurred: Joe Biden is gone, and with him the three and a half years of his failed presidency. As speaker after speaker has pointed out, Trump represents the past while the party represents the future. Trump represents himself while the party represents us. The rhetorical contrast is powerful. Magically, the Democratic candidate credibly represents change and the people fighting against power, while the Democrats themselves are in reality the party in power.
The crowd helped, too. The green-haired gender gremlins, the keffiyeh-masked Antifa rioters, and the accusatory and divisive racial rhetoric—all of that had magically disappeared. It was as if someone somewhere had flipped a switch or threatened to cut checks to the party’s radical organizing class, making the Democrats the party of everyday Americans again. Everywhere you looked at the United Center on Thursday night, Americans of all races and creeds were waving the American flag and breaking into spontaneous chants of “USA! USA!” Moreover, the chants seemed entirely sincere. Yes, the people in the room would dutifully follow the party wherever it led, but it turns out that most of them would rather express their pride in their country and wave the flag than call for police abolition or demand that children use gender-neutral bathrooms in public schools. Maybe all the craziness and apparent insanity of the last eight years was just a bad dream or the product of some sort of right-wing AI deepfake manipulation.
Or perhaps, faced with the sudden collapse of the agreed-upon pseudo-reality in which Joe Biden ran the country so successfully that he was on the verge of becoming the greatest American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the party’s image-makers used the impressive machinery at their disposal to construct a new pseudo-reality in five weeks and then cram it into everyone’s brain. Yes, we’ve lied to you nonstop for the last three and a half years about who’s running the country and what we’re actually up to—but hand on heart, we’re telling you the truth now. Kamala Harris will make difficult decisions about a more compassionate and inclusive, meritocratic American future full of opportunity while defending freedom around the globe. Plus, she’s a beauty queen. Plus, we love football.
Faced with such wonder, the brain cannot help but rebel against familiar sensory input. Did I just see that? Of course not. But it is right in front of me. Is the world I can see, feel and touch real? Or is it simply a controlled projection constructed by unseen and possibly malevolent forces? And if nothing is real, then why not believe what everyone else wants to believe? Under these circumstances, perhaps the safest choice is to hover somewhere between belief and disbelief, hoping that whoever is in charge of the big show will come up with an even newer, better script when Donald Trump is finally gone.
