Last night Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a relatively brief, bracing acceptance speech that ran for fewer than 40 minutes.
Last night Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a relatively brief, bracing acceptance speech that ran for fewer than 40 minutes. For Harris, the first nominee in either party who didn’t compete in a single primary or caucus since Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, this was a speech of unparalleled importance. She’s been barnstorming the country for weeks, but her primetime acceptance speech (which the DNC managed to start almost an hour earlier than the headliners from the first few days of the convention) was a single-serve opportunity to define herself to a country eager to learn more about her. And while what was there was flawlessly executed, she might ultimately regret not taking another 15 or 20 minutes to defend the Biden administration (and her role in it) and to put even a little bit of gristle on the bones of her policy agenda.
First, the good. There’s been a lot of chatter about Harris’s joy and ebullience on the trail. But for those who haven’t seen it up until now or remember her only from her acerbic grilling of Supreme Court nominees in the Senate or her contentious primary debate tussles with then-candidate Joe Biden in the summer of 2019, her beaming exuberance was unmistakably uplifting. Neither party’s nominee has seemed this happy and unburdened since Barack Obama in 2008. She was practically bouncing off the stage. Harris is clearly comfortable with herself and the extraordinary historical role that she has been thrust into. To be this poised and ready just weeks after her unexpected elevation to this position is an achievement that no other candidate could possibly have been able to muster.
It’s been a long time since the Democratic nominee wasn’t eligible to collect Social Security, and the benefit of a younger, dynamic candidate was obvious from the second she stepped on the stage. Especially in contrast with the flub-filled, often excruciating speeches Americans have endured from the past two elderly presidents, her speech was flawlessly executed and compelling. It was nothing new structurally—except in the hands of the rambling, word-salad-tossing mania of former President Donald Trump, these things have a familiar shape: a biography filled with stories and quotes from family members meant to make the nominee relatable, followed by a vision and a policy agenda flecked with attacks on her opponent.
