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What ultimately separates standout politicians from the rest is an ability to connect with the American people. It sounds obvious, but it’s a far more challenging task than it seems. Kamala Harris proved in her acceptance speech Thursday night that she understood the assignment.
She’s already a unique presidential nominee, a biracial woman with a blended family. She’s faced attacks on her identity from Donald Trump and his allies.
What Harris did in her acceptance speech was to tell her story and make clear she’s squarely within the American mainstream. What she told the public was essentially, I am not different from you; I come from the same roots as you do; my life is like yours.
In fact, her speech was cut from the same cloth as three very different past nominees who recounted the importance of family and overcoming adversity — all of whom went on to win the presidency.
In 1988, George H. W. Bush downplayed his life of privilege this way: “The war was over, and we wanted to get out and make it on our own. And those were exciting days. We lived in a little shotgun house, one room for the three of us. Worked in the oil business, then started my own. In time we had six children. Moved from the shotgun to a duplex apartment to a house. And lived the dream — high school football on Friday night, Little League, neighborhood barbecue.”
Grandson of a Wall Street investment banker? Son of a U.S. Senator? No — Bush was simply one of millions of World War II veterans, setting out for a new life, in a new place sharing the same common experiences.
In 1992, Bill Clinton’s educational background — Georgetown, Oxford, Yale Law School — defined him in polls as an “elitist.” So Clinton addressed that dilemma with an extensive account of his family — not just his single mother struggling to make ends meet, but in his description of his grandfather, who ran a small grocery store.
“My grandfather just had a high school education — a grade school education — but in that country store he taught me more about equality in the eyes of the Lord than all my professors at Georgetown, more about the intrinsic worth of every individual than all the philosophers at Oxford, more about the need for equal justice under the law than all the jurists at Yale Law School.”
In one paragraph, he dismissed each of the three elite institutions he’d attended, celebrating instead the down-home folk wisdom of his family.
And in 2008, it was family that was the touchstone of Barack Obama’s message. American voters had never been offered a Black man, much less someone with the same middle name as a hostile dictator and roots that reached from his father’s Kenya, to Hawaii, to the streets of Chicago.
So in his speech, he linked the struggles of “ordinary” Americans with those of his own family.
“In the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton’s Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree; who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships.”
Each of these speeches accomplished a political goal as essential as any, not to offer a litany of policies but to offer a more visceral message: This is who I am, this is where I come from, and in the ways that count, my story is your story.
It is the same message Kamala Harris delivered Thursday night.
She delivered it from the very first moments of her speech, when she told the story of her mother’s journey from India.
“It was mostly my mother who raised us,” she said. “Before she could finally afford to buy a home, she rented a small apartment in the East Bay. In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats — a beautiful working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers, all who tended their lawns with pride.” (That last assertion is about as middle class as it gets.)
“We know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success,” she said. “And building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. This is personal for me. The middle class is where I come from.”
It was in some ways an anodyne speech, with assertions that any candidate — well, almost any candidate — could offer: a promise to be “president of all the people,” an assertion to follow “the rule of law” and to support “the peaceful transfer of power.”
Her prosecutorial record was aimed at miscreants few would rush to defend: predatory lenders, drug cartels. The villains that progressives like Bernie Sanders denounces — the billionaires, the corporate kingpins — did not make an appearance.
Rather, she turned her wrath most on Donald Trump in her 35-minute speech — roughly a third of the length of his rambling, discordant convention address — painting in granular detail an opponent guilty of civil and criminal wrongdoing, determined to gain power to abuse and misuse it.
When she turned to her goals, some of what she offered was equally broad: create an “opportunity economy,” pass a middle-class tax cut, build more housing. By contrast, in her blunt, forceful account of what the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade led to and would lead to under Trump, there was no equivocation.
“Simply put,” she said, “[the abortion foes] are out of their minds.” It is Trump and his allies who are out of the mainstream, she argued.
Similarly, it was a not-so-subtle attack on Trump’s patriotism when she vowed to “always honor, and never disparage” the service and sacrifice of the military.
If you were looking for a litany of policies, you will have to look elsewhere. But as a speech whose goal was to connect with the broad impulses of the electorate, with repeated avowals of American greatness, and to present the nominee as a no-nonsense, tough-minded leader who holds the same values as most Americans, it accomplished its purpose.
