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The hosts react to Kamala Harris’s convention speech in this special late-night edition of “Matter of Opinion.” Columnists Lydia Polgreen, Ross Douthat and Carlos Lozada unpack how Harris had a “deft threading of a number of tricky needles” as she accepted her party’s nomination, and look at what the entire week revealed about the Democratic Party.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation. To listen to this episode, click the play button below.
Carlos Lozada: So the Democratic Convention has come to a close. Now we know exactly who Kamala Harris is and what she stands for, which is freedom. And we know who the Democrats are, who they’re pitching themselves to be in this campaign. I imagine it’s all crystal clear to all of you now. Is that right? I see Ross grimacing. [Polgreen laughs]
Ross Douthat: No, it’s completely clear, the Democratic Party did not nominate Donald Trump.
Lozada: For the third straight time.
Douthat: For the third straight time.
Lozada: So let’s start off with the case that Kamala Harris just made. We are speaking immediately after the end of her speech on Thursday evening, late Thursday evening. So, what did you guys make of the speech?
Lydia Polgreen: I think that this is perhaps the clearest and most fulsome articulation of what we have been hearing from Kamala Harris since she became the presumptive and then actual nominee for the Democratic Party just a — few weeks ago.
And I think the case is basically: I am a pretty normal Democrat who is falling back on some pretty standard American ideas about the country that we are and the policies that Americans want. And I found it to be a pretty deft threading of a number of tricky needles.
And it was definitely not the sort of soaring rhetoric or red meat of the Michelle Obama speech, or other things that we’ve heard over the last few days. But I felt like it got the job done in terms of the message that she’s trying to send about her candidacy and what she has planned for the country.
Lozada: What is that message?
Polgreen: I’m not Donald Trump. I represent core American values, just like you, the ones that matter to you. And I’m a safe pair of hands that can continue the country along a path to normalcy and out of what has been an extraordinarily aberrant period in American life.
Douthat: Abortions for some, little American flags for others, I think is the essential message.
The speech went into detail, as far as I could tell, on Roe v. Wade being a good thing and Donald Trump being responsible for overturning it. It went into some detail, I guess, on foreign policy in a kind of generic, America should lead the free world and Donald Trump has creepy affection for tyrants and strongmen. And it went into some detail on Jan. 6 being a disgraceful event and not wishing to bring back the man responsible for that disgrace. So pro-choice patriotism, I guess, was the substantive argument.
There was a little bit of economic policy. I thought it was quite striking that there was no attempt to deliver some state-of-the-union style, ringing, Joe Biden and I made this the greatest economy in history kind of thing.
Which I think is probably somewhat disappointing to liberals who have thought that Biden himself didn’t do enough to talk up the Biden economy. It’s an interesting choice. There’s a decision here to try and separate completely — or not completely, there were the moments of saying, Joe Biden and I are working hard to solve these foreign policy issues and Joe Biden and I would have solved the border crisis except Donald Trump sabotaged the border security bill.
That stuff was in there. But generally, there was a clean break with the last four years. Hit a few themes and move on. And it was what, one third as long as Trump’s speech? And I give it a lot of credit for that. Not least because it makes the job of podcasters a lot easier. [Lozada laughs]
We can be slightly more lucid not having to sit through a 90 minute stem winder. But yeah, it continues — I mean, I agree with Lydia. It continues the presentation of the Harris campaign that we’ve seen to date, which I think one could reasonably say is a little bit thin. But I think they think it’s been working for them.
Polgreen: And also it hasn’t been that long since she’s been the presumptive and actual nominee. But Carlos, what did you think?
Lozada: I thought it made sense that she would distance herself from the Biden record particularly in the economy, when so much of her story is about how ‘we’re going to lower the cost of living.’ It’s a reminder of when the cost of living shot up: under their watch.
And so that seemed a pretty reasonable way to go about that part of the story. She’s in a tough spot of trying to run both as a change agent while in fact being an incumbent. And you see throughout the week, there was a lot of credit mongering on her behalf for all the stuff that people liked in the Biden record, and a lot of silence on the stuff that people did not like on the Biden record. Bernie Sanders did a lot of that.
But for me what really loomed largest — and it’s probably not surprising given how she’s been campaigning so far — is the leaning in fully into the prosecutor story. You know, as a prosecutor, she represents the people. “Kamala Harris, for the people.”
She spoke of her journey from the courthouse to the White House. She says what she learned as a prosecutor is that everyone has a right to safety, dignity and justice, and in our system of justice, harm against anyone is a harm against all of us. To me one of the more striking contrasts that she did, rhetorically speaking at least, was, “My entire career, I’ve had only one client, the people. Donald Trump has had only one client, and that is himself.”
And of course, what’s fascinating about Harris leaning into the prosecutor persona is how miserably that failed in 2020 — or in 2019, she didn’t even make it to 2020 — when she was running for president. Back then, the party was in a different place. The country was in a different place. Now the prosecutor message has more resonance. In her first book, she was smart on crime. Then in her second book, she was a progressive prosecutor. Now the campaign calls her a pragmatic prosecutor, sort of shifting back. And it seems like a moment that the country is more ready for that kind of message.
So I don’t know if it’s just her shifting with the political winds finally made that match. Or if it’s really the moment when the kind of prosecutor that she really sees herself as finally meets a kind of moment.
Polgreen: Yeah, you can tell that the speech had to accomplish many different things. I think one of Kamala Harris’s biggest challenges is that most people just don’t really know who she is, or don’t really know what she believes or what she stands for. Even though she’s been in public life for a long time — she ran for president, it didn’t go particularly well. She dropped out before a single vote was cast. She gets picked as vice president. We’ve rehearsed the history of her political career.
And so I think that there’s this need to sort of introduce yourself. And one of the things that really struck me listening to the speech is that she did something that she hasn’t done that often on the stump, which is narrate the story of her family and her life.
It was striking to me how much less comfortable and natural she seemed telling that story than she did once she got into the full, this is the story of my career and the choices that I made as a prosecutor and the things that I did. There was just a very clear cadence and way of telling that story. And that style of storytelling didn’t go throughout the whole speech. I felt an abrupt pivot, which is just really interesting to me.
And one of the struggles that she has had in the past, and I think will have going forward, is making that kind of emotional connection, that is a connective tissue between her life story and her work, in a way that feels like it’s all an integrated whole. It just really struck me that she seemed just a lot less comfortable in the first part of the speech and a lot less natural than in the latter part.
Lozada: I tend to agree with you in looking at the cadence of the speech, and yet when you say that she might struggle to make that emotional connection — I’ve been told that this whole thing is about joy.
It’s all about emotions. It’s all about the feeling you get when you see Kamala Harris campaigning. One of our colleagues in Opinion wrote about the power of her smile.
Polgreen: No, totally.
Lozada: So there’s emotions and there’s emotions.
Polgreen: There’s emotions but that feels quite abstracted from the actual story that she’s telling. I mean, someone can have charisma and you really don’t really know anything about who they are. You can be an attractive person. You can be a talented public speaker. And that’s just a different thing from that magical combination of story, biography, policy — all of those things that come together into one thing.
Douthat: Well on that point, we’ve had a full convention here which means we’ve gotten the presidents of the Democratic Party’s past. And I think in different ways both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were much closer to that kind of synthesis that you’re describing.
Obama was more cerebral but also soaring in his rhetoric. Clinton was always folksier and more granular. I don’t think either of them gave the greatest speech of their life or career at all in this particular convention. But I think even in the speeches they did give, you could see something that they had that I don’t think Harris has achieved.
I think this was a perfectly fine speech for the campaign that they’re trying to run. And I’m not damning it with faint praise, I’m just describing the zone that it was operating in and trying to operate in. I think at the very end, when you got into the flourishes, I did have a little bit of “Veep” feeling that I, maybe alone among commentators, still get from Harris.
Lozada: “Veep” as in the television show you mean?
Douthat: “Veep” as in the television show where the political candidate is wading through cliché in certain ways. I thought there was some of that at the end of the speech.
We haven’t talked about the Israel-Gaza portion. I was trying to describe earlier moments where there was actually some substance. I left that out. That was the place where she was I think very self consciously trying to bridge what feels like the biggest internal divide in the Democratic Party right now. Doing a lot of on the one hand, on the other hand, we’re going to get to a good outcome for everybody kind of thing. I don’t know. What did you think of that part, Lydia?
Polgreen: Yeah, it was certainly the most emotionally satisfying full-throated talk about Palestinian suffering. And I think there was definitely a need for that, to talk about what’s happening in Gaza and the toll that’s happening there. I think an equally full-throated, I will support Israel, as president I will give Israel what it needs to defend itself. So I think a very carefully balanced and measured twinning of those things.
But, it did feel like a very substantive and frankly necessary emotional connection and recognition that what is happening in Gaza can’t continue to happen in Gaza. Whether that’s enough to bridge those divides, I don’t know. It should be said that there was talk that there was going to be a kind of 1968 style, blood in the streets, huge protests and that just didn’t happen.
At the same time there was a tremendous amount of pressure to have a Palestinian American speak at the convention. There was a copy of a speech that was from a Georgia state lawmaker whose family emigrated from Jordan, originally from Palestine, and that person was not allowed to make that speech. They ultimately weren’t able to negotiate it.
That felt like a missed opportunity. It would have been good for the party to actually have that voice appear, given that we were treated to lots and lots of Republicans onstage. There surely could have been two or three minutes for a Palestinian American lawmaker to speak.
But all of that being said I do think that the Israel-Gaza peace portion of the speech was important and notable and, much like the way that she talked about abortion, something that I think Joe Biden just simply couldn’t pull off. There just was no way that he was going to be able to thread that needle in the same way that she did.
Lozada: I think there’s, there’s threading the needle and then there’s just giving something to both sides to have some emotional resonance and satisfaction. It’s like, we will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and we will give Israel the resources it needs, and at the same time, the heartbreaking suffering in Gaza.
One of her favorite phrases in her writings is, is “false choices.” She doesn’t like to be, to be pinned down between the dichotomies she doesn’t like.
Douthat: I hate false choices. Those are the worst choices.
Lozada: And so I think she would say this is a false choice. I’m for Israel and I’m for the people of Gaza and Palestinian self determination. So I think she gave everyone involved sentences to latch onto.
One thing that has come up a lot in the discussion around this convention is the notion of passing the torch. Torch passing! Sounds a little bit dangerous to me, but it is something that the party is doing. And I’m curious as to how you see this torch being passed.
Is it Biden to Harris? Is it the Obamas to Harris skipping Biden? Who’s passing the torch and where is the final, or the next relay of this relay race going?
Douthat: I don’t know if a torch is being passed exactly. I mean, there’s all kinds of talk about tensions between the Biden camp and the Obama camp and Nancy Pelosi and so on. But I think if you were just watching this convention as a somewhat politically aware, but not too politically aware, viewer, the main thing you would take away is the normalcy of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, unlike the Republican Party, likes its former presidents. You had former presidents there. You did not have George W. Bush at the Republican convention. It likes its leaders old and new generally. It’s comfortable with itself. It doesn’t have a situation where you have to stack the successful governors earlier in the week, and then have the nominee’s family talking about him on the final day, as you did with the Republican convention and Trump.
So in that sense, I think that the structure of the convention fit well in a way with the approach that Harris herself took in her speech, which is basically to say, look, you wanted a generic Democrat to run against Trump? I’m a generic Democrat. This was a generic Democratic convention. We didn’t have any big fights. As Lydia said earlier, there wasn’t blood in the streets. This wasn’t 1968. The tensions were sort of interesting, but somewhat subterranean in a lot of cases. And here we are, America, we have normal positions, normal politicians. Vote for us. We’re not weird.
I think that was, that was the message sent. Not so much a sense of like, ‘We have this mission, and here’s Kamala Harris, she’s carrying on this mission.’ There was no Ted Kennedy in his 1980 convention speech.
Lozada: The dream will never die.
Douthat: It’s late, I’m not going to quote Ted Kennedy. But it was normalcy. And my question, I think the question that hangs over all of this is, isn’t this just what the Democrats have offered before against Trump? And is it actually enough?
And I think if Harris loses in November, as is still quite possible, people may look back and say, man, the Democrats didn’t really say a lot at this four day extravaganza, except that they were normal and Trump is not.
Polgreen: What I saw was a very, very deep bench of charismatic and talented leaders who are from the past and also in the future. People who will be with us for a very long time. There were some fantastic speeches. What I didn’t hear were a lot of new ideas or new direction for the country. And that to me is striking and worrying, because what we’re living through right now is a time where people are saying that they are not happy with the direction that the country is taking. And what I heard was a lot of, here’s how we’re going to tinker on the margins to work on this thing and make that thing better. But not big transformational ideas.
To be fair, the cast of characters who’ve tried to offer big transformational ideas on the Democratic side are people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren. We saw a striking move, from Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from being more on the left much closer to the center of the party.
So, I didn’t think this was like an ideas or hugely inspirational convention in terms of like thinking about, this is a new direction for America. It felt much more of a restoration to a different kind of idea about America, which is ironic, because the “Make America Great Again” guy is Donald Trump, not Kamala Harris.
In some ways this is something of a nostalgic vision. And I think that there are a lot of big open questions about what a post-globalization, post-cosmopolitan, and perhaps even post-liberal world order looks like. What sort of politics and policy this incredibly important political party is going to offer for that era is a question that they’re effectively just punting, in favor of saying like Donald Trump is an aberrant figure — which he absolutely is, but we’re also living through incredibly turbulent times that do require new thinking.
Douthat: It felt like a complacent convention in which is a weird thing to say about a party that has, to its great credit, dispatched an unfit president and replaced him at the top of the ticket and acted in a very noncomplacent way. And as someone quite skeptical of the Democratic Party, I think Democrats deserve credit for being noncomplacent in that way. But having done that, it felt like, OK, we did that. That was really hard. Let’s not do anything else too crazy from here till November. That could win them the election. If it does win them the election, it’s going to be, I think, by an extremely narrow margin.
Polgreen: Yeah. I think it was going to be an extremely narrow margin no matter what.
Lozada: So, you guys are clamoring for substance and it seems like the main thing you got this week were constant references to freedom, and then this constant attitude of joy. Is there anything behind freedom and joy? Not just as sort of a messaging mechanism, but substantively?
Douthat: Sure. I mean freedom is not a code. It’s just a direct reference to a full-throated defense of social liberalism against social conservatism, with abortion as the focal issue, but looping in other issues as well where it seems like social liberalism could be threatened by weird people who JD Vance has been on a podcast with. I think that’s fairly straightforwardly what the freedom argument is about. The joy stuff, I think, is a mixture of Democratic joy at having a normal candidate — unfeigned, like, ‘we are really happy to have a generic Democrat instead of Joe Biden,’ combined with, again, I think a somewhat complacent version of the, ‘America is really good, why are Donald Trump and JD Vance so down on America?’ kind of stuff.
Polgreen: I think the freedom pitch is broader than that. I think strikingly it’s about free speech. I remember when Democrats were supposedly the scolds who wanted to prevent people from talking and saying certain things. The Republicans have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by enacting book bans and trying to ban drag shows and things like that and turned themselves into the anti-free speech party, miraculously.
But I think there’s also just things like freedom to marry who you love, freedom to get a divorce or not marry at all, freedom to access gender affirming care, freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot. I think they’re trying to broaden these ideas of freedom beyond just getting an abortion or not.
And I think that the joy is real. These have been joyless times. I think a lot of it is, I don’t know, coming out of Covid, the specter and the grim struggle between these ancient men — Joe Biden and Donald Trump — and then suddenly being able to think about a different kind of future in a different kind of race.
And there are actual joyful people involved. Tim Walz seems like a really fun guy that people like. Kamala Harris seems like a lot of fun. She’s actually someone you would want to have a drink with. Whereas like JD Vance goes in and doesn’t seem to know how to order doughnuts at a doughnut shop. It just seems really, really strange and alienating. And Donald Trump is of course, as people say, just sort of weird. So I think the joy is something that they come by honestly.
Douthat: I mean, it’s almost midnight, so I’m not going to go too deep here, but first I’ll just say that the Tim Walsh shtick is just not for me. He’s not trying to win my vote, so I’m not really a good judge of just how appealing he is. Maybe he really is just the joyful America’s dad, the coach of all coaches and I’m just too cynical to see it, but I’m not sure that he will actually wear well over the course of whatever span of time he remains at the center of American political life. We’ll find out. I think there is something kind of amusing in that the sense of relief that Democrats feel at the moment is in part the relief of escaping from strictures that they themselves were imposing.
That can mean very literal things, like the fact that Tim Walz, like many Democratic governors, imposed a lot of strictures on people’s lives during the pandemic that lasted way too long and did a lot of damage. And now it’s like, well, they’re lifted. We’re filled with joy and we won’t talk about the fact that we ourselves were responsible for that. Or the joy of racing away from a bunch of politically implausible positions that all liberal politicians had to adopt in 2020, Kamala Harris included. And now? Well, now we agree that we can just pretend those positions were never adopted in the first place and shake the Etch A Sketch and make them all go away.
So yes, I think there is a sense of a desire for freedom from the dark hand of conservative power, but there’s also a sense of like, well, what if we just escaped from all the crazy things we ourselves did just a few short years ago? Wouldn’t that be fun? And that’s part of what the Democrats are doing too.
Polgreen: Well, let’s talk about that during the 2028 Republican Convention when they’re no longer under the thumb of Donald Trump and can feel the joy of escaping
Douthat: The Douthat-Lozada ticket of 2028 is going to be joyful.
Lozada: I’ll give quick thoughts on freedom and joy for whatever they’re worth. The freedom thing — I mean, not to get too like Isaiah Berlin, but it’s like the two concepts of liberty. Freedom from and freedom to.
Douthat: Oh god, it’s Isaiah Berlin, and it’s ten minutes to midnight,
Lozada: It’s never too late!
Douthat: Yeah, it’s never too late in the day, or too early for Isaiah Berlin.
Lozada: Tim Walz is doing the “freedom from” business, right? With the whole “mind their own damn business” message to the Republicans, but of course, the Democrats are the party of regulation as well in some ways. And so restricting “freedom to” is also part of their agenda.
The Republicans, especially the parts of the Party that maybe, as Ross would say, that JD Vance goes on podcasts with have a more restrictive vision of freedom these days.
In the foreword to Project 2025, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, says that the Constitution grants us the liberty not to do what we want, but what we ought, and what we ought is to live as our Creator ordained.
So, I don’t think that anyone has a monopoly on the freedom train, to mix my metaphors there. As for joy, I think the message was, yes: Democrats? Joyful. Republicans? Weird. But joy lasts until the first failed piece of major legislation, until the first debt ceiling fight.
Everyone who’s high on the Kamala Harris joy-o-meter needs to remember how America was going to be post-racial with Barack Obama. It was not. Was it Mario Cuomo who said that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose?
Maybe it was. But joy is the poetry of this campaign. It’s the new hope and change. But it’s hard to govern that way. Pete Buttigieg, who I like very much, said that politics should be uplifting. It should be “soulcraft,” as he put it in his speech. Like I said, I’m a fan of Pete, but I really would love it if politics could be beautiful and uplifting and nourishing to the soul.It can also be brutal and painful and soul crushing compromise. And that’s just the way it is. And that’s, that’s OK.
So we have now been through the Republican and Democratic conventions. There’s no more manufactured news events in the weeks ahead. What would you all say are the biggest opportunities and the biggest risks for both campaigns over the next ten weeks or so?
Polgreen: It’s been sort of unfashionable, at least on social media to say this, but Kamala Harris really needs to do an interview. She needs to take substantive questions, not just from the reporters who happen to be on her plane, but in a press conference setting and things like that. I think that she has had these kind of big media encounters that have not gone particularly well for her in the past. And so that’s a big crucial test, and a place where things could go off the rails is if she retreats to the defensive stance that she’s had in the past.
And you know Ross mentioned Tim Walz’s shtick running thin. I don’t necessarily think that it’s a shtick, but I think the risk that the person he is and the personality that he puts across could wear poorly — in the same way that the Republican vice presidential nominee’s personality seems to be wearing very poorly. I think that that’s a risk. And both of those offer pretty significant opportunities for the Trump-Vance campaign.
Douthat: I mean, I think there will be a series of further manufactured political events that will attract a lot of attention and will be the moments that people —
Lozada: The Sept. 10 debate.
Douthat: — there will be at least one presidential debate. I think the vice-presidential debate will be quite fascinating to watch regardless of what you think about the people involved.
I don’t know exactly how successfully Donald Trump can debate Kamala Harris. I think that successfully debating her would require even more restraint in certain ways than he showed in his debate against Joe Biden when he managed to get out of his own way just enough to let Biden basically self-destruct. Harris is not going to self-destruct and you could very easily imagine a debate bringing out the worst in Trump.
With all that said, I think that what we’ve seen — and may see further if Robert F. Kennedy drops out of the race — is a reconsolidation of the polarized electorate, which sort of rules out some of the bigger swings that we’ve seen in polls so far in this weird year.
It also remains the case that things like how the economy goes, how the world goes in the next few months, if the jobs numbers are good, if the stock market keeps going up, if there is a cease-fire in the Middle East, if something crazy happens in the world — all of that probably matters more than what happens in the debates or the tactical choices people make when it comes to swinging the two to three percent of America that’s going to decide this election.
Lozada: We had multiple October surprises in July, so I think you’re right, Ross, that it’s probably something extraneous to the regular rhythm of a campaign — conventions, debates, et cetera — that might nudge things in one direction or another. But I do think you’ve hit on a challenge for both the Harris and the Trump campaign, which is that they should probably do the one thing that they don’t want to do. For Harris, it’s getting into specifics. I imagine she wants to ride the joy and freedom train as long as she possibly can.
For Trump, it’s not self destructing on the campaign trail. He’s talking about how he hates his opponents and how he’s going to be mean. His aides seem to be unsuccessfully trying to talk him out of that.
And so I think both of them are going to have to run counter to instinct here, and whoever’s able to do that most successfully, I won’t say is going to win, but is probably going to have an advantage in what is, as Barack Obama put it, still a very tightly divided country.
On that note in the wee hours of now of the fifth day of the Democratic Convention, we will have to leave it there. And Ross, Lydia, Go to bed.
Douthat: I will joyfully do so.
Lozada: You have the freedom to go to sleep, Ross.
The post What We Learned About Harris — and the Democrats — This Week appeared first on New York Times.