The Speech of Her Life
Harris accepts the nomination as America accepts an unprecedented candidate
Aug. 23: Harris tells her life story … Trump knocks neglect of poor … Harris laments Gaza’s “innocent” lives … Warren chokes (up) …
Speech of her life, get it? Because it was about her life!
Vice President Kamala Harris last night accepted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.
Harris called her life an “unlikely journey.” But she framed that journey as one that fits squarely within classic American narratives. Even though it doesn’t. Or didn’t until last night.
Harris’s intersectionality is precedent-shattering for an American presidential candidate. Black, Indian-American, only the second woman to be nominated. Harris last night jammed all of that shit right up Norman Rockwell’s ass. In a good, consensual way, of course.1
And there was more. She’s a child of divorce.2 And her mother was a scientist. A lady woman female scientist!
An unusual pedigree for a presidential candidate. Until last night.
Her mom also ditched an arranged marriage! Not a feature in many presidential lineages!3 Until last night.
And — not surprisingly for a woman who attended a nice Baptist church, was raised primarily by a nice Hindu lady, and married a nice Jewish boy — we haven’t heard a lot about religion from Harris, including last night.
She mentioned God twice. In the pro forma “…bless you” and “...bless America” shpiel.
Her 2020 memoir — subtitled “An American Journey” — mentions God eight times. It’s only once that it’s remotely personal, writing that she prayed to do the right thing when deciding whether to join a settlement with big banks after the mortgage crisis.
So God only knows if Harris ever went to her knees and accepted Jesus as her personal savior. But Jesus appears twice in her memoir, both times as the first name of Jesus Rodriguez.
In other words, Harris last night made it normal for a presidential nominee not to be a publicly pious, Jesus-loving, white, Christian, once-married tradhusband, child of seven generations of Americans, with multiple biological spawn.
Celebrating this diversity — rather than apologizing for it or pleading for tolerance of it — not only redefined family, but redefined the values of family values. All families and kinds of families can thrive without upending the values Harris exalted last night: “Freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities.”
When you’re the party of family values — and your party includes everyone — the message is clear that everyone is family. Everyone is okay. The 2024 Democratic Party has mainstreamed … everyone.
That’s why drag queens aren’t weird; people who freak out about drag queens are. Abortion and divorce aren’t weird; people who want to police them are. Identities aren’t weird, weirdness about identity is weird.
That’s why Harris accepted the nomination on behalf of all Americans, “regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks.”
Despite Sen. JD Vance’s (R-OH) claim that Americans love their country not because of an idea but because America happens to be the geopolitical patch of dirt onto which they emerged from a uterus, Harris celebrated an America that is very much an idea. The same idea that the white founding fathers (and only fathers) enshrined in the first, real national motto: E pluribus unum.
In doing so, Harris accepted the position of commander in chief of the armies mobilized and mobilizing to stave off the last gasp of the dying MAGA hordes.
And she struck, in a single, perfect blow, what may be the best, most devastating indictment yet of Donald Trump: “Unserious.”
And in a weird moment for me, she articulated a nascent idea floating in my head since the party switched from doomsaying to mockery:
“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”
Like giving the nuclear codes, or monetary policy, to Carrot Top. Or Joe Rogan. Like putting Elon Musk in charge of a company.
Harris crystallized for me the dynamic that their capacity to devastate, once armed with institutional power, does not render them serious.
Even out of office, Trump poses a threat: His willingness to pile more human sacrifices on the pyre of his ambition. No coincidence that Harris listed “the peaceful transfer of power” as one of “America’s fundamental principles.”
It’s worth noting that Trump’s sentencing for violating campaign-finance laws is Sept. 18. My fear has been that a prison sentence before the election might become the trigger event finally capable of igniting MAGA violence.
But former Trump lawyer-turned-whistleblower Michael Cohen says that Trump fears a prison sentence will dampen Republican enthusiasm and turnout. (Of course, Trump has underestimated before just how well he’s duped his MAGA dupes: He thought he’d be hurt rather than celebrated for fucking a porn star.)
And if you want some uplifting, albeit wholly anecdotal, evidence of “independent” willingness to abandon Trump, enjoy CNN’s bullshit, unscientific sampling of eight undecideds responding to Harris’s speech. Spoiler: One still undecided, one decided for Trump, six for Harris.
Why Harris? One former undecided explains: She seems confident! Oh, goody.
In fairness, there wasn’t too much else to judge Harris on last night.
Her speech was light on policy — which I’m still mostly fine on. Policy plans are great, but few of them matter until you know the Congress you’ll be working with.
So there was a lot of focus last night on the entertainment factor — who would be the rumored surprise guest?!?
It was not Beyoncé. Also not making a surprise appearance was Medicare For All. Or COVID. Or the poor.
“The climate crisis” appeared as part of the “freedom” to breathe air free of pollution, a cameo about as awkward as Musk in Iron Man 2. Or Trump in Home Alone 2.
Harris mentioned the middle class eight times. The poors, and the poverty in which they are, got zero mentions.
It took Trump the same number of days to zero in on Harris’s exposed left flank.
As The Bulwark reported, Trump posted, “There are 60 million people4 in poverty in the U.S., under their watch, and she doesn’t even talk about them!”5
If not mentioning the poor is a strategic decision by Democrats to avoid scaring off voters who think they’re Marxist, how is it that Trump can mention the poor? Not a rhetorical question!
Also a no-show last night, any indication that the Harris administration might obey the law of not supplying arms for human-rights violations.
As Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) points out, “If you really wanted a cease-fire, you would just stop sending the weapons.” Which is true! Without weapons, you definitely cease fire.
And as Glenn Greenwald notes, U.S. arms sales “is the only point that matters, and the only one that has mattered from the start.”
Because that’s the only thing the U.S. can actually control. It’s the only leverage it has on Israel’s behavior, but more importantly, it’s not supposed to be an optional lever to use for political outcomes; it’s the law that the U.S. can not supply arms for human-rights violations.
Greenwald writes, “There's nothing more to the bullshit Democratic and liberal posturing about Gaza than this.” Which, fair, but not necessarily true.
Harris may feel it’s politically impossible to get tough on Israel rhetorically when she’s not in a position to do so practically. So her rhetoric is all we have. And last night she went farther than the Biden-Harris administration has — not in condemning Israel, but in elevating the Palestinian plight, which is the first, and requisite step toward taking action to address it.
“[W]hat has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.
“President Biden and I are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
Harris is creating the predicate for action on non-arming Israel. “Innocent lives,” she said. That’s what makes the arms sales illegal.
She’s basically asking for protesters to continue. Joining the voices calling for an arms embargo makes it easier for Harris to do so if she’s elected. Silence in the name of unity makes it harder for her to do what she clearly laid the groundwork for last night.
Was it a promise to stop arming Israel? Of course not. But we can assume that as a prosecutor she knew she was stipulating the central claim of opposing counsel: That Israel is killing innocent people.
Good presidents want protest and know how to benefit from it politically and use it for good. And that, after all, was the central point of Harris’s speech last night.
That we don’t have to be something we’re not. We’re not required to be silent or invisible to be Americans. We can be ourselves and still be unified.
New COVID Vaccines
Vice Pres. Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech may have been free of COVID, but that doesn’t mean everyone in the almost entirely unmasked audience was! We won’t know till next week whether the Democratic National Convention was a superdelegate super-spreader event, but next week will also bring us new vaccines.
The Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved vaccines to protect against the KP.2 COVID variant.
The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are expected to be available as soon as next week. Go get ‘em, kids!
An Abortion-Rights Loss
The Arkansas Supreme Court yesterday ruled that a referendum on abortion cannot appear on the state’s ballots in November.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) — who is somehow actually governor without that fact stopping the Earth from spinning on its axis — celebrated the ruling as upholding “the right to life,” which it did not.
In reality land, the premise for the ruling was not that cell clusters are people, it was purely bureaucratic. Organizers of the ballot referendum didn’t submit some paperwork on time. Now, are the referendum rules probably rife with anti-democratic shit to make it harder for the people to achieve self-governance? All I can say to that is: Arkansas.
And, yes, in fact, it’s hardly clear that the submitted paperwork didn’t satisfy the law. That’s why the ruling was split, 4-3. In Arkansas.
Whether the ruling is technically right or wrong, it’s still heartbreaking. But abortion is on the ballot in at least ten other states, including some states where a pro-abortion wave could help Democratic candidates. Here’s the Washington Post’s map:
Two Things Today
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — a Donald Trump appointee and Joe Biden re-appointee for some fucking reason — will deliver remarks today that could, potentially, alter the economy and/or the elections. Like, all the elections.
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will deliver a national address today that will be nationally ignored. It’s expected to be Kennedy’s withdrawal from the race, one of the rare times a Kennedy pulls out when he says he will. Kennedy filed yesterday to take his name off the Arizona ballot, presumably to avoid drawing votes from Donald Trump in November’s voting there. Both men are in Arizona today and it’s widely speculated — by the narrow world of Beltway “journalism” — that Kennedy will appear with Trump to endorse him and at last finish off the once-towering Kennedy family legacy.
One Thing Next Week
Reportedly, we’re getting that big, consequential, focused-on-shit-that-really-matters corporate media interview with Vice Pres. Kamala Harris next week. I’m sure it’ll change things a lot.
Your Moment of ‘Ren
Watch the first minute and a half of this.6 It’s Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) taking the stage at the Democratic National Convention, and then being overtaken by a wave of love and then her own emotions.
It’s clear she thought she’d start speaking as soon as she reached the mic. Wrong! The crowd wouldn’t let her. The love and affection choked her up. And she got teary as it went on. And then — because of course — she had clearly had enough of this emotion shit and wanted her party to shut the fuck up so she could get down to business.
Anyway, take a couple minutes at some point over the weekend when you need a pick-me-up. You’ll get more verklempter than she did.
TCB
TFN can only continue fucking news if enough Newsfuckers support it. You can keep this newsletter — and TFN’s original reporting — going with a donation or by becoming a paid subscriber.
And come say hi on Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Spoutible, or Twitter.
Go get ‘em, kids. And give yourselves a restful and/or fun weekend!
As far as I’m aware, I’m okay with Rockwell!
No, I don’t know how many presidents were children of divorce. What am I, Heather Cox Richardson?
Unless you count Kennedy or Clinton or others serially ditching the entire arrangement of marriage.
40 million, according to government definitions.
On the other hand, Harris also doesn’t kill extending the Child Tax Credit, which Republicans did, replunging millions back into poverty.
You can also watch the rest of it.
As always, thank you.
we made Elizabeth Warren cry with our MASSIVE LOVE