CHICAGO — Vice President Kamala Harris provided a look back at her life to reassure the voters she can be trusted with the country’s future as she accepted the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination at the party’s national convention in Chicago.
“On behalf of the people, on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender, or the language your grandmother speaks, on behalf of my mother and everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey,” Harris told the crowd on Thursday.
“On behalf of Americans like the people I grew up with, people who work hard, chase their dreams and look out for one another, on behalf of everyone whose story could be written in the greatest nation on earth, I accept your nomination,” she said.
The narrative-heavy address underscored a desire to redefine herself 75 days before November’s election amid political attack ads portraying her as too liberal politically and a policy flip-flopper. But Harris drew on her prosecutorial skills to make the case against former President Donald Trump, calling him an “unserious” person who is out for himself. She particularly sought to warn women that Trump could restrict abortion access, despite the former president himself delegating that to the states, saying Republicans “are out of their minds.”
“America, we are not going back,” she said, echoing a theme throughout her campaign
Harris, 59, recalled her middle class childhood in Oakland, California, where she was mostly raised by her Indian immigrant mother Shyamala, a breast cancer researcher. Like repeated references to her part-time job at McDonalds throughout this week’s convention, she emphasized her childhood, in part, to appeal to those who are concerned about the economy and their personal financial circumstances, specifically those who blame President Joe Biden‘s so-called “Bidenomics.”
“She was tough, courageous, a trailblazer in the fight for women’s health, and she taught Maya and I a lesson that Michelle [Obama] mentioned the other night,” Harris said of her mother. “She taught us never to complain about injustice, but to do something about it. And she also taught us to never do anything half-assed. That’s a direct quote.”
Harris reflected on the reasons she pursued a legal career, first as an Alameda County line prosecutor, then as a San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before she became a U.S. senator and vice president.
“When I had a case, I charged it not in the name of the victim, but in the name of the people,” she said. “Every day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and I said five words, ‘Kamala Harris for the people’ and, to be clear, my entire career, I have only had one client, the people.”
As Democrats try to undermine Trump for being “extreme,” using the Heritage Foundation‘s Project 2025, which the conservative think tank has proposed as a blueprint for a second Trump administration, as an example, Harris on Thursday countered with what she described as a “New Way Forward.”
“Consider what he intends to do if we give him power again,” she said. “Consider the power he will have, especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution. Just imagine Donald Trump with no guard rails.”
Harris’s address was well-received in the room with a five-minute standing ovation that the vice president had to encourage to end by declaring, “Let’s get to business,” though there was disappointment that Beyonce did not perform.
Harris commenced her address with an ode to Biden before promising to make growing out the middle class “a defining goal of my presidency.” Another notable moment was when she expressed support for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. A pro-Gaza protester shouted “Free Palestine!” while she reiterated that Israel has the right to defend itself.
But it was Harris’s recollection of her mother’s insistence not to let anyone define her that may present political problems for her this fall.
Four years ago when she ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris’s record in California created issues for her with more liberal Democrats, for instance, over her decision not to oppose California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 ballot initiative in 2013 and her defense of the death penalty in Golden State in 2014, in addition to not reforming the state’s former three strikes law but attempting to introduce anti-truancy laws she implemented in San Francisco statewide.
At the same time, Harris’s more liberal record in Washington, from her endorsement of Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Black Lives Matter, expanding the Supreme Court, a mandatory gun buyback program, a fracking ban, and even a federal job guarantee, created similar issues for her with more centrist Democrats and independents.
Now, four years later she finds herself the Democratic presidential nominee without a traditional primary process as Republicans condemn her as a “San Francisco liberal” and “radical Leftist” and she embraces Biden’s more centrist policy positions.
Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) dismissed the criticism of Harris as a political chameleon on the sidelines of a Georgia delegation breakfast on Thursday, contending it is possible to have nuanced policy stances.
“She’s like I am. She’s a proud progressive and a cold blooded capitalist,” Murphy told the Washington Examiner.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM) argued the scrutiny is partly gendered, asserting women have to “keep demonstrating that we have a resume.”
“She’s got a chance and she’s doing to it to focus on where we’re headed,” Grisham told the Washington Examiner. “I think that’s how you counter all of this negative. People want to know where’s our destination and she’s delivering on that.”
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, whose home state is an important city on Harris’s electoral map, advised the vice president to remain “in the middle” and was confident she could.
“She’s been a leader her whole adult life, so labels of ‘radical this’ or ‘radical that’ for someone that always led as a vice president and also as a senator, as an attorney general, as a district attorney, she’s had to get things done,” Dickens told the Washington Examiner. “She’s had to balance criminal justice, as well as making sure she takes care of the families of victims from violent crime.”
Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) recommended that Harris rely on the foundation she and Biden laid during the past four years before extending it, while being “exactly who she is.”
“She didn’t just start doing this overnight,” McBath told the Washington Examiner. “She’s already been elected. We’ve already elected her. She’s already been doing the work. So don’t listen to the naysayers.”
For DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston, Republicans will “naturally” seek to caricature Harris so her address Thursday was an opportunity for her “to tell the world all that she has done” and how “her career has been in evolution.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“I completely understand the evolution that you have when you’re doing the work right,” Boston told the Washington Examiner. “We don’t stay stagnant in our views for 20 years or 30 years of being in this work.”
“We learn and grow through successes and failures,” she said. “There are plenty of laws that we have passed and things that we have done where we have said that didn’t go the way that we hoped or thought it would, but if we don’t pivot from those situations and learn from them and then take that in to the next idea, then what are we doing?”
