RALLYING THOUGHTS: NOTES AFTER SATURDAY'S KAMALA HARRIS EVENT IN CHARLOTTE NC
Two questions:
Is there a more pleasant way to spend a warm autumn afternoon in the South than gathering with like-minded relaxed people at an outdoor concert venue to listen to the Presidential candidate of your choice?
Is there a reason why a Presidential candidate who can close a campaign with this much energy and flair isn’t running away with the race?
This was the close of Kamala Harris’s rally yesterday afternoon in Charlotte North Carolina. Harris had appeared at a similar event in Wisconsin earlier in the day and after this performance flew to New York to appear on Saturday Night Live.
When she first hoved into sight as a candidate in 2020, from my view back to America from London, it seemed she would take some beating. There was no doubt that the mood of the Democratic Party was to roll the rock up the hill one more time and get a woman into the White House, following Hillary’s loss via the anomaly of the Electoral College.
There were two prominent possibilities: Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
The former was my personal preference but I gave up several decades ago believing that anyone I supported would get the Democratic nomination and then win the White House. I am a social democrat. No politician with serious aspirations would call themselves a “social democrat”.
Americans as a whole may want the benefits of social democracy but they are against voting for candidates who use the term, or the word socialist. A lesson Bernie Sanders learned early, he is elected to office as an “independent” even though he describes himself as a small “s” socialist.
So Warren seemed an unlikely nominee but Harris was a good bet. She was a telegenic woman of color and most emphatically not a social democrat or all that liberal. She was prosecutor, tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime — the criminals.
When she crashed and burned I was surprised. When Joe Biden picked her as his running mate I thought it a very shrewd move as it got a woman within a heartbeat of the Oval Office. It would help Democratic women get over their disappointment that another man would be president. I also wondered if there had been a conversation between Biden and South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who had been instrumental in rescuing his candidacy, that should he ultimately get the nomination that he would pick a person of color as his running mate, with a preference for Harris.
Anyway, the same negatives that dogged Harris during that 2020 campaign attached themselves to her during the first years as Vice-President and after a surge in popularity when Biden stepped aside, she seems to have plateaued and the race is close.
AND I JUST DON’T GET IT.
Maybe I have lived abroad for too long but it seems like Harris has every thing necessary to be a popular candidate. Even factoring in the unswayable nature of Trump’s support, this race should not be close and the sniping in the press just doesn’t make sense.
“We still don’t know who she is” stories persisted even into last week? Really??
Allow me to clear up my colleagues’ confusion:
Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and a damned good one. She speaks like she’s making a closing argument and we are the jury. Her style is to embrace us and convince us of her presentation of the facts of the case.
She has charisma and looks. If Dick Wolf were to revive the original Law and Order she wouldn’t be playing Sam Waterston’s hot assistant, she would get the Waterston part. And as Jackie McCoy her win record would be as good as his.
And Harris is good on her feet. At Saturday’s rally, the inevitable pro-Palestinian protestors noisily interrupted her and she dealt with them with a light touch, reminding the crowd this was democracy at work, promising to address the protesters concerns and work tirelessly for a cease-fire in Gaza — as soon as she is elected.
You do wonder what the protesters think will happen if Trump is elected. For that matter you wonder why don’t they go to one of his rallies and interrupt him? (rhetorical question that last one. They know and you know what would happen if they tried to heckle at a Trump event).
Saturday’s rally had a very benign energy, most people in attendance had already voted. Yesterday marked the end of the early voting period in North Carolina. More than half of eligible voters in the state have cast their ballots. The message from the stage was don’t stop yet, get people who haven’t voted to the polls on Tuesday.
Off to the side of the crowd I saw a local politician, Michael Tucker, holding a Republicans for Harris Walz sign. Tucker’s group was formed by disaffected Nikki Haley voters. Haley managed to get nearly 250,000 votes in her challenge to Trump in this year’s Republican primary in NC. Tucker used that number to explain why he thought his group, as well as unaffiliated voters, just might tip the state to Harris.
Tucker’s view — Harris needs just 3 out of 10 disaffected Republicans/unaffiliated voters — isn’t too big an ask. It’s almost enough to make a person optimistic about Harris’s chances to take North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes.
This is the seventh of my dispatches from Georgia and North Carolina. Both states are critical to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s hopes of winning the election. And both are competitive according to opinion polls but, as you can tell, I prefer to gather my own facts.
I plan to stay here through the counting of the vote, which promises to be fraught, particularly in Georgia but I need your help to do it. Here’s how:
I agree with you Michael rather than with the gentleman below Gillian. But I have to say in my fog of anxiety that the murk of truth optional, and bottomless propaganda, and deepfake, and the lack of veracity from any and all maga populations, makes it hard to see clearly. Thanks for the report!
I knew you would be there. I too am a Social Democratic but our experiment with it in the UK did not last long. I still believe Charles Kennedy, a former Social Democrat was the best leader the Liberals/Lib Dems have ever had.