Letter from America | Kamala’s riveting reinvention

I ARRIVE at the tiny airport on Martha's Vineyard the day after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, joining friends from California for their summer vacation. It is an interesting group of people, most of them involved in film and television and all of them dyed-in-the-wool (but depressed) Democrats.

President Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance and insistence on remaining in the race despite his plummeting polls have made another Trump presidency a distinct probability. The horror of the assassination attempt has added another layer of pessimism. And resignation.

On a walk through the woods, Sarah tells me she has made peace with another Trump presidency. “Biden cannot win this. And you know what? The sun will come up, and the sun will go down. And we will survive. But this time around, I cannot do the rage and indignation again. I am going to opt out of politics for the next four years."

We share The New York Times over breakfast and listen to political podcasts in the car as we explore the island. It is the quintessential American summer destination: quaint fishing harbours, sandy beaches and shingle-covered cottages. The Stars and Stripes is everywhere —hanging from porches and over barn doors, stuck in flower pots, next to graves, and attached to white picket fences festooned with bunting.

We set off for Lambert's Cove on Sunday afternoon. Our plan is to take a long walk followed by a swim and sundowners on the beach.  On the way there, Biden announces on Twitter and Instagram that he is ending his quest for a second term.

It is as if a dam wall has broken. Finally, the pent-up agony of what one of our group calls “having been held hostage" has ended. But the prospect of Kamala Harris as a stand-in candidate does not elicit huge excitement. There is a general feeling that she does not have the “it factor" to beat Trump. That she is a bridesmaid, not a bride. “Let's face it, she didn't exactly shoot the lights out as vice president," says Laura.

The floodgates open

What a difference five days can make.

It is Friday morning, five days after Biden's stunning announcement, and Harris is on a roll — as are donations to her campaign.

A month of Democratic panic after Biden's stumbling, confused debate performance on June 27 has given way to a historic flood of cash for Harris. Between Sunday afternoon and Wednesday morning, the Harris campaign raises more than $126 million (about R2.32 billion) from 1.4 million donors. Add to that a further $150 million in pledges and the Biden war chest of more than $100  million, and things are looking pretty flush for the “Harris for President" campaign.

“It really feels like a moment in history that we are going to talk about 10 years or decades from now," Ning Mosberger-Tang, a major donor and former executive at Google, tells The Washington Post.

“It is something we have not seen for a long time. A lot of people, including myself, were paralysed in the last few weeks. A lot of us were not giving money to anything. Now we are seeing the floodgates have opened.”

But it is not only the money rolling in. There is also an unexpected wave of enthusiasm from ordinary people. The Harris campaign reports 58,000 volunteer sign-ups in the first 48 hours and well over 100,000 at the time of writing this article.

Harris’s transformation

While Harris picked up enough delegate support to win the nomination on the first full day of her campaign, she has yet to receive an official presidential nomination. There are still pockets of opposition to her candidature, with concerns that she might not be the right person to beat Trump. 

But as the days tick on, these voices become increasingly muted as the reality sinks in that at this point there is no real alternative. With just over 100 days until the election on November 5, time is of the essence. But something else has happened, too — Harris has transformed into a shiny, exciting, self-assured candidate.

Her poll numbers are surging.

Gone is the opaque, drab vice-presidential persona she has inhabited for the past four years.

Her public speeches, previously a heavily criticised aspect of her persona, suddenly become more assertive, slick, and confident.

Harris holds her first campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She enters the venue to the Beyoncé song Freedom, and even on television the energy from the 3,000-strong crowd is palpable.

Harris deploys what has clearly been designed as her signature line of attack — setting herself up as the prosecutor and Trump as the convicted felon.

The former district attorney and Attorney General of California (the state's top law enforcement official) tells the cheering crowd she “took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So,” she says, “hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

When Harris ran for president in 2019, some criminal justice reform leaders branded her a “top cop” who lacked a strong progressive record— that she was too tough on crime. Five years later, the political landscape has shifted. Her prosecutorial history can now be used as a key asset in the battle against Trump, the ex-president convicted of 34 felonies.  

Fresh start for American politics

More than 350 national security leaders endorse her candidature, saying she is the “best-qualified person to be America's commander-in-chief" and that if elected “she would enter that office with more significant national security experience than the four presidents before President Biden”.

The letter is signed by former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, former director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former national security advisers Susan Rice and Thomas Donilon, former secretaries of defence Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. 

It is a stunning endorsement by figures at the very pinnacle of the powerful political establishment.

In a New York Times op-ed, Clinton praises Biden for his “decision to end his campaign”, which she calls “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime”. She goes on to say that Harris “represents a fresh start for American politics,” offering a vision of an America with its best days ahead of it and, rather than “old grievances … new solutions”.

“Abortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanising women voters like never before,” Clinton wriyes, and “with Ms Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.”

Race

Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964. Her parents, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India, and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica (now an emeritus professor at Stanford), immigrated to the US and met while pursuing advanced degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. Harris has one sister, Maya.

In her autobiography The Truths We Hold, Harris writes that despite her mother being Indian, she understood that in the American context she was raising two black daughters.

“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”

In his autobiography, Barack Obama wrote about his soul-searching quest to explore his identity as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father.

But when Harris was asked in an interview if she had wrestled with similar introspection about race, ethnicity and identity, she said she had not spent much time trying to categorise herself.

“I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it."

She is, she says, simply “an American".

Maga pain

The Trump campaign is suddenly on the back foot. With Biden unexpectedly out of the picture, it is scrambling for a battle plan against a new Democratic rival less than four months before election day.

One of its first lines of attack is to call Harris a “DEI hire”. DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, and a South African audience will understand the racist and sexist subtext: Harris, the Trump campaign insinuates, is only where she is because of “affirmative action".

Using the race card to cast aspersions on the highest-ranking female elected official in US history and the first black and first Asian American to serve as vice president does not land well, and at a meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee chairperson Richard Hudson urges fellow lawmakers to dial back the sexist and racist attacks. 

In her newsletter, Letters from an American, the historian Heather Cox Richardson writes that Trump has continued to post angrily on his social media feed but is otherwise sticking close to home.

“His lack of visibility highlights that the Republicans are now on the receiving end of the same age and coherence concerns they had used against Biden, and there might be more attention paid to Trump’s lapses now that Biden has stepped aside.” 

Tim Alberta notes in The Atlantic: “Everything they intended for this campaign — the messaging, the advertising, the microtargeting, the ground game, the mail pieces, the digital engagement, the social-media manoeuvres — was designed to defeat Joe Biden. Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator JD Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledge, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nailbiter."

Sarah Longwell, co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, says swing voters questioned in focus groups indicate that they “simply do not like” Vance. “Both his flip-flopping on Trump and his extreme abortion position is what breaks through.” 

And this is precisely where the Trump campaign will be taking direct shots from Harris, who has quickly made it clear that reproductive rights will be front and centre of her campaign.

So will Trump's felony status. And his age. 

But a tough battle lies ahead for the Democrats.

Within a day of Biden's announcement, Harris was already facing a wave of attack ads on television and radio questioning everything from her personality (and her laugh) to what she knew about Biden’s decline.

“Public opinion is like cement. It’s soft at first, and then it hardens,” says Longwell.

“The next three weeks are definitive. She needs to define herself before Trump defines her.”

She seems to be well on her way.

♦ VWB ♦

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