As a fired-up Kamala Harris emerged from an upbeat Democratic National Convention (DNC) last week, her opponent, Donald Trump, seemed like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a freight train heading his way — but it won’t be long before he fights back.
The DNC delegates came out of the convention prepared for the fight of their lives, knowing that democracy is at stake and if they lose, people throughout the world will be affected.
Barack Obama told the DNC the world was watching. However, the world doesn’t get to vote, and electing a dangerous man such as Trump at such a fraught moment will be like pouring petrol on the global village and setting it on fire.
Harris’ powerful speech at the convention exalted US power. Her claim that she wants the US to have the most lethal military in the world and stand up to dictators will be grist for the cynics who claim that there is no real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.
But her purpose was something that, as a woman, she had to do — signal that the US’s first female commander-in-chief will be more resolute in defence of the country and its values than her faux macho opponent who toadies up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
She leaned so far into the flag that Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, complained in The Wall Street Journal that the Democrats had “stolen” faith and patriotism from the Republican Party.
The speech must have hit a sore spot because as she wrapped up, a familiar rasping voice was on the phone to Fox News, complaining: “She’s not having success. I’m having success.” Trump bragged and whined for 10 minutes before the host Bret Baier put the phone down on him, after which he promptly called into a Newsmax show.
A clearly rattled Trump had live-posted on Truth Social during the speech, inventing reckless claims such as accusing Harris of being behind the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October.
Then, with reports that women were flocking to support his opponent, creating the widest gender gap in US political history, Trump pulled off a shameful about-face.
The man who put three extremist judges on to the Supreme Court to cancel Roe v Wade and women’s constitutional right to have a say over their bodies claimed that his administration would be “great for women’s reproductive rights”.
‘Promiscuous playboy’
Maureen Dowd pointed out in The New York Times that the worst part about it was that Trump was not even a true believer before he decided to run for president as a Republican. The “famously promiscuous New York playboy wrecked the Supreme Court simply because it helped him with his Christian right disciples”, she wrote.
In a further sign that the good ship Trump is taking on water, he eagerly accepted the endorsement of the conspiracy theorist and third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jnr, who withdrew from the race on Friday.
Kennedy’s stock had deflated after a series of bizarre revelations, starting with a confession that a worm had eaten part of his brain. Craziest of all was the story of how he dumped the corpse of a bear cub in New York’s Central Park to make it look like it had died in a collision with a bicycle.
Trump’s apparent flailing was a far cry from those heady days after the debate in late June that ended Joe Biden’s run for the presidency. Then, propped up in his golf cart and casually pulling on his gloves, he gave his unvarnished opinion of Kamala Harris: “She’s so bad. So pathetic. She’s just a fucking bitch.”
Now she’s coming to get Trump, and she’s tough as only a woman prosecutor can be who has nailed predators — sexual abusers, drug cartels and big banks.
She outlined to the convention how she had inherited a passion for justice from her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who as a 19-year-old “travelled from India to California with an unshakable dream to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer”.
She did not speak about Shyamala’s father, her grandfather PV Gopalan, an Indian public servant who served in Zambia in the 1960s, working on refugee resettlement and advising the government of Kenneth Kaunda.
During Harris’ trip to Africa last year, she visited the site of her grandfather’s home in Lusaka where she had stayed as a little girl and spoke movingly of his lasting influence on her life.
In the speech, she identified community and neighbourliness as critical to her upbringing, and spoke of how there was a need to bind society back together in these polarised times.
That was the overriding theme of the convention, going to the heart of where the US is today, both within its borders and as a member of the global community.
For the past 40 years, since the winding down of the Cold War, liberal democracy has tied itself closely to free market fundamentalism, which has resulted in immense inequalities and a broken sense of community that has left many people behind.
The sentiment was powerfully expressed by Michelle Obama, who spoke of “the affirmative action of generational wealth” in which rich people like Trump have all the advantages in life and are allowed to fail multiple times while so many others, including the majority of black Americans, live pay cheque to pay cheque.
“If we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third or fourth chance,” she said. “If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. We don’t get to change the rules, so we always win.”
Harris’ speech was not filled with soaring rhetoric. She didn’t overpromise or roll out a long list of specifics.
Rather, she focused on practical things like a child tax credit, building new affordable housing, saving and expanding social security and medical insurance.
Her presidency, she made clear, would be focused on the “care economy”, that part of Biden’s post-pandemic build-back-better agenda that was blocked by the brick wall of Republican opposition.
Put another way, Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, are proposing a new politics of decency and humanity, aligning not with any particular doctrine or ideology.
Dictators and populists of the left and the right have been losing in elections during the past year in Poland, Senegal, Indonesia, France, the United Kingdom and South Africa. In India, the world’s largest democracy, voters clipped the wings of Narendra Modi, who expected to win in a landslide, and slashed his BJP’s representation in Parliament.
Mexico elected its first woman president; Iran elected a centrist over the hardliners. After years of retreat, democracy — the simple proposition that people get to choose their own governments — is starting to wake up and is on the march again.
Which side will the US choose?
This week, there was an awareness that the multicultural festival of good vibes in Chicago was a bubble and outside the arena lurked another US, almost half of which is preparing to re-elect Trump.
Trump’s downward spiral has to end at some point, and the campaign will get back in gear.
Harris warned that although people were laughing at the former president, and he was not a serious man, the consequences of putting him back in the White House would be extremely serious. DM