WASHINGTON—Drawing repeated cheers and chants from an estimated 75,000 people gathered south of the White House, spilling out toward the Lincoln Memorial, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on Tuesday night delivered the closing message of her campaign.
On a host of domestic issues, including the defense of democracy, abortion rights, and condemnation of MAGA hate and racism, Harris spelled out a progressive agenda. Among the points she made on domestic policies were a call for increased taxes on the rich. When it came to international affairs, however, she said she would continue the imperialist approach of maintaining what she called a “powerful and lethal” military.
In what was meant to be a pointed contrast to her Republican foe, convicted felon Donald Trump, Harris picked the same site just south of the White House for her campaign’s ultimate address that he chose for assembly of his invasion force against the U.S. Capitol almost four years ago, in the last of his futile attempts to retain power illegally.
Her peaceful listeners far outnumbered Trump’s 2021 maddened mob of insurrectionists, overflowing the speech site—the Ellipse—and covering side streets and part of the Washington Monument grounds.
She made it clear that she is unafraid when it comes to tackling Trump’s fascist agenda. “It doesn’t have to be this way. I’m not afraid of tough fights against bad actors…. I’ll hold accountable those who wield power over others.”
In a subtle reference to Trump’s age, 78, his growing rages, increasingly incomplete sentences, memory lapses, constant lies, and persistent racism and hate, Harris, 60, noted “It is time to turn the page on this drama of fear and division. It is time to bring a new generation of leadership to the United States of America.”
That drew a big cheer.
In contrast to Trump’s closing
Harris’s speech was also a contrast with Trump’s “closing” two days before, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Trump’s hate rally was a catalog of complaints and grievances, preceded by a so-called “comedian” supporter who insulted Puerto Ricans and other voters Trump needs if he is to have a chance of winning. Much of Trump’s crowd of white nationalists loved the description of Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.” It has triggered a firestorm of outrage including in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, however, where more than 4% of the voters are Puerto Rican.
“This election presents a choice for every American, of freedom over chaos,” Harris began in her spirited defense of a government that works in the economic interests of the people and for the liberty she said Trump’s fascism is bent on destroying.
“We know who Donald Trump is,” Harris said, producing the first round of boos for her mentions of the misogynistic, would-be dictator. “He is a person who stood at this very spot four years ago and sent an armed mob to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election, an election he knew he had lost.
“And then he sat in the White House and was told by his staff” that he—Trump—should call them off. The staff told Trump the invaders even threatened to hang his then-Vice President, Mike Pence. “So what?” said Trump, Harris reminded the audience.
“He has an enemies list. He said one of his priorities is to free those violent extremists” who pillaged the Capitol, producing five deaths—four of them defenders of the building—and 140 injured.
“Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls ‘the enemy from within.’ America, this is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better. This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.
“That is who he is, but I’m here tonight to say to America ‘That is not who we are, and we are not going back.’”
A patriotic vision
That contrast drew the first union comment on Harris’s speech, from Teachers President Randi Weingarten, a New York City high school civics and government teacher on leave, who also has a law degree. Harris, Weingarten said, presents a “patriotic vision for the country, honoring the enduring power of democracy. Just days after Trump’s dark, dystopian, racist gathering at Madison Square Garden.
“Will we elect a president who will help us realize our hopes, dreams, and aspirations, or one who embraces chaos, division, and violence? A president who wants to polarize and demonize, or one who will help every American not just get by but get ahead? One who has a to-do list, or one who has an enemies list? Donald Trump only cares about himself, while Kamala Harris is for us.”
Harris herself campaigned for unity, despite Trump.
“Our democracy has arguments,” like a family does, but “just because someone disagrees with us does not make him the ‘enemy of the people,’” she said. Trump, in interviews and in his New York address, denounced “enemies”—anyone who opposes his takeover.
With early voting already underway and sharply up in key swing states such as North Carolina and Georgia, Trump and Harris are virtually tied in national polls. One or the other leads by a percentage point or two in those seven vital states whose electoral votes will decide who wins the White House: Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and especially Pennsylvania.
After her spirited defense of democracy and the Constitution—a theme Harris returned to in her closing—the vice president segued to a long list of promises for what her administration could do should she win the White House.
She wrapped them all in a promise “to protect hard-working Americans who are not always heard.” Prime among those Americans are women who lost the federal constitutional right to abortion.
“I’ll fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-picked justices took away from the women of America. And Donald Trump is not done,” Harris warned. One of his planned moves, she said, is to “have states monitor women’s pregnancies,” an idea rabid anti-abortionists push.
“The government should not be telling women what to do with their bodies,” Harris declared. “If Congress passes a bill restoring Roe v. Wade,” the Supreme Court ruling decades ago legalizing abortion, “I’ll sign it,” Harris promised.
That statement produced prolonged cheers.
Also produces votes
It also produces votes. The capital’s chattering class of pundits, pollsters, and Democratic donors has gotten at least one cause right: Americans of all political stripes strongly support the right to abortion, at least through the first six months of pregnancy. And it has been a winning issue in elections for unionists, progressives, and Democrats for the last two years. Even deep-red states, such as Kentucky and Kansas, voted for the right to abortion.
Trump brags on the stump about appointing the three Supreme Court justices who were the core of the five Republican jurists who nullified it—and Harris mentioned that. She also noted Trump and his supporters want to go even further, outlawing medication used for pregnancy prevention and in vitro fertilization, too.
Harris also tried to distinguish herself from President Joe Biden, who yielded the Democratic nomination to her after winning all the party primaries but losing a disastrous debate to a fulminating Trump. Party leaders, led by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and various big donors, pressured him—successfully—to drop out before he sank the whole ticket.
In her only reference to Biden in the speech, Harris thanked him for completing two enormous tasks: Providing an economic recovery from the coronavirus-caused depression and saving democracy from Trump four years ago. She didn’t mention Trump mishandled the virus recovery, too.
But her agenda, besides the right to abortion, included taxing the rich—unlike Trump—restoring and enhancing child care, and, most importantly, finding ways to reduce rising prices, especially by going after the monopolies that produce them. Those costs, including “jacking up rents,“ rose “even before the pandemic,” said Harris.
“Enough with the excuses. I’ll work with local governments and the private sector to build more housing” to help bring prices down, Harris said, without saying how.
“Donald Trump’s answer is the same as it was last time: A tax cut for the richest and a 20% national sales tax on everything you buy, from clothing to food to toys to cars.” Later, she added, Trump “wanted to cut Medicare and Social Security every year he was president.”
That refers to Trump’s proposed universal tariffs of 20% on all imports, except for those from China, which he’d set at between 60% and 1,000%, depending on which audience he’s addressing.
Trump also proposed, the day before, that federal income taxes should be abolished, with tariffs replacing all taxes and dominating revenue, as they did in the Gilded Age era of corporate magnates and plutocracies—an era Trump called “the best in history.”
Economists of all political stripes call that idea both ridiculous in revenue terms and ruinous economically, likely to plunge the U.S. into a recession, a trade war, or both.
The rest of Harris’s domestic agenda included a renewed push for comprehensive immigration reform, though along the lines of a GOP-crafted bill that pro-migrant groups rightly denounce as punitive—but which Trump torpedoed anyway. The Harris plans on immigration law reform would stick to the current policies of limiting asylum claims, a serious break with what immigration rights activists support.
Conspicuous omissions
There were some conspicuous omissions from Harris’s speech—the same ones that were not in her Democratic Convention acceptance address in late August.
Harris did not call for the right to organize, which she has done in prior speeches to labor audiences. Biden, by contrast, advocated it even to hostile business owners.
Harris also did not address income and racial inequalities or the yawning wealth gap in the current capitalist economy, other than a promise to pursue corporate greed, and another to provide everyone with “a seat at the table.”
Unlike Biden, whose half century in Congress featured a concentration on foreign affairs, Harris gave the topic short shrift in her speech. She pledged the U.S. would remain the main military power in the world and retain its alliances. She completely ignored the incendiary issue that roils her party and upsets major segments of the Democratic base: Biden’s continued arming and support for the right-wing Israeli government’s war on Gaza.
The war—fought with U.S.-supplied planes, ammunition, and bombs, has killed tens of thousands of civilians, left Gaza in ruins, and produced two million refugees, all homeless and many starving, ravaged by disease, or both.
It also produced the sole protest at Harris’s speech, but far on its fringes. A group of approximately 100 people, barred from the main speech site, tried to disrupt her by shouts of “Free, free Palestine,” through bullhorns and by banging on drums. Harris likely didn’t hear them, given the distance involved.
A random selection of just over half a dozen speechgoers, interviewed afterwards, were uniformly positive. Comments included:
“After hearing Donald Trump and the Republicans for four years, I have a complete lack of trust in them,” said Marylander Diane Russell. “If they can take away a woman’s reproductive rights, they can go further and take away a woman’s right to vote.” Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, has proposed that. Trump, a notable womanizer, hasn’t contradicted him.
“Her ending was profound, and it lifted her message off the ground,” said retired congressional and political aide Kathleen Harrington of Massachusetts. “She’s a force of nature, and you saw a lot of happy women here. She makes that other person look almost absurd.”
Harris’s “themes were about the same” as when, as a senator seven years ago, she addressed the graduating class at her undergraduate college, Howard University, said Eric Humphrey, a member of that class. “She’s more presidential than Trump, and she has a je ne sais quoi about her.
“She stated the facts to a very diverse crowd,” Humphrey said, looking around. “This is what America looks like.”
If it is Harris who enters the White House rather than Trump, it is clear millions will celebrate. It is also clear that pro-peace, progressive forces, the labor movement, and all its allies will, as always, have to continue to build their movements and fight for their issues. In a Harris administration, with the nation’s first woman in the White House, however, the people’s movements expect they will have much more space in which to operate than they would under the fascist criminal, Trump.
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