“The mismanagement of the president of the pandemic has put us in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and we are experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that a new coalition of consciences has brought to the streets of our country needs change, “Harris said at the luncheon event in Wilmington, Delaware.
“America calls for leadership. Yet we have a president who cares more about himself than the people who elected him,” said Harris, who left her own bid for the White House less than a year ago before one voice was cast. “As someone who has presented my fair share of arguments in court, the case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and closed.”
It was a first performance that showed Harris’ political prowess and why she will be a formidable opponent this fall for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence this fall, both in their ability to connect with stories of average Americans wrestling through the pandemic and throwing a clean punch without fear of the consequences.
She accused Trump of failing to take the virus seriously, testing coronavirus on and off, offering a nationwide strategy to end the pandemic has left 16 million people without jobs, “a crisis of poverty, of homelessness” “that’s ‘depressing Black, brown and indigenous people the most’ and ‘more than 165,000 lives cut short, many with lovers who never got a chance to say goodbye.’
“It didn’t have to be that way,” she said.
Harris also sought to convey an understanding of what average families have to do by pointing to the ‘complete chaos’ of when and how to create open schools:’ Mothers and fathers are confused, uncertain and angry about childcare and the safety of their children at schools – whether they will be in danger if they go or go behind if they do not. “
She blamed Trump’s leadership mistakes by noting that his family’s wealth had paved his way to power, saying he ‘inherited’ the longest economic expansion in history ‘from the Obama administration and then, like everything else, otherwise he inherited, he ran it right into the ground. “
Over the course of her career in politics – as San Francisco District Attorney, California Attorney General, the state senator and now as a presidential candidate – Harris has sometimes struggled to keep the energy of a chamber like the cheers that are so important in maintaining a candidate’s momentum.
But during the mid-pandemic campaign, that Wednesday was no problem in the nearly empty gym, where only socially engaged – and quiet – reporters and staff served as the audience.
Instead, Harris was able to speak directly to the camera in an institution that seemed almost intimate because there were no cheers, applause or distractions – making her case why a Democratic win in November could be important in the daily life of Americans.
She wavered aspects of her personal story with Biden’s, noting that she met the former vice president because of her friendship with his son Beau, a former Delaware attorney general who died of brain cancer.
Demonstrating the role she would play in humanizing Biden, she took up the story of how the older Biden “rode the rails” between Washington and his home in Delaware four hours a day after his first wife and his daughter died in a car accident that he was able to make breakfast for his sons in the morning and pack them at night.
“All this so that two little boys, who had just lost their mother and sister in a tragic accident, knew that the world was still turning,” Harris said. “And that’s how I got to know Joe. He’s someone whose first reaction, when things get tough, is never to think about himself, but to take care of everyone else.”
Introducing his running mate earlier in the event, Biden explained why he had chosen Harris, the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent on the presidential map of a major party.
As the child of immigrants from Jamaica and India, Harris “personally knows how immigrant families enrich our country,” Biden said, adding that “their story is America’s story.”
Examples of arguments that will be important in major swing states as his campaign seeks to convince Americans if they are no better than four years ago, he also tried to link Harris’s agenda to his own, noting their efforts to help working families help after the crisis of prospect, when they adopted the big banks, and pleaded for ‘folks’ who are looking for an ‘honest shot to make it’.
Biden seemed to draw attention to Trump’s sexist remarks about Harris, such as when the president repeatedly called her “disgusting” shortly after Biden announced her as his running mate, and stated that the president “cried.”
“Is anyone surprised that Donald Trump has a problem with a strong woman? And we know there will be more,” Biden said. He called on “working people” to defend his new partner.
“Kamala Harris has got your back – and now, we need to get her back,” he said. “She will stand with me in this campaign, and we will all stand up for her.”
In an interview with Eric Bolling from “America This Week,” a Sinclair program, Trump said Harris was not “fun” – a gendered critique often used to describe 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
“She’s not a person who liked it. I think people will fall in love with her. Very quickly,” Trump told Bolling. “She campaigned, and she campaigned very hard. Every time people heard her mouth open, she fell down.”
Biden also did not leave the historical nature of his choice unmoved at their first event together. When Harris was seen, now firmly in the role of a supporting player, Biden imagined the reaction of “little Black and brown girls, who so often feel overwhelmed and underestimated in communities.”
“Today, just maybe,” he said, “they see themselves for the first time in a new way.”
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