On the fourth night, the final speaker of what was a euphoric Democratic convention of reinvention told the people about “unlikely journeys”.
She was talking about two uncharted journeys. The first involved one undertaken by her mother, Shyamala Gopolan, who as a 19-year-old woman set out from India for California to obtain a medical degree.
It was to be the great adventure of a life scripted by tradition: she would return to an arranged marriage. Instead, she met a Jamaican immigrant, Donald Harris, and the couple were caught up in the 1960s countercultural and civil rights movement.
They had two girls, the eldest of whom, Kamala, arrived in October 1964 and set out on a road that brought her to this point: 59 years old, standing before an ecstatic crowd in Chicago, telling them that, “on behalf of anyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey and as someone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth, I accept your nomination to be president of the United States”.
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This convention was defined by the spirit of absent women – of departed mothers invoked by everyone from Michelle Obama to husband Barack and again, during the final address, by Kamala Harris.
After a year of warning America, through the halting delivery of Joe Biden, that democracy is in peril, the Democratic campaign over the past four weeks invited its constituents and undecided voters around the US to long-ago childhood dinner tables and the everyday struggles and triumphs people could relate to.
For the three years of her vice-presidency, Harris has been portrayed as a mystery, an irrelevance or an aloof Californian who could not connect. So, she took them on a tour, back to the Oakland of the early 1970s where the music in the house was “Aretha, Coltrane, Myles” and when, after her parents split up, “it was mostly my mother who raised us.
“Before she could finally afford to buy a home, she rented a small apartment in the East Bay. In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats – a beautiful working-class neighbourhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers, all who tended their lawns with pride.”
The storytelling was clear and persuasive and powerful, and the energy around the arena was, on the last night, close to antic.
The primitive technology and unforgiving optics of the first widely televised national convention in 1948 marked the beginning of an event that has, through the decades since, been finessed into the sophisticated, immaculately timed television shows that dominated the network schedules this week.
The Republicans and Democrats have learned how to craft highly impactful party political broadcasts, and this extravaganza in Chicago mixed celebrity draw with an appeal to common values.
But outside the choreography and succession of polished speakers the atmosphere veered between exhaustion and euphoria. For four nights running, the delegates and crowd had been pummelled by stories of inspiration and joy, and they emptied themselves for every single speaker. There was an antsy sense in the corridors that circle the arena on Thursday evening, crowded with fast food vendors and people rushing to the last seats.
But an extraordinary thing happened when the Rev Al Sharpton took the stage. As soon as his name was announced, the chatter and laughter in the corridors miraculously fell away and people began to listen. It was the only time all week that this had happened.
It was right then that it was obvious the Democrats had managed to alchemise what had started out as a stiff and halting campaign into a genuine movement. It will be left to historians and political scientists to ultimately figure out how this happened – or how far it will carry Democrats through to November.
The most common criticism of Harris’s campaign, framed around the concept of joy, is that it is like champagne: frothy and delightful and completely lacking in substance. Where are the policies – and where is the how of the policies?
Part of her brief on Thursday night was to cast herself as the figure she had been in the first guise of her public life: an uncompromising California public prosecutor with a reputation for fairness.
But she also had to begin to address how Kamala Harris in the Oval Office can represent a new departure rather than a continuation of the US she has served as vice-president for the past three years.
Harris vowed to lower grocery costs and to make more houses available but didn’t offer detail on how this will be achieved – or why neither has happened over the past 3½years.
She promised to pass what she termed “the strongest border Bill in decades” if she returned to the White House and delivered a heavy-hitting passage on the abortion ban issue. “This is what is happening in this country. And understand he is not done,” she warned of Donald Trump.
“As a part of his agenda, he and his allies would limit access to birth control and enact a nationwide abortion ban. And get this: he plans to create a national anti-abortion co-ordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.
“Simply put, they are out of their minds. One must ask why exactly is it that they don’t trust women? Well, we trust women. And when Congress passes a Bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States I will proudly sign it into law.”
She depicted Trump as a figure who is “in many ways an unserious man” while warning of the serious consequences of his return to office. She leaned into her experiences in foreign policy, including her work in rallying allies ahead of the invasion of Ukraine before promising the crowd that along with President Joe Biden she is “working around the clock” to secure a ceasefire in the Middle East conflict and the release of hostages.
All week, a small vocal minority of pro-Palestinian protesters have engaged in public demonstrations of vivid unhappiness. The lunchtime DNC crowd strolling down Michigan Avenue were met with stark signs reading ‘F**k the DNC’ and accusing the Biden-Harris regime of genocide.
It will remain a critical and delicate issue for Harris to navigate once she sits down for the in-depth interviews that her Republican detractors accuse her of avoiding.
And there is a sliver of truth to the notion that even though her face has become emblematic of a dramatic makeover for the Democratic Party, she remains curiously sprite-like and elusive.
Since Joe Biden sat in the shadows of a July weekend in Delaware and realised his time was up, she has set a furious pace of movement, barnstorming the country and succeeding in the logistical triumph of simultaneous rallies, broadcasting live to Chicago from a full house in Milwaukee on Tuesday night.
It was the ultimate show of disrespect to the Trump campaign, which had all but announced a coronation at the same venue in downtown Milwaukee one eternal month ago. The tough questions and moments will come but in Chicago, Democratic spirits surged as she presented her vision.
“I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation and inspired our world that here in this country anything is possible, and nothing is out of reach. An America where we care for one another. That none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”
It was a plea that contained echoes of Joe Biden’s stump speeches. But the similarity ended there. Kamala Harris, dressed in black and using that famous laugh sparingly, established herself in the minds of the Republic as someone who may well, depending on the division of tens of thousands of votes here and there, join the predestined group of men who have served as presidents of the United States over the centuries.
The public college law student who worked in McDonald’s for extra cash seems right now to be on the crest of a tsunami of goodwill that will carry her to the historical breakthrough of becoming the first woman to serve as president. All can change. But it still stands as an unlikely and extraordinary journey.
It was all over by 11 o’clock, the floor of the big arena a riot of fallen balloons and discarded banners and outside the footpaths strewn with abandoned plastic beer containers as the believers chased back to the city to continue the party.
The words she had spoken were already falling into history even as they substantiated in the minds of millions who Kamala Harris was – and who she could become.
“At the park, my mother would say: ‘stay close’,” she told them at one stage.
“But my father would say: ‘run Kamala, run, don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.’”
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