Something’s shifted in the Democratic Party over the past week as momentum has built around Vice President Kamala Harris. There’s been record fundraising, better memes, and finally an end to the infighting around the question of Biden’s ability that that seemed likely to derail the essential effort to beat back Trumpism.
Most of all, there’s very, very real enthusiasm animating Democrats, rooted in the sense that Harris is a candidate who’s willing and able to fight along the lines we argued in our assessment of President Biden’s options, building on the freedom argument she’s gotten rolling as the voice of the administration’s reproductive rights message and turning that into the kind of overwhelming energy that the moment and the challenge ahead demands. The energy that’ll have your head spinning — enough of it to scare the Trump camp into threatening to back out of the scheduled second debate,
Basically, Kamala Harris is indeed brat — and a lot more than that.
From her first official campaign appearance in West Allis, Wisconsin this past Tuesday, Harris has begun laying out a compelling vision, making the coming election about freedom (for more on the importance of framing things that way, we suggest checking out what messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio has to say) and more precisely about a choice between two visions for the country and the future: freedom or chaos.
The first choice is a country that recognizes that people have real freedom to choose their futures — the second is an unthinkable alternative, a dark future that closes down those possibilities in favor of handing over control to authoritarians.
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That’s all clear as day, but for more insight into the details of what we might hear from Harris on the campaign trail — and what to expect from the Harris presidency — we took a look back at her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold.
Written during Harris’ Senate term, the book — a political autobiography that covers her journey from California politics through her first years in national office — is significant in that it articulates her vision for America and her thinking on what role government needs to play in the lives of people, in a moment when those possibilities seemed very dim.
Years from now, our children and our grandchildren will look up and lock eyes with us. They will ask us where we were when the stakes were so high. They will ask us what it was like. I don’t want us to just tell them how we felt. I want us to tell them what we did.
What emerges is a political leader who even writing from the perspective of the opposition in the first half of the Trump administration was already thinking about how to move the country forward. She’s also clearly a person who knows when and how to turn up the temperature as required.
About ten seconds later, my assistant popped her head into my office. “Mr. Dimon is on the line.” I took off my earrings (the Oakland in me) and picked up the receiver.
Harris has the fundamentals in order, and has spelled them out: she knows how and why to fight, cares for precise meanings, and understands the fundamental importance of showing up, building community, translating political abstractions into things that matter to people every day, and, most importantly, turning that into a portrait of a future worth working together for; worth fighting for.
With some work, she’ll be in a position to not just speak these truths, but to act to make them real.
We need to speak truth: that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and anti-Semitism are real in this country, and we need to confront those forces. We need to speak truth: that, with the exception of Native Americans, we all descend from people who weren’t born on our shores—whether our ancestors came to America willingly, with hopes of a prosperous future, or forcibly, on a slave ship, or desperately, to escape a harrowing past.
We cannot build an economy that gives dignity and decency to American workers unless we first speak truth; that we are asking people to do more with less money and to live longer with less security. Wages haven’t risen in forty years, even as the costs of health care, tuition, and housing have soared. The middle class is living paycheck to paycheck.
We must speak truth about our mass incarceration crisis—that we put more people in prison than any country on earth, for no good reason. We must speak truth about police brutality, about racial bias, about the killing of unarmed black men. We must speak truth about pharmaceutical companies that pushed addictive opioids on unsuspecting communities, and payday lenders and for-profit colleges that have leeched on to vulnerable Americans and overloaded them with debt. We must speak truth about greedy, predatory corporations that have turned deregulation, financial speculation, and climate denialism into creed. And I intend to do just that.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.