Politics
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October 29, 2024
She has one other week, and so does Trump. However evaluating her wonderful Ellipse speech to Trump’s Madison Sq. Backyard satyricon is absurd.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a marketing campaign rally on the Ellipse in Washington, DC.
(Kent Nishimura / Getty Photographs)
Donald Trump delivered his closing argument Sunday night time after a posse of racists and reprobates insulted Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, Taylor Swift (implicitly), ladies and Vice President Kamala Harris herself at New York’s Madison Sq. Backyard. His personal speech rehashed his promise to crack down on “enemies of the individuals,” pledged to interchange taxes with tariffs, described the USA as an occupied nation, and, once more, insulted Harris’s intelligence. It was incoherent. Immediately, he known as the occasion a “lovefest.” Nothing extra is ever anticipated of him.
In the meantime, on Tuesday night time at Politico’s West Wing Playbook, the stakes had been excessive for Harris’s so-called closing argument, which she delivered on the Ellipse behind the White Home the place Trump summoned his insurrectionists to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The headline: “Kamala tries to stay the touchdown.”
“Stick the touchdown” comes from gymnastics discuss: It refers to when a gymnast, it may very well be a person or a girl, wraps up an especially acrobatic set with an ideal, steady, standing-on-two-feet ending. Male or, most famously, feminine, they should be excellent all through their contortions, and land impressively on two stable ft. That’s what’s anticipated of Kamala Harris: to “stick the touchdown,” as Trump shambled by means of his “closing.”
It was onerous not to think about the comparability between the candidates Michelle Obama made in her speech in Kalamazoo Saturday night time.
“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a bit annoyed that a few of us are selecting to disregard Donald Trump’s gross incompetence whereas asking Kamala to dazzle us at each flip,” she mentioned. “For Trump, we count on nothing in any respect, no understanding of coverage, no means to place collectively a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”
Certainly. However Harris got here out and killed it nonetheless. In entrance of an estimated crowd of 75,000, she helped wipe away the reminiscence of the January 6 rebel. It was a peaceable, loving crowd—for actual, not what Trump described—who listened to Harris reassure them that we all know what we have now to do subsequent Tuesday.
Present Difficulty
“We all know who Donald Trump is,” she mentioned. “He’s the one that stood at this very spot and set an armed mob to the capitol to overthrow the desire of the individuals.” As she’s mentioned earlier than, she’ll come to workplace with a to-do listing, whereas Trump would include “an enemies listing…to let out the violent extremists who assaulted legislation enforcement on January 6.
“People died on account of that assault. 100 and forty legislation enforcement officers had been injured. And whereas Donald Trump sat within the White Home watching because the violence unfolded on tv, he was informed by workers that the mob needed to kill his personal vice chairman. Donald Trump responded with two phrases: ‘So what?’”
Harris ran by means of her coverage proposals, from housing to elder care to childcare. (Her promise to permit Medicare “to cowl the price of house care” obtained one among her loudest cheers.)
She additionally reiterated her pitch to Republicans and independents: “Our democracy doesn’t require us to agree on every thing. That’s not the American manner. Simply the other. We don’t shrink back from sturdy debate. We like an excellent debate. And the truth that somebody disagrees with us, doesn’t make them ‘the enemy from inside.’
“They’re household. Neighbors. Classmates. Coworkers. They’re fellow People. And as People, we rise and fall collectively. America, for too lengthy, we have now been consumed with an excessive amount of division, chaos, and mutual mistrust. And it may be straightforward to neglect a easy reality: It doesn’t need to be this fashion.”
I watched MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recoil a bit bit and evaluate that to President Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon again in 1974, which nonetheless roils the left. I didn’t hear it that manner, however I took the warning.
But it surely was onerous to see it as primarily a pitch to right-leaning voters with strains like this: “Those that got here earlier than us—the patriots at Normandy and Selma. Seneca Falls and Stonewall…they didn’t wrestle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives, solely to see us cede our basic freedoms…[and] undergo the desire of one other petty tyrant.” (Though I imagine some former Republicans are coming to see these battles our manner.)
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Harris remains to be introducing herself to some voters, and took the time.
“I grew up as a baby of the civil rights motion, the place crowds of individuals of all races, walks of life, got here collectively to battle for freedom of alternative. Household by blood and household by love instilled in me the values of compassion and religion. I’ve lived the promise of America. I see the promise of America in all of you. I see it within the younger people who find themselves voting for the primary time.”
I don’t suppose, with a full week left, that both of these will stay the “closing” argument, however stack them up towards one another proper now and we all know who needs to be president. We may have extra closing arguments, large and small. However Harris bested Trump on this contest.
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