Thursday night, Kamala Harris took the stage in a blue pantsuit to accept her party’s nomination for President of the United States. The excited audience kept chanting “Kamala” and “USA”; she thanked them and said, “We got to get to some business! Thank you all.”
According to Politico, Vice President Kamala Harris planned to lean into her personal biography, and that is what she did. While mention was made of her father Donald Harris, it was her mother Shyamala Gopalan’s “values” that Harris constantly referred to as her guiding principles throughout her speech. As I wrote throughout this four-day-long, DNC reinvention fest, everything from the single-mother schtick to the tough prosecutor trope is an illusion. But it is these illusions that Harris has hung her hat upon.
Harris began by thanking her husband and family, President Joe Biden, her running mate Tim Walz, and the Democrat delegates.
So, let me start by thanking my most incredible husband Doug. I love you so much.
To our president, Joe Biden! When I think about the path we have traveled together, Joe, I am filled with gratitude. Your record is extraordinary as history will show, and your character is inspiring. Doug and I love you and Jill, and are forever grateful to you both.
Grateful that he stepped aside, for sure. Biden and Dr. Jill probably are not watching and don’t care.
So, America. The path that led me here in recent weeks was no doubt unexpected. But I am no stranger to unlikely journeys. So, my mother, our mother Shyamala Harris, had one of her own. I miss her every day and especially right now. And I know she’s looking down smiling. I know that.
Growing up we moved a lot. I will always remember that big, Mayflower truck, packed with all our belongings, ready to go. To Illinois, to Wisconsin, and wherever our parents’ jobs took us. My early memories of our parents together are very joyful ones. A home filled with laughter and music. Aretha, Coltrane, and Miles. At the park, my mother would say, “Stay close.” But my father would say, as she smiled, “Run, Kamala, Run! Don’t be afraid, don’t let anything stop you.” From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless.
A campaign adviser must have encouraged Harris to add this commentary on her father, to her pre-packaged origin story that she has told before. The glossy video which led into her acceptance speech primarily highlighted Shyamala Harris and her role as a single mother, but not Donald Harris. Harris also only alluded to idyllic images of an Oakland neighborhood, but no mention of Montreal, Canada, where she spent the bulk of her pre-teen and teenage years.
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Harris repeated the same, years-old, tired diatribes about Donald Trump fomenting an insurrection, January 6, and the E. Jean Carroll nonsense, and the 34 felony convictions. Harris continued the lie of Project 2025, and claimed Trump had wanted to pull us back into the past.