2024-08-24 04:55:02
In the end, it was just like watching her ride a bike. Or, better, drive a car, but drive a car … really well. Watching Vice President Kamala Harris deliver her acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for president in Chicago Thursday night, eschewing the white pantsuit and the talk of glass ceilings and the announcements of firsts, she was able to simply say the powerful words that mattered. It was like watching a thing that has always been, or, better, could have always been. It was almost ordinary, like watching a woman perform thoracic surgery, or change a tire, or drive a car. It was the beginning of the Barbie movie in which such activities as performed by women were wholly taken for granted until they were just normal. And the fact that there was no need to announce it—look at that arresting woman, she’s driving … a car—was precisely the way to signal that this Kamala Harris candidacy is both momentous but also a thing women do every day, in democracies around the world; it is no more or less remarkable in 2024, in Chicago, than it would and should have been in 1976.
The dark pantsuit was, with all due respect, rather workaday, and her hair was just her usual superb hair and the jewelry was understated, and in every way Harris looked like she might have looked if she were trying a big case or running a Senate committee hearing. In a convention that was top-heavy with smiling husbands who fully expect their partners to wear their work outfits to the job interview, there was visceral relief that the candidate didn’t look like the president of Falcon Crest and that nobody would die tonight because of a tragic stiletto-related ballooning accident.
There were moments of Harris’ speech in which it was clear that she was leading from her gender: the sketch of her single mother’s working life; being raised in a soup of loving friends and neighbors; the deliberate mention of abortion and IVF and the imperative need to trust women; and the three subtle, implicit references to sexual predators. But it was, for the most part, a speech that a Bill Clinton or a Joe Biden might have offered. The assumption, and the implicit tribute to 2016 and Hillary Clinton, was that this wasn’t a night of firsts so much as a night of forever-afters. We are, finally, post–glass ceiling. So much so that it’s about as politically interesting as a glass slipper.
Indeed as my friend David Rothkopf pointed out, it was, from stem to stern, more a lawyer’s speech than a woman’s speech, shot through with the language of law as a tool that serves no one individual, but instead advances the interests of “the people.” Which is why the most moving section of the speech was, at least to my ever-jaundiced ear, a call and response about the failures of “Me Too” and of the Kavanaugh hearings and of the justice system, when it comes to protecting vulnerable women.
As Harris laid it out, the legal systems we have constructed to protect women are not working if we are abandoning survivors to fight for themselves. I heard an aching awareness of what it took to be a Christine Blasey Ford, and an E. Jean Carroll, and a Stormy Daniels, in her formulation of what our legal processes do to women:
As a prosecutor, when I had a case, I charged it not in the name of the victim, but in the name of the people, for a simple reason. In our system of justice, a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us. And I would often explain this to console survivors of crime, to remind them: No one should be made to fight alone. We are all in this together.
This wasn’t just a speech about how the Donald Trumps of the world have managed to use the law to benefit themselves. This was also a speech about the women who have been left to fight the men like Trump all alone. It was a tribute to their courage, and a pledge to better serve them. Ultimately, it wasn’t just a lawyer’s reflection on democracy and the rule of law, but also a woman lawyer’s reflection on what democracy and the rule of law can mean. Peace and security and immigration and taxes and opportunity, yes. Health care and education and Head Start and a strong middle class, yes. But also—very starkly—what would happen if the instruments of the law were seized by the nutters who brought you Project 2025 in order to, as Harris put it, “create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” Women have the most to gain when the justice system is working and the most to lose when it is used to harm them. This was a rhetorical full circle back to where the convention speeches began on Monday.
Harris’ speech was so strong because it was a testament to what the law can do to women (her mother’s almost-arranged marriage) and what the law can do for women (Donald Trump’s multiple adjudicated sex offenses). And nobody has lived in the swirling void between those two conditions more than a woman of color in America. This was a generous, bold speech that centered on the work of bringing absolutely everyone under the broad canopy of American legal protections. As such, it made perfect sense that it opened and closed with a woman lawyer of color, in an unremarkable dark suit, speaking about the law as though there is nothing exceptional about women toiling endlessly for law and democracy. Because in this one sense it was extremely ordinary: It’s what they have been doing forever.
