Following President Biden’s dramatic exit from the presidential race, Kamala Harris has not only seized the presidential baton but taken command of the 2024 campaign.
Beginning with her first appearance at Biden’s Wilmington, Del., headquarters, Harris went on the attack. Recapping her career, the vice president described prosecuting “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”
With a rhetorical flourish, Harris added this sharp retort: “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
After Trump reneged on a scheduled ABC News debate in September, Harris deadpanned that while Trump had plenty to say about her, she issued another devastating response that immediately went viral: “Well, Donald, I hope you’ll reconsider meeting me on the debate stage. Because, as the saying goes, ‘If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.’”
Before she could finish, a raucous crowd was already chanting the punchline.
With each appearance, Kamala Harris is setting the terms for what will follow over the next three months. Knowing that successful candidates focus on the voters and their futures, a staple of Harris’s stump speech is this call-and-response line: “We’re not going back.”
Harris’s political savvy did not develop overnight. In 2019, she was a tentative candidate, unsure of herself. Despite an impressive rollout, she ended her presidential campaign by year’s end, before a single vote had been cast.
But during her four years as vice president, Harris has honed her political skills. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, she went on the offensive with yet another devastating reply to the court’s majority, “How dare they?” In the many town halls and forums that followed, one sensed her growing self-confidence.
One year later, after yet another school massacre in Tennessee, Harris jumped into the fray when two Black state legislators, Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, were expelled for merely wanting to discuss gun control. Another legislator, Gloria Johnson, who is white, was also prohibited from speaking.
Casting her prearranged plans aside, Harris flew to Tennessee. With almost no time to prepare, she delivered a powerful speech, telling the “Tennessee Three” that their voices needed to be heard, concluding, “We march on.” The crowd reaction was electric. As I wrote at the time, this was Kamala Harris’s shining moment.
For the past 17 months, Kamala Harris has gone about making the case for Joe Biden’s reelection, giving speeches with little fanfare. All the while, she was sharpening her political skills to meet this moment.
The most talented politicians do not develop their political skills overnight. During his first campaign for Congress in 1946, one Boston politician described John F. Kennedy as “not built for politics.” The shy, timid Kennedy was hardly the polished speaker and confident pol that he eventually became when he declared his presidential candidacy 14 years later.
Likewise, Ronald Reagan spent a decade giving speeches for General Electric. After years on the chicken-and-mashed potatoes circuit, the “great communicator” became a political wunderkind who won comfortable majorities every time he appeared on a general election ballot.
Similarly, few initially saw the talent George W. Bush would eventually exhibit. During his unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 1978, Laura Bush told her husband that his stump speech wasn’t very good. Bush became so upset that he drove his car into the wall of his house.
By 1994, however, Bush’s skills were evident. That year he delivered a stunning upset to another political thoroughbred, Texas Gov. Anne Richards. Six years later, he was a political colossus in the Lone Star State and well on his way to the presidency.
Donald Trump has never had to face someone with Kamala Harris’s raw talent.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was hardly a gifted politician. For most of her life, she played a supporting role in Bill Clinton’s many campaigns. And when she made her first foray into politics in 2000, she won a U.S. Senate seat against a lackluster Republican opponent.
By 2016, her distrust of the media made her a reserved public figure. In many respects, she shared that troublesome facet of her persona with another failed presidential candidate, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, who lost to Democrat Harry Truman in 1948.
Donald Trump’s other opponent, Joe Biden, ran for president in 2020 when the country was in a COVID lockdown. Traditional campaigning was nonexistent. Instead, for the first time in decades, the country yearned for a return to normalcy and valued someone with government experience. Biden was the right person at the right time.
After Kamala Harris emerged to take the top spot on the Democratic ticket, Trump has been flatfooted and off-message. His once-vaunted ability to capture and hold an audience’s attention has waned.
As Harris noted after Trump’s attacks on her racial heritage, “It’s was the same old show.” Clearly, his political skills have been dulled during the four years he’s been out of office.
And Trump is getting no help from J.D. Vance, his hapless running mate, who exhibits none of the raw aptitude needed to help the GOP ticket win.
For the first time ever, Donald Trump is facing a talented political opponent. Kamala Harris is more than ready to take on Trump and engage in the rough and tumble of politics. One senses that Harris not only knows this but is finding joy in doing so.
Donald Trump has never seen anything like this.
John Kenneth White (johnkennethwhite.com) is a professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America. His latest book is titled, “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”