Kamala Harris’s Rousing Ellipse Campaign Speech Made Republicans Scramble

Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech on Tuesday night that largely exorcised the dark forces that have hung over the National Mall ever since January 6, 2021. It was a strong and vivid address, delivered well to a huge and appreciative crowd. It did one unexpected thing: It fastened the vice president securely to a chain that links the previous two Democratic presidents, both of whom were elected to repair the monumental damage done by the previous two catastrophic Republican presidencies. Harris, of course, is running to keep another catastrophic Republican presidency from occurring. This was made most clear in one eloquent passage from the vice president’s address:

Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant. Across the generations, Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing proved to the world that a government of, by, and for the people is strong and can endure. And those who came before us, the Patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall, on farmlands, and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us seed our fundamental freedoms. They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.

In that, you could hear echoes of Barack Obama’s second inaugural address, when a president added Stonewall, which was the first detonation of the gay-rights movement, to the list of other turning points in American freedom forty-three years after the episode in Greenwich Village that began with violent resistance to a police raid of a gay bar.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal —is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

You could also hear echoes of President Joe Biden’s famous rationale for running—to restore the soul of America. But “the will of another petty tyrant,” linking El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago to George III, that was all her.

It was quite a night for the Harris campaign. For the Republicans, it was a chance to misquote President Biden for the purposes of distracting from Harris’s speech, and from their own hatefest on Sunday in Madison Square Garden. In a video, the president referred to Sunday’s rhetoric as “garbage,” and the GOP and its flying monkeys insisted that the president had referred to the former president*’s supporters as “garbage.” Oooh! A “deplorables” moment! The popinjay political press—Axios and, inevitably, Tiger Beat on the Potomac—gleefully glommed onto the meretricious barbering of what the president said. On the front page of the TBOTP website there were six stories on what Biden had said. Here’s a representative example:

Meanwhile, sitting about 1,000 feet behind her in the White House, President JOE BIDEN was busy undoing all of that, handing Republicans fuel to undermine that argument precisely one week before the first votes get counted. We won’t pretend to know exactly what was going through Biden’s head, but we do know that, if you’re Harris, you don’t want the tenor of your final days on the campaign trail to be dictated by a fateful apostrophe. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s—his—his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Biden said during a get-out-the-vote call hosted by Voto Latino. “It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

Time to pretend to take Republicans seriously again.

That interpretation immediately coursed through the GOP ecosystem—from Biden’s mouth to JD VANCE’s X account (“This is disgusting”) to Trump’s Pennsylvania rally (“We are not garbage, we are patriots,” Florida Sen. MARCO RUBIO said onstage in Allentown) to downballot campaigns (one Senate hopeful accused his opponent of “Hating half the country’s voters”) and to Trump’s own social media accounts (“You can’t lead America if you don’t love the American People”).

You can certainly debate whether the comment genuinely has the power to move votes in the final week or if it’s a Beltway media obsession kindled by people who just days ago were telling people we have to stop getting so offended all the time.

Yeah, they’re a bunch of hypocritical bastids. What’s the point?

But no matter where you put that apostrophe, it’s a distraction for Harris going into the final six days—and an interesting final test for her relationship with the man who elevated her to the vice presidency and handed her the campaign baton. Harris is campaigning in three swing states today and, starting on the airport tarmac this morning, will be asked about the comment over and over again. (Her running mate, TIM WALZ, is sure to get similar questions on “Good Morning America” in about an hour.) How she answers those questions will be telling.

She answered those “telling” questions pretty eloquently earlier that evening at the Ellipse. It’s time for a lot of people to put their heads down on their desks until next Wednesday.