In her closing message to America before Election Day, Harris pledges to fight

Kamala Harris delivered a compelling closing argument last night before a crowd of 75,000 on the Washington Ellipse. At the site of Donald Trump’s insurrection-inciting speech on Jan. 6, 2021, she forcefully laid out the theory of her case. The vice president artfully wove together vision and contrast, what drives her to run and what is at stake in this election.

Harris differentiated herself from Trump, calling him, among other things, “a petty tyrant.” Not surprisingly, those remarks made headlines.

But those headlines miss the two most important things that Harris did last night.

First, she sent a message straight to independent voters and Republicans who don’t care for Donald Trump but don’t feel sure they know who she is. She told them (and the rest of America) clearly and coherently why she is running for president.

Second, the speech showed that Harris understands that, in close presidential elections, the winning candidate’s vision of America is often what separates winners and losers. In what former President George H.W. Bush once called the “vision thing,” positivity matters.

History proves that voters respond to the kind of future that a candidate envisions, especially when that vision is grounded in empathy. In 1960, John F. Kennedy offered a vision of youthful vigor in the presidency; it helped him win the presidency over Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon by a razor-thin margin. “The times,” Kennedy said in an early speech, “demand a vigorous proponent of the national interest,” a president who “will place himself in the very thick of the fight, [and] care passionately about the fate of the people he leads.”

Last night, Kamala Harris’s message in many ways echoed his. Gently distancing herself from President Biden, she told voters that she would bring to the White House “a new generation of leadership.” She painted a portrait of herself as a listener who unites, then fights for ordinary Americans.

Importantly, Harris’s closing argument returned again and again to her commitment to listening to the country’s voters. Critics have taken the vice president’s campaign to task for its failure to answer Americans’ questions about who she is. She took that critique to heart last night, then stood and delivered.

She told us what makes Kamala tick, and why she’s running for the nation’s highest office.

As backdrop, Harris described her career in law enforcement outside of Washington, taking on big banks that defrauded homeowners, drug cartels that imported fentanyl from Mexico, and prosecuting sexual offenders.

Then she came to the point: “That’s why I’m in this race,” she told her audience. “To fight for the people, just like I always have.”

She did what is vital to authenticity — she connected her political mission to her personhood.

“There’s something about people being treated unfairly or overlooked that, frankly, just gets to me — I don’t like it,” said Harris. “If you give me the chance to fight on your behalf, there is nothing in the world that will stand in my way.”

Echoing what so many traditional conservatives, including Liz Cheney, have been saying about the campaign, Harris took the opportunity to remind voters that “unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”

Then she put on display her most poetic, patriotic self: Two hundred and fifty years ago, she said, the nation’s founders “wrested freedom from a petty tyrant.”

“They did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives,” the vice president said, “only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.”

And then, for emphasis, she offered a vision of our present danger, our past, and the future she aims to ensure: “The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised.”

Great campaigners and great presidents are leaders who understand that their central role is often to inspire. Last night, Kamala Harris showed herself the worthy head of a nearly flawless campaign — and the worthy leader of a nation in need of the kind of president she will be.

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy. Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science and a professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College.