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Kamala Harris summed up her campaign pitch with the largest rally of the cycle — at the White House Ellipse, with the office she wants to take over glowing right behind her.
“My presidency will be different because the challenges we face are different,” said the vice president, finessing an answer to a question that has dogged her for months — what she’d change from the Biden years.
“Our top priority as a nation four years ago was to end the pandemic and rescue the economy,” Harris said. “Now our biggest challenge is to lower costs, costs that were rising even before the pandemic, and that are still too high.”
Harris used the speech to reiterate several main campaign themes — Trump’s unfitness for office, how to restore federal abortion protections, and the choice between a round of tax cuts for the wealthy and some progressive healthcare and housing policies.
“Donald Trump will deliver tax cuts to his billionaire donors,” she said. “I will deliver tax cuts to working people and the middle class.”
She repeatedly emphasized the importance of bipartisanship and civility, promising to “build consensus and reach compromise” with Republicans on important issues while warning Trump would further inflame divisions.
“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy,” she said. “He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”
She tried to combat Trump’s strongest issue advantage, immigration, by endorsing border controls without recanting the Biden record.
“When I am President, we will quickly remove those who arrive here unlawfully, prosecute the cartels, and give border patrol the support they so desperately need,” Harris said.
The Vice President had delivered versions of the speech in swing states for a week, but hadn’t threaded them together until Tuesday. She didn’t try to address her party’s divisions on Gaza, though a group of protesters gathered near an entrance, reminding Harris fans of one of their persistent problems.
Harris opened and closed her remarks by framing Trump as a unique threat, one that independents and Republicans could temporarily band together to reject.
“The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators,” she said. “The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised. A nation big enough to encompass all our dreams. Strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us. And fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.”
The View From Republicans
Republicans worked fast on Tuesday to blend Harris’s call for bipartisanship and unity with President Biden’s stammering appearance on a Voto Latino call, in which he condemned comedian Tony Hinchcliffe for denigrating Puerto Ricans at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. Biden said that the “only garbage” he saw in America was “his supporter’s — his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable.”
At least, that was the White House’s interpretation, which included the apostrophe in “supporter’s” in a transcript and insisted that the president was referring only to the roast comic. JD Vance and the Trump campaign said that Biden was referring to all Trump “supporters,” hoping to end the controversy over Trump’s Sunday rally while accusing Democrats of insulting half the country. You can watch the clip here.
The debate, which was essentially between whether Biden was being rambling or malicious, was a vivid example of why Democrats pushed him off the ticket. The president stepped in to clarify his words on social media, writing that he was referring to ”hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage” and “that’s all I meant to say.”