Carrying the flame on the second night of prime-time speeches will be the Obamas, with Michelle Obama addressing the convention shortly before her husband Barack takes the stage. The couple’s endorsement of Harris in July was seminal in securing the Democratic presidential nomination for the current US vice-president, helping to bypass a potentially ugly internal fight.
The Obamas stamped their approval on a Harris bid for the White House on 26 July, five days after Joe Biden stepped aside, recording a video of their phone conversation which promptly went viral. “I can’t have this phone call without saying to my girl Kamala that I am so proud of you – this is going to be historic,” Michelle Obama said.
Tuesday’s convention will be aiming for another viral moment, when almost 5,000 delegates from all 50 states and US territories will gather on the floor of the United Center in downtown Chicago. They will hold what is being billed as a “ceremonial roll call” symbolically to hand the Democratic nomination to Harris.
The event will be purely figurative: Harris was already officially elevated into that position two weeks ago through an online vote of delegates. But the curators of the convention are hoping the spectacle will allow a more public recognition of Harris’s history-making feat as the first woman of colour to lead a major party presidential ticket.
The theme set for Tuesday of Harris’s “bold vision” has been designed both to highlight her optimistic take on the future and to contrast it with Trump’s dark and dystopian narrative of America as a failing nation. Convention organisers are billing the night as showcasing “the broad, deep, wide and diverse coalition” behind Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.
Among the other headline speakers will be Harris’s husband, the second gentleman Doug Emhoff. He will introduce himself to Americans, recounting his middle-class New Jersey upbringing and his career in law, before giving his personal view of the vice-president, whom he will describe as “joyful, empathetic and tough”.
Others on stage will be JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois who is hosting the convention; the Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth; Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont; New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham; and the mayor of Mesa county in the critical battleground state of Arizona, John Giles.
The second day is also conceived as a natural extension of Monday night’s passing of the baton from Biden to his vice-president. Biden was granted an ecstatic standing ovation from delegates on the convention floor in gratitude for his half-century of service to the Democratic party. His speech was frequently interrupted by chants of “Thank you, Joe.”
Biden gave a feisty account of his four years in office that was as forceful and pointed as his disastrous performance in the June presidential debate with Trump was weak and floundering. With Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, watching from within the arena, Biden denounced Trump as a “loser” who was whipping up political violence.
“You cannot say you love your country only when you win,” he said. He went on to defend the American economy as the “strongest economy in the world”, and called for tougher gun laws to protect the country’s children.
The four days of the Democratic convention will continue under the shadow of ongoing tension over the White House position on the Gaza war. On Monday, thousands of protesters gathered within half a mile from the United Center calling for an immediate end to Israel’s retaliatory war, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.
Biden addressed the war in his speech, insisting that he was working hard to secure a ceasefire and end the fighting. Alluding to the thousands of anti-war demonstrators, he added: “These protesters out in the street have a point – a lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides.”
It has been reported that Biden remains convinced that he could have defeated Trump in November, despite concerns following the debate around his age – at 81 – and his mental acuity. It has been suggested that he holds senior Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the former US House speaker and the current Senate leader, responsible for levering him out of the race.
Biden dismissed the accounts on Monday. “All this talk that I’m angry at the people who said I should step down – it’s not true.”
It has also been suggested that Biden holds Barack Obama partly culpable for his political demise. Obama did not encourage the president to end his campaign, but nor did he rally to his side when pressure mounted.
That context will make Obama’s keynote speech on Tuesday all the more poignant. It was already imbued with personal significance for Obama.
It was the soaring keynote speech that Obama made at the Democratic national convention in Boston, Massachusetts, exactly 20 years ago – in which he talked of the “audacity of hope” of “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too” – that rocket-launched him from his then relatively lowly status as a state senator in Illinois into the presidency just four years later.
In his speech on Tuesday night, Obama is expected to set out Harris’s qualifications for the world’s most powerful job. Earlier this month he commended her on X, saying: “She has the vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands, and I know she will deliver.”
Convention planners said they have made “real-time adjustments” to the schedule to avoid a repetition of Monday night’s overrun, which they blamed on the raucous applause of delegates and long standing ovations for speakers. The delays pushed Biden out of prime-time, with his speech finishing close to midnight, causing anger among some Democratic supporters on social media.
The singer-songwriter James Taylor was also bumped from the program.
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