Democrats seize the urgency of our moment

It would be a place, she said, “where all are welcome, no matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we love.”

In keeping with expectations that a vice presidential candidate will strike relentlessly at the opposition, Harris continued the online Democratic National Convention’s assault on President Trump’s failures, lies and selfishness.

But as prosecutors sometimes decide to do, she chose to speak not angrily or irritably, but in a tone of quiet sorrow over a country confronting pain, distress and exhaustion with a divisive and erratic president.

“Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives and livelihoods,” Harris said. “If you’re a parent struggling with your child’s remote learning, or you’re a teacher struggling on the other side of that screen, you know that what we’re doing right now isn’t working. And we are a nation that’s grieving. Grieving the loss of life, the loss of jobs, the loss of opportunities, the loss of normalcy. And yes, the loss of certainty.”

“The constant chaos leaves us adrift,” she said. “The incompetence makes us feel afraid. The callousness makes us feel alone. It’s a lot. And here’s the thing: We can do better and deserve so much more.”

The quieter language reflected a warmer and far more personal Harris than the tough and fiery image she has often cultivated. She spoke of her mother and her husband, of love and of how family has been at the center of her life. It was an introduction to the vast number of Americans who knew little about her, and the softer tone will be a challenge to Trump, who has specialized in gendered attacks.

Harris’s prosecutorial burden was also lightened by former president Barack Obama, who offered a sharp and urgent case for change. Obama’s 2020 speech on behalf of his former vice president was, in many ways, more passionate and more insistent than his case for his own reelection at the 2012 convention.

For the last three and a half years, Obama clearly felt restrained by norms prescribing that former presidents should refrain from criticizing the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Those constraints fell away on Wednesday night.

When Trump took office, Obama explained, he had hoped that the new president would at least “show some interest in taking the job seriously” and “discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.”

“But he never did,” Obama declared, and what followed was one of the most cutting and comprehensive attacks of the convention so far:

“He’s shown no interest in putting in the work,” Obama declared, “no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”

And like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday night, Obama also drew attention to Trump’s threat to free government. “Our democratic institutions [are] threatened as never before,” he said.

The twin speeches, combined with statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former secretary of stateHillary Clinton, reflected the astonishing discipline that the two-hour-long online convention has imposed on a party that has often turned its guns toward internal rivals.

Over and over, the party has stressed three themes: the catastrophe that Trump’s reelection would bring in its wake; the empathy and competence that Biden would bring to the White House; and the Democratic Party’s devotion to diversity, inclusion and social justice — a nation, as Harris put it, committed to “the fundamental belief that every human being is of infinite worth, deserving of compassion, dignity and respect.”

But it fell to Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016 when nearly everyone expected her to win, to be explicit about a fear that will animate Democratic activism between now and Election Day.

“For four years,” she said, “people have said to me, ‘I didn’t realize how dangerous he was.’ ‘I wish I could go back and do it over.’ Or worst, ‘I should have voted.’ Well, this can’t be another woulda-coulda-shoulda election.”

Obama drove that theme home, too. “Do not let them take away your power. Don’t let them take away your democracy.”

One word summarizes the Democratic mood: urgency.

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