Joe Biden was quickly forgotten. On Tuesday, August 20, on the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, delegates state by state voted to nominate Kamala Harris as their party’s presidential candidate. Harris appeared on-screen, speaking from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a key state where she was holding a rally. She accepted the nomination.
Her husband, Doug Emhoff, won over the delegates’ enthusiasm by praising his candidate wife. “My mother is the only person in the whole world who thinks Kamala is the lucky one,” he joked. Harris is “showing you what we already know: she’s ready to lead,” he explained in his slightly drawling voice, recounting, full of self-deprecation, his love story. “I love that laugh,” he said, referring to a subject constantly mocked by Republicans.
He explained that the game had been won with his two children from his first marriage when they started calling Harris “Momala,” in a rebuttal to attacks by Republicans who criticize the Democratic candidate for not having given birth herself. “She finds joy in pursuing justice. […] She likes to see people do well, but hates when they’re treated unfairly,” said Emhoff, whose Jewish parents from Brooklyn had come to support their son in the room.
‘Hope makes a comeback’
The mood turned up a notch with the appearance of a Democratic icon, Michelle Obama, incredibly popular with party delegates and loathed by Republicans. “Something wonderfully magical is in the air,” began the former first lady. “Hope is making a comeback,” she rejoiced. Invoking the backgrounds of their respective mothers, she drew a parallel between her destiny and the values shared with the presidential candidate. Sober but incisive, spelling out the dangers that threaten the United States, she took swipes at Donald Trump, whom she hates and who has never stopped fighting Barack Obama and Harris and their aspiration to the White House: “Who’s gonna tell [Trump] that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she joked to thunderous applause.
After more applause, at 10 pm Chicago time, the man everyone had been waiting for appeared: Barack Obama, commander of the Democrats. “I’m the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama,” jested the former president, his voice a little cracked, also presenting a model couple, in a convention where family values were in the spotlight, as well as the right to abortion and in vitro fertilization, extolled in numerous short films and testimonials.
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