Will there be a bounce? Takeaways from the Democratic convention
Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in a speech Thursday infused with patriotism, presenting herself, not her opponent, as embodying their nation’s best traditions.
The speech broke little policy ground, hewing to the Democratic Party’s traditional centre-left lane: supporting NATO allies, expanding social programs, abortion access, and a middle-ground approach to border policy, migration and the Middle East.
It went heavy, however, on personality.
Its key objective: strike a contrast in values with Donald Trump. She compared her own working-class upbringing as the daughter of immigrants with an opponent she characterized as an egomaniac friend to billionaires.
It was wrapped in red, white and blue, in a convention that made a conscious effort to claim patriotic bona fides for Democrats, who repeatedly cheered, “U-S-A!” It appeared clearly targeted at swing voters uneasy with Trump, her opponent, closing a convention that featured numerous Republican speakers.
“On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth,” Harris said, “I accept your nomination for president of the United States of America.”
She compared her own life path, as a prosecutor, to Trump’s: “My entire career, I have only had one client, the people,” she said. Trump is running, she added, to serve the only client he has ever had: “Himself.”
Here are takeaways from the four-day affair that kicks off the general-election campaign, which will see Americans elect a president Nov. 5.
Enthusiasm surge
It was already clear entering the convention that the switch atop the ticket had had a galvanizing effect. And it’s not just because of a bump in the polls. There’s a staggering fundraising surge: Harris raked in more donations in her first 10 days as a candidate than Joe Biden did in 15 months.
One convention-goer, Letitia Flowers, said she wasn’t even going to vote for Biden, frustrated over his Gaza policy. Now? “I’m amped up,” she told CBC News.
She plans to knock on doors for Harris — and is willing to give her time to define her own Mideast policy. Leaving the convention Thursday, Deirdre Harper of Chicago said: “I am optimistically excited. She brings joy.”
After speeches by Barack and Michelle Obama on Tuesday night, one young man exiting the venue was shouting excitedly into his phone that other young people must get involved. That’s what a party wants out of a convention.
Trump — one part mockery, one part outrage
Yes, Democrats still describe Trump as a threat to democracy, as Biden habitually did. There were searing videos about the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The campaign, however, is now targeting him more often by prosaic means: mockery. To tease him, make him seem small, petty, self-obsessed. It was a recurring theme.
From Barack Obama ridiculing his obsession with crowd sizes, while making mischievous hand gestures alluding to Trump’s manhood; to Bill Clinton describing empathy as a key presidential quality, and calling the election a choice between “We, the people,” and “Me, myself and I.” Don’t count the lies in a Trump speech, Clinton said: “Count the I’s.”
The audience at the convention’s final night also heard from, and about, people victimized by Trump.
There were young Black men he falsely accused of a brutal 1989 rape, urged their execution, then never apologized. There was a fraud settlement involving Trump University. “Donald Trump ripped off his biggest fans,” said Tristian Snell, a New York prosecutor on the Trump University case. “Kamala Harris fought scammers like him.”
Harris tried pulling these themes together in her acceptance speech. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”
Kamala Harris, speaking as she accepted the Democratic presidential nomination said, ‘we trust women’ and pledged to sign a bill — if passed by Congress — that would ‘restore reproductive freedom’ in the U.S.
A personal intro to Harris
As a late entrant into this race, Harris isn’t as well-known as some past presidential candidates. Her campaign worked to fill in the blanks of her bio — the parts they hope will stick with voters.
The convention heard about her mom, an Indian-American cancer researcher; her close relationship with her stepchildren; and from friends and relatives who described her as kind, smart, and tough.
While attending high school in Montreal, she learned a friend was being abused by her stepfather and invited her to live with her family. Harris cites this as an impetus for becoming a prosecutor.
Of note: She airbrushed her life outside the U.S. from the speech. Harris referred to having lived in a working-class area of California, Wisconsin, Illinois, and, “wherever our parents’ jobs took us,” in a glancing reference to those six years in Montreal.
As California’s attorney general, she played hardball with big banks and scored a much higher-than-planned payout for victims of a foreclosure scam.
Her husband, Doug Emhoff, described a first nervous phone call to her when a mutual acquaintance set them up. He left an awkward voicemail and Harris saved it. “She makes me listen to it on every anniversary,” Emhoff said.
By coincidence, Thursday, the night she accepted the nomination, was their 10th anniversary.
What do we know where Kamala Harris stands on key issues? CBC’s Alex Panetta breaks it down from the Democratic National Convention.
Policy? It’s a work in progress
The goal here was a feel-good election rally, not a policy forum to discuss ideal marginal tax rates. Harris has released only bits of her platform. She promises more in the coming weeks.
Her program so far focuses on lowering living costs — in housing, groceries, and medicine. She also wants to raise taxes for companies and the wealthy.
The details remain skimpy. She’ll be pressed for details on Sept. 10, when she debates Trump.
She’ll have a chance to press him for clarity, because he’s been vague as well — like, for example how he would implement his plan for a 10 per cent global minimum tariff. His platform also calls for military strikes against drug cartels and a mass-deportation of undocumented migrants, with few specifics.
Chant for Israeli hostages; no stage time for Palestinians
One of the more moving moments involved the parents Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American-Israeli hostage kidnapped along with around 250 others when Hamas militants attacked Israel last Oct. 7.
His mother began weeping as the crowd began chanting, “Bring them home,” referring to the 105 hostages still in Gaza. She later revealed that she was surprised, and overwhelmed, by the reaction.
The party is deeply divided over Palestinian-Israeli issues. Just a day before, protesters disrupted a meeting of Orthodox Jews at the convention.
A refusal to allow any pro-Palestinian speeches prompted protests: some delegates, including members of Congress, staged a sit-in. A Muslim women’s group for Harris announced it was disbanding.
A group of protest delegates was given space for a first-ever convention gathering on Palestinian issues, where they discussed the human catastrophe in Gaza. But they failed in repeated efforts to get speaking time for Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American member of the Georgia legislature who wrote a speech urging a ceasefire.
“I’ve had some pretty crushing days, but to be honest today took the cake,” she tweeted Wednesday, saying she couldn’t understand why the convention made time for several Republican speakers but not her.
These delegates want a ceasefire, an arms embargo on Israel, and they’re demanding actions from Harris. When it comes to the Middle East, this party’s bitter divisions haven’t disappeared.
In her speech, Harris made clear she would not abandon Israel, promising to always help it defend itself. In the next breath, she added that Palestinians deserve dignity, security and self-determination.
She and President Joe Biden, she said, are working for a ceasefire deal that achieves all those things.
Kamala Harris, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, said she is working alongside President Joe Biden to ‘end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.’
Still, this wasn’t 1968
The potential for history repeating itself was obvious. The last time a sitting president — Lyndon Johnson — cancelled a re-election campaign, he was also replaced by his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. The convention was also in Chicago, and the party was also divided over a foreign war.
In the streets, protesters were beaten by police; in the hall there was chaos. The convention was a disaster, and the party was electorally doomed.
“[This was] nothing like the protests in ’68,” said Peter Hancon, 81, a delegate who was in Chicago for both conventions. He’d joined the National Guard to avoid being drafted to Vietnam, and his unit was in Chicago back then.
This time, he said, there’s a progressive mayor who supports the protesters; the party is more united; and the war in question involves fewer Americans directly.
Looking for a bounce
This election remains a tossup. Usually, conventions give parties a bump in the polls of several percentage points. Democrats will desperately be looking for one. Because the absence of a bounce would be a troubling sign.
“This is going to be so close,” Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said during a forum at the convention, hosted by Politico and CNN. “It is a margin of error race.”
She noted that Trump continues to have better poll numbers than in his past two elections — when he won in 2016, and almost won in 2020. An early good sign for Democrats is their convention’s TV viewership ratings were clearly higher than Republicans’ last month.
The bad news? They were still lower than past conventions, and only a small fraction of Americans watched on TV. Convention clips will continue to run in social media.
Meanwhile, attention will turn to Robert F. Kennedy on Friday, amid speculation the third-party candidate will exit the race.
In a passionate keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris accepted her party’s presidential nomination, promising to represent ’all Americans’ while highlighting her past experiences and detailing some political priorities.
Published at Sun, 18 Aug 2024 18:39:34 +0000
Baby in Gaza suffering paralysis from polio virus, World Health Organization says
A 10-month-old baby in war-shattered Gaza has been paralyzed by the type 2 polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years, the World Health Organization said on Friday, with United Nations agencies appealing for urgent vaccinations of every baby.
The type 2 virus (cVDPV2), while not inherently more dangerous than types 1 and 3, has been responsible for most outbreaks in recent years, especially in areas with low vaccination rates.
UN agencies have called for Israel and Gaza’s dominant Palestinian militant group Hamas to agree to a seven-day humanitarian pause in their 10-month-old war to allow vaccination campaigns to proceed in the territory.
Omar Al-Zawaidi, a father of two, went to the hospital in hopes of getting his children vaccinated against polio, a highly infectious virus that is spread through the fecal-oral route. A doctor working in Gaza, meanwhile, warns that actually detecting the virus will prove challenging as cases can be asymptomatic.
“Polio does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli children,” the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Friday in a post on X.
“Delaying a humanitarian pause will increase the risk of spread among children,” Philippe Lazzarini added.
The baby, who has lost movement in his lower left leg, is currently in stable condition, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
Vaccine campaign imminent
The WHO has announced that two rounds of a polio vaccination campaign are set to begin in late August and September 2024 across the densely populated Gaza Strip.
With its health services widely damaged or destroyed by fighting, and raw sewage spreading amid a breakdown in sanitation infrastructure, Gaza’s population is particularly vulnerable to outbreaks of disease. Children under five are particularly at risk of polio exposure.
Poliomyelitis, a highly infectious virus primarily spread through the fecal-oral route, can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis.
Traces of polio virus were detected last month in sewage in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, two areas in southern and central Gaza where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the fighting have sought shelter.
Gaza’s health ministry first reported the polio case in the 10-month-old baby a week ago in the central city of Deir Al-Balah, an often embattled area in the war.
On Aug. 16, Hamas supported a UN request for a seven-day pause in the fighting to vaccinate Gaza children against polio, Hamas political bureau official Izzat al-Rishq said on Friday.
Israel, which has laid siege to Gaza since last October and whose ground offensive and bombardments have levelled much of the territory, said days later it would facilitate the transfer of polio vaccines into Gaza for around one million children.
Challenges in a war zone
The Israeli military’s humanitarian unit (COGAT) said it was co-ordinating with Palestinians to procure 43,000 vials of vaccine — each with multiple doses — for delivery in Israel and transfer to Gaza in the coming weeks.
The vaccines should be sufficient for two rounds of doses for more than a million children, COGAT added.
As burials took place for more hostages recovered from Gaza, some Israelis said the government wasn’t doing enough to bring home the remaining hostages kidnapped by Hamas militants during the deadly Oct. 7 attack. And in Gaza, another round of airstrikes left dozens dead — including numerous children.
As well as allowing the entry of polio specialists into Gaza, the UN has said a successful campaign would require transport for vaccines and refrigeration equipment at every step as well as conditions that would allow the campaign to reach children in every area of the rubble-clogged territory.
Vaccinating and tracking shots for an itinerant population would be a significant challenge. Successive Israeli evacuation orders in Gaza, including 12 just in August, have displaced 90 per cent of the territory’s 2.1 million residents since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, the top United Nations humanitarian official for the Palestinian territory said Friday.
Muhannad Hadi said the evacuation orders are endangering civilians instead of protecting them.
“They are forcing families to flee again, often under fire and with the few belongings they can carry with them, into an ever-shrinking area.” Civilians are being deprived of medical care, shelter, water wells and humanitarian supplies, “running from one destroyed place to another, with no end in sight,” he said.
The war began on Oct. 7, when Hamas and other militants stormed Israel, killing around 1,200 people. Several Canadian citizens were among the dead.
About 110 hostages taken by the militants are still inside Gaza, with the Israeli government previously stating it believes about one-third of that total are deceased.
The Israeli offensive launched in response has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the local health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish in its daily counts between fighters and civilians.
Published at Fri, 23 Aug 2024 13:57:14 +0000
