U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris in New York City on June 21.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Brian Mulroney was a white labour lawyer from a paper-mill town in the rugged Côte-Nord region of Quebec. Condoleezza Rice is a Black scholar from a steel city in the Deep South state of Alabama. But in late 2018 they encountered each other under the elegant ribbed vaulting of Washington’s National Cathedral.
“He’s brought this country together again,” the former American secretary of state, speaking of former president George H.W. Bush, said to the former prime minister of Canada as they milled in the aisle of the soaring neo English-gothic cathedral before the funeral of the 41st president.
Andy Beshear is a moderate Democrat and the son of a governor of Kentucky. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a left-leaning one-time activist from the Bronx.
Joe Biden’s withdrawal has brought Mr. Beshear, now the Governor of Kentucky himself and a leading candidate to become the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee, together with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the leader of the progressive group of House of Representative lawmakers known as the Squad. They both endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris within hours of Mr. Biden’s stunning statement Sunday. The irony of the summer season is that, though besieged by doubters and increasingly viewed as out of touch with political reality, Mr. Biden’s decision brought the Democrats together again. The frailest figure on the American political scene has turbocharged his party, for nothing in Joe Biden’s long political life became him like leaving it.
The result is that a party that was breaking into feuding parts even as it spent most of the summer trying to edge its senior figure out of a re-election race he was determined to run and was likely to lose now stands firmly behind its new leader.
Which of the two American political parties is the most united now?
Is it the Republicans, who just completed a bravura convention performance of glitter, confetti and white ear bandages but whose only living former president other than Donald Trump stayed far away, as did a senator who was the party’s presidential nominee only a dozen years ago? Or is it the Democrats, whose convention is less than a month away and among whom, to paraphrase a beloved American 150-year-old anthem, suddenly nary is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.
There are, to be sure, distant clouds on the Democratic horizon. The Democrats’ presumptive nominee is untested; indeed, she’s had the status as the repository of the party’s hopes for only less than half a week. Her negative public-approval ratings outstrip her positive assessments. The electoral map favours her opponent, who already has loosed verbal infrared homing guided missiles in her direction and has an arsenal more at hand. And the vital swing states are swinging toward Mr. Trump.
But in a matter of mere days Ms. Harris’s ascendancy has transformed the narrative for her party from Shakespeare to Homer. Suddenly the Democrats’ deep discontent of summer has been transformed into a rosy-fingered dawn. The shimmery aura will wear off, to be sure, but for now the Republicans and their vaunted unity have been moved off the stage, replaced by the invigorated Democrats.
How long will the ecstasy persist? Not, to be sure, through the Labour Day opening of the general election and on to Election Day itself.
Ms. Harris still must make the leap from best supporting actor to the star herself. Though George H.W. Bush was able to succeed Ronald Reagan in the 1988 election, other former vice-presidents who directly became presidential nominees such as Richard Nixon (1960), Hubert Humphrey (1968) and Al Gore (2000) found the transition difficult, awkward even. All three lost, though Mr. Nixon, freed from the long shadow of Dwight Eisenhower, prevailed eight years later, in a chaotic 1968 campaign against Mr. Humphrey, whose own gifts and party bona fides were overshadowed by Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War policies.
But the reversal in the Democrats’ fortune has been matched by the reversal in the profile of the age issue. Ms. Harris soon will turn 60. Mr. Trump is 78. Neither is the voice of the new generations, but at the very least Ms. Harris’s new status flips the election focus from Mr. Biden’s infirmities to Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities.
That returns the Democrats’ playbook to the chapter that, from the beginning of the year, they had hoped to employ. In a way, Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor and California state attorney-general is better positioned to take on the legal problems of Mr. Trump than was Mr. Biden.
“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said in one of her first appearances in her new role. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Mr. Trump will not sit still for that critique. Frontal assaults on the new Democratic standard bearer will come, and many will hit home. Ms. Harris will stumble, and the Democrats, who held their collective breath during Mr. Biden’s silences will be equally troubled by Ms. Harris’s rhetorical excesses.
“Vice-President Harris is more than up to the task and ready to be president,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. The task is to prove that she is.