Democratic ‘ranks are closing fast’ around VP Kamala Harris
Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00international affairs commentator, Douglas Herbert.
00:03First question, Doug, who, if anybody, could challenge Harris for the presidency?
00:08Well, there were a lot. And if you'd asked me that 24 hours ago or just right after this
00:12announcement, I would have said, you know, there were several names there. You had some
00:16prominent governors out there, governors from the states of Illinois, of Wisconsin, Michigan.
00:21You had names like Gretchen Whitmer. You had J.B. Pritzker. You had Andy Beshear from Kentucky.
00:29You had a lot of people whose names are sort of mooted and thrown about. But like I said,
00:34we got a sort of sense of that from this report. The ranks are closing fast. They are circling the
00:40wagons, this party, around Kamala Harris. And when I say things are moving fast, remember,
00:44it has been less than 24 hours, literally, since Joe Biden's dropped out of the race.
00:49And in that time, yes, Kamala Harris has been very quick on the uptake, working the phones,
00:54calling around, making the calls to the Democrats and the delegates that she is going to need
00:59to consolidate this vote, to make sure that the party, the word that we're using is coalesces
01:04around her. It's a race against the clock, literally. You said it at the top. There's
01:09106 days to go. You know, that's a snap of the fingers here in presidential elections.
01:14She doesn't have that much time. It looks like the party, more and more, we're seeing this
01:18critical mass of momentum building in her favor. Now, does that mean that it's going to be a
01:23coronation? No, not by any means. And in fact, the head of what's called the Democratic National
01:27Rules Committee has made it very clear they don't want it to be a coronation. And Kamala Harris
01:32herself, one of her earliest statements right after Biden endorsed her, who says, I want to
01:38work and earn and win your votes, meaning the votes of the delegates. She doesn't want this to
01:43be some rubber stamp anointment, a coronation, to use that word again, in which she's just shoot in.
01:49That's exactly what the Trump campaign wants to do. They want to smear her, to slander her
01:53as some undemocratic appointee of these Democratic grantees that violates the will
01:58of the 14 million Democrat rank and file Democrats who went out and voted in primaries.
02:03So what she wants to do, she wants to make this as much of a democratic process as possible,
02:10wants to go through all the steps, wants the delegates themselves to be able to coalesce
02:15around her. So it's in her interest to do that. So when I say it's not going to be a coronation,
02:19what's less likely, Annette, as we sit here at this hour, could still happen, but I'm saying
02:23less likely, is an open convention. That thing we keep talking about, a brokered convention,
02:28where you get to Chicago on August 19th, Democratic National Committee meets.
02:31They're 3,900 delegates plus 700 superdelegates waiting in the wings, and they all have to sort
02:37of fight it out on the convention floor in speeches and vote by roll call for choose their
02:42anonymy. Probably it's going to happen before. It could happen in a sort of virtual vote,
02:47but what's clear is they will go through process. But my hunch tells me it will be
02:52sooner rather than later that we see people coalescing as it's already happening. She got
02:57six Democratic governors today, big states, all coming out in favour of endorsing her
03:01former potential rivals. So this is all big, and I think it's going to happen fast.
03:06What would a Kamala Harris campaign actually look like, though, Doug?
03:10It would look unlike a Biden campaign in the sense of right now she has been stuck up until now,
03:15with having to basically be the cookie cutter, the echo of Joe Biden, having to say and do whatever,
03:20you know, and support him. And she has been very loyal and supportive. But now that it looks like
03:24it's going to be potentially her at the top of the ticket, she's going to be her own person.
03:28What her campaign team wants to do is put forward what they see as her greatest asset.
03:33She is running against a man who is a convicted felon, a man who was convicted on 34 felony
03:38counts in that hush money trial we all reported on. She is going to hammer away at that theme.
03:44She is a former prosecutor. She is an attorney general from California. She was a district
03:49attorney before that. She prosecuted the types of people, as her team sees it, that Donald Trump is.
03:56She has put the likes of people like Donald Trump in prison. They're going to hammer away at that
04:02and keep reminding the voters that what Donald Trump represents is a type of person that as a
04:06prosecutor throughout her career, before becoming a senator, before becoming a vice president,
04:11she went after time and again in court. But she's also going to bring forward another giant
04:16Democratic campaign theme, perhaps their biggest asset, and that is her staunch support of abortion
04:21rights, which have been whittled away on the national level and slowly on the state level.
04:26She's going to remind the voters that she is stood by women and their right to choice,
04:31whereas this is a Republican Party that is in the process right now of whittling those down.
04:37Doug Herbert, thanks for that.