Hours before Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage Tuesday to rally supporters of her presidential bid at The Liacouras Center, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker uncorked an anecdote from her own youth.
When Parker was a child, she sat down on her childhood home’s stoop to escape a family argument and began to cry. A “nosy neighbor,” Parker told the capacity crowd, ambled past, asking why the little girl was so downcast. She told her.
The future mayor’s grandmother overheard the confession and gave Parker a stern word of advice: What happens at home stays there.
Parker wasn’t simply dispensing her patented homespun wisdom. She was urging everyone within earshot to move past the Democratic Party’s vaunted veepstakes. Immediately.
“Our Democratic nominee has spoken!” Parker bellowed, as the crowd roared and the seats shook. “And that’s it!”
Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and a laundry list of Democratic Party luminaries gathered in North Philadelphia hours after the end of a bruising vice-presidential search that saw the current No. 2 choose Walz over several other popular, highly-regarded candidates. More importantly, they were campaigning in the home state of Gov. Josh Shapiro, a finalist for the nod.
Parker told this tale as Harris and the party look to ride a wave of enthusiasm into a November faceoff with former president Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate.
Parker, who in 2023 first won the mayor’s office on a message of optimism and urban renewal, repurposed another slogan to reiterate the point.
“Don’t rain on Kamala’s shine!” she exhorted the crowd. Implication: The vibes were immaculate — and, to Philadelphia’s 100th chief, there was no reason they couldn’t stay that way.
At least at the rally, the crowd took Parker’s advice. Not even rain itself — ranging through the day from negligible to torrential — could dilute or subdue the raucous crowds who thronged the court floor and both bowls of Temple’s basketball arena.
“This was electric tonight — the excitement in the room, the line around the building to get in here,” said Bob Rudy, the Democratic nominee for a state house seat in Lancaster County. “If this is any indication of the turnout for the election, I have no doubt who’s going to win.”
Barely five weeks ago, the Democratic Party was in disarray: An abysmal early debate with Trump paralyzed President Joe Biden’s reelection bid. Trump narrowly missed an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, a brush with death that obscured his own controversies in a wave of national grief and goodwill. And poll after poll had even some elected Democrats predicting the former president’s restoration to the highest office in the land.
Then Biden stepped aside, the anti-Trump insurgency coalesced behind Harris, and the 2024 campaign effectively reset. The same surveys that once had Trump firmly in the lead now show Harris closing the gap or even passing the Republican ticket, both nationally and in critical swing states.
“It’s new blood,” said Reggie Byers, a local graphic novelist who authored a children’s book about Harris’s place in history. “I think everyone was becoming complacent when Biden was running again. People knew that his age, his zest, and his zeal were all waning.”
When the president stepped out, and his deputy stepped in, Byers said, it reignited liberals and progressives who had once been lulled to sleep.
Shapiro was on hand alongside Harris, Walz, Parker, Senators John Fetterman and Bob Casey, Democratic National Committee chairman Jamie Harrison and a field organizer for the state party. If he was floored by getting passed over, he certainly didn’t plan to show it.
“I love Philadelphia,” he told the audience. “And I love being your governor!”
Shapiro is an astonishingly popular governor in a critical swing state. His ability to whip up a crowd, in full evidence Tuesday night, earned him the nickname “Baruch Obama.” And, like Harris, the governor is a former prosecutor: As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he prosecuted sex abuse in the Catholic church and won a $26 billion settlement from opioid manufacturers.
Despite his merits, Shapiro’s promotion out of Harrisburg became complicated in public when progressives noted his criticism of pro-Palestinian protests on colleges campuses across the commonwealth this spring.
Though his position was typical of the party establishment and came alongside denunciations of Israel’s current government, the campaign against Shapiro just wouldn’t let up.
A college-era letter-to-the-editor in Rochester’s student paper claiming Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to ever live in peace resurfaced in the Philadelphia Inquirer. So did the claim, in that same letter, that Shapiro volunteered in Israel’s army. The governor’s spokespeople now say that claim was false: In fact. he spent a summer fishing and farming on a kibbutz as “a service project. But no matter how adamantly Shapiro insisted he had changed in three decades, the criticisms kept coming — and threatened to reopen an intraparty rift over the Gaza war.
Harris’ campaign feared the governor’s ambitions could lead him to try and upstage their presidential nominee, POLITICO reported. Shapiro’s promotion of a Republican-inspired school voucher plan risked Democrats’ relationships with labor unions. And his tenure in state office hasn’t been scandal-free: As attorney general, he paid a former staffer $295,000 to close a sexual harassment case against an aide.
Still, when news of Walz’s selection broke, pundits and insiders alike pointed to the war as the main reason Shapiro remains in Harrisburg — and wondered if the old wound was unavoidable. Speaking minutes before the headliners at Liacouras, perhaps no one was better positioned to keep the crowd riding high.
When Shapiro dinged Vance at the midpoint of his address Tuesday, the crowd launched into a rather Trumpy-sounding chant: “He’s a weirdo!” they thundered as the governor grinned. “He’s a weirdo.” The moment, ironically, pointed to why Walz was in the running in the first place.
After Republicans nominated Vance in July to be vice president in a potential second Trump term, Walz took to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to sound off on the Ohio senator — who grew up in Kentucky before joining the Marines, graduating from Yale Law and making a fortune in Silicon Valley.
“These guys are just weird — it’s like they’re running for the He-Man Woman Haters’ Club or something,” Walz said.
The “weird” label stuck to Vance like well-chewed gum, just one in a series of brutal Vance-related memes that simply refuse to die. Walz, a former Army sergeant who taught high school geography and coordinated Mankato West Football’s defense before serving 12 years in Congress, became something of a liberal earworm on cable television — and a favorite of young progressives.
“I can’t wait to debate that guy,” Walz said. Then, another plunge into the Vance-ter-net, referencing a slice of social media disinformation not wholly fit to print: “If he’s willing to get off his couch and show up.”
Harris spent her early years on the national stage trying to will memes into the political zeitgeist ex nihilo, as a means of getting her message to the public.
The then-California senator’s exchanges with Trump appointees in congressional hearings often formed neat sound bites. Her 2020 campaign was briefly buoyed by a debate in which she denounced then-former vice president Joe Biden’s stance on busing. And Biden announced Harris as his running mate via a video of a phone call that was quickly posted to social media.
But the last four years have seen Harris — the daughter of two professors, the lifelong lawyer, the onetime California kid — produce accidental memes. And the naturally-occuring lines have lived far longer than the zingers that broke the internet in her Senate years.
Rallygoers sported tees emblazoned with the phrase, “Excuse me, I’m speaking,” from the moment a visibly-frustrated Harris rebuffed Mike Pence at a vice-presidential debate in 2020.
Buttons, stickers and Harris-themed banners blared their messages in misshapen sans serifs against puky lime-green backgrounds, rather than the official campaign’s own slapdash typography. (The text was a reference to Charli XCX, who in July became the first pop star to endorse Harris’ sudden presidential bid.)
And coconuts were everywhere — posterboard, apparel, attendees’ conversations — referencing a scold Harris relayed from her mother in a speech about education.
Even Harris’ laugh produced a late-campaign mantra, designed to turn her Bay-Area-meets-the-courtroom-meets-Washington awkwardness into an asset. “Ka-MALA,” read one such message. “MAKE AMERICA LAUGH AGAIN.”
When she and Walz finally took the stage, Harris, grinning ear to ear, still tried her hand at serving up vibes. As San Francisco’s district attorney, she prosecuted financial crimes, sexual abuse and general lawbreaking, she said.
“I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said.
The crowd, in an ironically-Trumpian “LOCK HIM UP” chorus, did the rest.
But many of the nitpicks of Harris’ speech and mannerisms often strike supporters and critics alike as dips from a darker well, one from which Trump’s allies have recently, repeatedly guzzled.
Vance has refused to back off a 2021 interview in which he called Harris one of a cabal of “childless cat ladies” making America miserable. So many House Republicans referred to her as a “DEI hire” that Speaker Mike Johnson stepped in and told them to cut it out in a congressional GOP strategy meeting.
And Trump, at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention, accused Harris, whose parents were respectively born in Jamaica and India, of having “all of a sudden turned Black” for political gain.
The attacks have galvanized Democrats and muddled Trump’s efforts to retool his message for an anti-Harris push. But they’ve also delayed the moment when Harris will have to personally answer for her camp’s attempt to transform her from an ardent progressive to a mainstream liberal.
In a pair of statements released to the press, the vice president’s representatives repudiated her support of a ban on fracking and said she no longer wished to decriminalize border crossings. The statements were designed to appeal to swing voters, setting Harris up for a general election campaign, but they also sowed uncertainty as to what she actually believes. With no sit-down interviews and no open press conferences, there’s no indication Harris intends to clear that fog, lest she alienate the ever-fractious anti-Trump coalition.
The former president, perhaps the most Internet-centered politician since Al Gore, brought his traveling roadshow to Liacouras in June — before Biden’s Apollo-grade bomb at the debate, before Trump’s near-demise in Butler, before Harris entered the race, before America locked in. His endless stream of quotables and controversies produce thousands-strong crowds and carnival atmospheres wherever he rallies supporters. But in North Philadelphia, in the campaign’s final dog days, the upper decks sat mostly bare for the bulk of Trump’s remarks — except for several Secret Service snipers, their presence taken for granted amid the hubbub of a visit from a former U.S. president.
That might as well have been a completely different election. The country’s attention had been switched out and refreshed, as if by battery. And winning this election has morphed into a wholly different mission than it was just two months ago.
Towards the end of his 20-minute remarks, Shapiro paraphrased an adage from Pirkei Avot, one of several midrashim forming the ideological sinews of rabbinical Judaism. The quote, referenced in Chapter 2, Mishna 17, has been a mainstay of the governor’s speeches and even interviews since at least 2017. Back then, Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, faced antisemitism and withering controversy while investigating sex abuse in the Catholic church.
But on Tuesday, the governor — both a curator of the zeitgeist and its prisoner — prefaced the recitation with a declaration. “I lean on my family, and I lean on my faith,” he said. “And I am very proud of my faith.” As he spoke, the crowd rose as one in a rip-roaring affirmation.
“I’m not here to preach at y’all,” Shapiro continued, “but my faith teaches me that no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it. Everyone has a responsibility to get off the sidelines, get in the game and do their part.”
Did Harris’ backers think she was up to the task of winning an election? Of governing, perhaps, at which point the good feelings would have no choice but to give way to substance?
“Absolutely,” replied attendee Josie Jones as supporters spilled out of The Liacouras Center and onto Broad Street. “We only have 90 days to go — and then it’s everyone’s responsibility to go out and vote in November.”
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