All eyes are on Harris at the DNC tonight: NPR

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Tonight, Vice President Kamala Harris will try to convince the nation that she is ready to be president. After more than three years as deputy, there are questions about what Harris would do as commander in chief. And when she formally accepts the nomination in Chicago tonight, she’ll have a chance to answer some of those questions. NPR’s White House correspondent Asma Khalid is here with me at the United Center. Hello, Asthma.

ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Hey. It’s nice to be with you.

SHAPIRO: So tonight, Harris will have a lot of eyes on her, probably more than she’s ever had before. What do you know about what he has to say?

KHALID: Well, she’ll have a chance to introduce herself, and she’ll talk about growing up as the daughter of a single mother in a middle-class neighborhood. She will also talk about how and why she became a prosecutor, and then try to offer a contrast with the vision of the country of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate. You know, his campaign, I would say, in the last month, has really become a shift in a way that, frankly, President Biden, when he was in office, was not.

SHAPIRO: In the last month or so, you’ve been covering the Harris campaign as she’s brought in huge crowds and energized the Democratic Party. But you covered it long ago. So tell us more about where this Kamala Harris was before.

KHALID: I spoke with the expert, I would say, about the vice-presidency. His name is Joel Goldstein. And he said that the most recent vice presidents who ran for the top job—say, like Al Gore or George HW Bush—were two-term vice presidents. And that meant they spent the first few years just getting their sea legs, and then later they could position themselves to build a presidential campaign. But he would make the argument to me — Joel Goldstein — to me that because of the ambiguity about whether Biden would, in fact, be a one-term president, he says that there was this kind of unusual, laser-like focus, on Harris from day one. . And he says it’s a little remarkable, in his opinion, to see how she was able to quickly change gears now.

JOEL GOLDSTEIN: The sitting vice presidents who came before her in modern times have all, it seemed to me, had more trouble going from being No. 2 to No. 1 than she has.

KHALID: And, Ari, to understand how Kamala Harris made this pivot, you have to go back in time, and I want to go through that.

SHAPIRO: All right.

KHALID: Before Harris was vice president, he was usually the main decision maker, either as attorney general or as district attorney. And in the Senate, she became a star for her tough questioning during the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But that style had to change when he got to the White House. I talked to Terrance Woodbury about it. He is a Democratic pollster who has now joined the Harris campaign.

TERRANCE WOODBURY: I think people expected him to maintain that bully pulpit that he had in the Senate, and that’s not just the role of the vice president.

KHALID: Frankly, Harris has had a rough start as vice president, and President Biden has given him a complicated initial mission – figure out how to deter so many people from coming to the southern border of the United States. He traveled to Mexico City and Guatemala, where this interview with NBC’s Lester Holt shed light on his work on the issue.

(ARCHIVED REGISTRATION SOUND)

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: We’ve been to the border.

LESTER HOLT: You haven’t been to the border.

HARRIS: And I haven’t been to Europe. And, I mean, I don’t understand the point you’re making. I’m not arguing…

KHALID: Early on, Harris often seemed stilted and uncomfortable in the spotlight. She was the first woman in the job, with a mother from India and a father from Jamaica. And her supporters point out that there aren’t many examples of women like her in leadership positions. There has never been a black woman, for example, as governor.

RACHEL PALERMO: There was a magnifying glass on her from the moment she joined the ticket.

KHALID: Rachel Palermo worked for Harris for almost three years.

PALERMO: Working for her, I always felt like she had to overperform to get an average review.

KHALID: And Harris’ approval ratings, like Biden’s, were underwater. Democrats wondered why they hadn’t seen more of her. They didn’t know what she was doing in this job. But behind the scenes, Harris was putting his stamp on politics in subtle ways. Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, credits the vice president for spotting the racial disparity in the COVID response.

JEFF ZIENTS: It pushed us to have a response that really met people where they were, setting up community health centers, mobilizing a corps of community volunteers for COVID. It was one of his original ideas that ended up making a big difference.

KHALID: The job of vice president, by definition, is to be the hype person, not the person who takes the credit. But staffers say Harris has been key in pushing specific priorities. Ike Irby is a senior adviser on policy issues for Harris.

IKE IRBY: As we were building the initial proposal for the infrastructure, the vice president said we needed to make sure lead pipes were included. She made sure she could point to the legislation she wrote as a senator as a way to know how you can do this.

KHALID: But the major turning point for Harris was the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling in 2022. Suddenly, he had a clear public mission. Here’s Harris the day after the decision was leaked.

(ARCHIVED REGISTRATION SOUND)

HARRIS: How dare they tell a woman what she can and can’t do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to prevent them from determining their own future?

KHALID: The vice president was on his way to an event on maternal health when he learned that Roe had been struck down. Aides told me she read the majority opinion line by line in the car, then rewrote her entire speech. Biden, a devout Catholic, has struggled to talk about abortion. Harris did not.

MINI TIMMARAJU: He has been the most critical voice on the most galvanizing issue for Democrats in the last two years.

KHALID: It’s Mini Timmaraju. Leads the Reproductive Freedom for All group.

TIMMARAJU: He is not only the main spokesperson. He was the person driving the strategy.

KHALID: And for Harris, the strategy has been to tie Trump directly to the overturning of Roe v. It’s a message she’s been delivering for months, and it’s become a central pillar of her campaign. Here he was in Milwaukee Tuesday night.

(ARCHIVED REGISTRATION SOUND)

HARRIS: Former President Trump chose three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intent — with the intent that they would overturn the protections of Roe v. And as he had intended, they did.

SHAPIRO: This is a report from NPR’s Asma Khalid, who is still here with us. And Asma, for all you’ve said, there’s still this hunger to understand what Harris would actually do if he wins the presidency. Are we going to get answers tonight?

KHALID: I don’t know how many clear answers you’re going to get – right? – on policy prescriptions. But I want to point out that the kind of consistent plot that we hear from his campaign is this general message about freedom, trying to win back the vision of freedom and which party is really the party of freedom. And this is something that I happened to talk about for a couple of years. I first heard him talk about it when the Supreme Court defeated Roe v. Wade. It’s a message she’s been delivering for a while. It’s not something he broke through when he was vice president. But it’s starting to, I think, Ari, become much more of the mainstream message from the Democrats.

Tonight, you know, it’s going to be a friendly crowd of enthusiastic Democrats. But to your point, Ari, on some sort of policy prescriptions, I think next week, he’s going to have more tests. For example, he will have, you know, pressure to articulate what his own foreign policy vision would be as a potential commander-in-chief. And then, of course, there is the debate against Donald Trump on September 10.

SHAPIRO: Asma Khalid, NPR White House Correspondent. Thank you.

KHALID: It’s nice to talk to you.

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