Hear what GOP strategist thought about Harris' speech

Let me start with a couple of things that I think she did. absolutely. Right. Or that are improving for her. First of all, the podium presence is really good. I didn't think much of her public speaking before, but since she's gotten into this race, she's only been behind a podium. And she did that well tonight. So from a plausibility perspective, what you expect to see out of a president, she absolutely did. It is a sea change what she was in 2020. It's a lot. Well, even what she has been during the Biden years, she's not been that steady on her feet. But behind the podium, off a prompter in a big speech, she obviously can do it. That's number one. Number two, as an image matter. She looks young, she looks coherent, she seem calm. So she's the anti Biden right? I mean that's that's what was the problem with the Democratic campaign. He was none of those three things. And now she puts that on. Now the Republican pushback. And I think there's some truth to this is that some of this is just substance less pablum, that there's really no specificity in it and that they ultimately think they are going to be able to fire her as the incumbent. And I think that's the question that we're really going to be answering over the next couple of months. How far can she run away from Joe Biden to prevent the Republicans from portraying her as the incumbent and then firing her as the incumbent? The country is off on the wrong track. People believe it. They still have economic anxiety. Can she shake off those vibes and replace them with this sort of esoteric unity vibe that they've been portraying at the convention? But I think, I think when you said that, last night, you were on very solid ground. I don't think today you're on solid ground. This was substantive all night long. That policy on immigration policy, on foreign policy policy, on on gun violence, on climate, on the economy, this you can this this was not all sizzle. This was sizzle plus real steak. And by the way, I think we both have to say the way she dealt with Israel and the way she dealt with Gaza. Tough in defense of of Israel, but also compared to the Palestinians, she you get their sizzle and their steak tonight. I agree with you on Israel. I thought that paragraph was good. The issue you didn't list in your bullets the economy and inflation. I still think at the end of the day, the people are so upset with Biden and Harris on the economy. If the Republicans tie her to it, all of the other stuff falls away because it's the most important issue. we heard things from her that we don't normally hear from a Democratic candidate in a speech like this. She talked about maintaining the strongest and most lethal fighting force in the world. and went on to say new about never disparaging their sacrifices. Obviously, reference to the many reports about what Donald Trump has said. Yeah. Look, but just even talking about the lethality of our fighting forces is language you don't normally hear, right? You know, this this was a very muscular speech. And look what the whole hallmark of the Trump candidacy when you lay it bare is he's strong. He's strong. And that was the advantage he had over Joe Biden. She was a she she showed strength on that stage tonight. And I think that she has cut his advantage there. She looked like a president on that stage. I also wanted to mention Ortiz point was so important to me, having done this for a while, but biography is really, really important because it's the way in which people take the measure of whether they can believe what you're saying and what the way she told the story of her own life and her own choices, gives people some confidence that the commitment she's making are, genuine, commitments. And then the last point I wanted to Scott, your point about, Biden and and the strategy, the Republicans, which I understand it to be reasonable strategy to try and saddle her with, with some of the negatives that, Biden has. It is really interesting how little she mentioned Joe Biden in this speech. In certain ways, this was her declaration of independence. I agree with that. And she became her own person in this speech. And, I've told you before, we'll see how this turns out. I think you're going to have a hard time, saddling her in a way that you guys are hopeful that you can. Well, she she still flies around on Air Force Two. I mean, but that's the race, and it's going to take place in a truncated period of time. Can she get away from him, or can Donald Trump and his campaign apparatus drive home the point that you that there's no blank slate here, that this is a person who's been right next to Joe Biden executing on the policies that you say have driven you crazy over the last four years. And there's really just a simple question for Trump to ask if you're upset about the direction of the country, maybe you don't put the people in charge who are already in the white House. I don't know who's going to win that race. But to me, between now and the debate on September 10th, that is the argument that's going to be had between these two juggernaut campaigns. I think that I think that Kamala Harris has done something. She's not just going to get away from Biden, which I think that she can do now. Penalty free, penalty free. And she she has this party behind her, but she's doing something. She's fixing some problems on the left. This whole this whole thing has been an implicit critique of problems that we've had on the left. The left, before we walked in here was about justice, diversity, trigger warnings, reparations for the past, and a bunch of party poopers and scold. That was the knock on the left. We have gone from talking about justice, which is wonderful, but now it's about freedom. It's not just about diversity, it's about patriotism. It's not just about trigger warnings. In fact, that's gone. It's tough, tough, tough reparations for the past. No fight for the future. Party pooper snow. We legalize fun. We legalize fun. it's. We put the party back in the Democratic Party. And so this is a a remodeling of the genetic makeup of what the progressive movement is. These guys want to fight not just Biden in the past. They want to fight this wall of Anti-Woke war against a left that just died in here. And something new just got born. The Kamala Harris Democrats are a different thing for you guys to fight. Different thing. I'm not sure the left is going to go down, is as easy as you think. But I agree with your chart. And I did want to pick up on one word that you wrote, and that's patriotism. Yes, sir. I do think that Republicans should pay attention to what happened in this hall tonight and the power of patriotism. It is a powerful thing. I made a snarky quip about it earlier, but what I what I was noticing was the American flags, the number of them everybody had won towards the end of the speech, they had large American flags. There is something very symbolic about a waving American flag the red, white and blue, especially when you consider what we've seen out of the left on the streets of America and on the campuses of America over the last several months. You didn't really pick that up in the hall. But there is a rebuke. There is something interesting about it. And it was powerful. Vice President Harris stuck almost completely to script. she spoke exactly on time, 37 minutes. And something that's very interesting about her presented her presentation. she obviously would be a trailblazing candidate. She would be the first woman president. She would be the first black president. who is a woman? She would be, the first, at least half Indian, president. She didn't mention any of that at all. I mean, I guess she believes that it speaks for itself. And that's not how she's running. She's running as a candidate for to represent all of the American people. Even those people, with whom she disagrees and who disagree with her just kind of kind of an interesting, fact that she, she really didn't know, noted at all. She talked about her, her mom facing discrimination, but but not her, and that it was so subtle. but that was the way that she sort of wove it in talking about. I just pulled up that part of her speech, talking about the way people would. She watched the way people would treat her mother. but, her mother just kind of said, move on and focus on other things. And I thought that that was her way of saying, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm focusing on what I'm here for, what I'm going to do, not who I am, whether that is her gender or her race and her ethnicity and that it was powerful and enough itself. Now this is a campaign where you have all of these everything that's been going on online for four weeks has been white guys for Kamala, you know, black men for Kamala, so on and so forth. So people have been kind of dividing up in order to prove that she has different demographic folks behind her. But when it comes to her and the historic nature of her candidacy, she just let it speak for itself, exactly as you said. And that is really interesting. I think it's also because she knows that that is not where she needs to grow. It's not where she needs to expand her support. The people in this room are the faithful. You know that black women don't need a whole lot of convincing. Maybe black men need a little bit more convincing than black women, but these are not the groups that need, to be convinced to vote for Kamala Harris. She was speaking today for a broader swath of the electorate. Who wants to understand whether she's prepared to be commander in chief. They want to undo experience and the skills, the values, all of that. and it felt to me like a speech that was written for them. And as somebody who's talked to her about her race and her gender and and her upbringing, she doesn't spend a lot of time on it. When you talk to her about it, she understands the role that it's played in how she's come up in the political world and in her, and how she understands the world. But she does not spend a lot of time talking about it. I think by this point, many people are familiar with her mother's saying, which is you may be the first, but don't let yourself be the last. And I think that it really is. The reason she repeats that so much is because she doesn't really want to focus as much on the first part of that, saying she wants to focus on the other part of it, which is about what comes after her and what she actually does with, with the power that she's been able to accumulate.