Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaks during
the third day of the Democratic National Convention, being held
virtually amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, at the Chase Center
in Wilmington, Delaware on August 19, 2020.Olivier DOULIERY /
AFP
Kamala Harris made history Wednesday when she accepted
the Democratic nomination for vice president, while joining Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton to condemn President Donald Trump’s
profound “failure” as a leader.
Harris, the first black woman on a major party’s White House
ticket, accused Trump of turning “our tragedies into political
weapons.” And she urged Americans to vote for Joe Biden, “a
president who will bring all of us together.”
“Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives and
livelihoods,” the former California prosecutor charged in her
acceptance speech.
“We’re at an inflection point.”
Biden, who faces Trump on November 3, is due to give his own
acceptance speech on Thursday, closing a Democratic convention held
wholly online and on television due to coronavirus safety
precautions.
Shortly before Harris spoke, America’s first black president,
Barack Obama, delivered his own condemnation of Trump — and appeal
for Biden’s election.
Obama said that on handing over the White House to Trump in
2017, he thought the Republican “might show some interest in taking
the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the
office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been
placed in his care.”
“But he never did,” Obama said.
As a result, Trump has left America’s “worst impulses unleashed,
our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our
democratic institutions threatened like never before,” Obama
said.
Trump responded by telling reporters that Obama had been “a
terrible president.”
Leave nothing to chance
Former first lady and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who
narrowly lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump, pleaded with
voters to take nothing for granted in another tight contest.
“This can’t be another woulda-coulda-should a election,” she
said.
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Others on the night’s program included Massachusetts Senator
Elizabeth Warren, who unsuccessfully challenged Biden for the
nomination, and Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of
Representatives.
19, 2020 from the online broadcast of the Democratic National
Convention, being held virtually amid the novel coronavirus
pandemic, shows former Secretary of State and former First Lady
Hillary Clinton speaking during the third day of the
convention.DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION / AFP
Former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who has become
a gun control advocate after being shot and severely wounded in a
2011 assassination attempt, also spoke, along with Emma Gonzalez, a
survivor of the Parkland school shooting.
Young activists addressed the dangers of climate change and
Hispanic immigrants made highly emotional critiques of Trump’s
policies that they said had torn apart their families.
Much focus was on Obama, who remains a giant force in the
Democratic establishment.
Although he took a back seat during the Democratic primaries, he
is now campaigning hard for Biden.
“Tonight, I am asking you to believe in Joe and Kamala’s ability
to lead this country out of dark times and build it back better,”
he said in his speech.
Trump’s ‘storm center’
Obama spoke two days after his wife, Michelle Obama, opened the
convention with a scathing takedown of Trump as “the wrong
president for our country.”
“He cannot meet this moment,” she said.
Tuesday’s lineup featured two other former presidents —
95-year-old Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, 74, who called the Trump
White House “a storm center.”
18, 2020 from the online broadcast of the Democratic National
Convention, being held virtually amid the novel coronavirus
pandemic, shows former US President Bill Clinton speaking during
the second day of the convention. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION /
AFP
Biden, 77, the former Delaware senator who served as Obama’s
vice president for eight years, was officially nominated on
Tuesday.
Harris, the California senator whom Biden picked to be his vice
president, will speak live from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden’s
hometown and campaign headquarters.
The nomination is the latest in a lifetime of firsts for the
55-year-old daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother who
were immigrants to the United States.
Harris was the first black attorney general of California, the
first woman to hold the post, and the first woman of South Asian
heritage to be elected to the US Senate.
The Republican Party is to hold its virtual convention next week
and nominate Trump to serve four more years.
Trump has chosen the White House South Lawn as the location for
his acceptance speech — a controversial decision given that
presidents are legally required to separate their campaigning from
taxpayer-funded governing.
AFP
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