How Kamala Prepares for Her Biggest Speech – 08/22/2024 – The World

Kamala Harris often relies on one of her favorite quotes to focus her team before starting an important project: “What are we trying to accomplish here?”

When deciding what to say in the most important speech of her life on Thursday (22), the vice president’s response was threefold, advisers said: tell her life story, frame her dispute with former President Donald Trump as a battle between the future and the past and reclaim the banner of patriotism for the Democratic ticket.

Kamala took her convention speech so seriously that she did full rehearsals using teleprompters in three different time zones.

Shortly after she ran for president a month ago, she told aides that she viewed that speech and the debates as the most important moments of her abbreviated campaign, according to three people familiar with her thinking.

The first draft of her speeches for a future convention was already circulating when Kamala was still just vice president seeking a second term as President Joe Biden’s number two.

Now the reworked speech will mark Kamala’s biggest turn on the national stage since her sudden rise to the top of the Democratic Party as she prepares to face Trump in the election 75 days from now.

Adam Frankel, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and now an adviser to Kamala, is primarily responsible for the candidate’s speech, taking suggestions and input from a wide range of others. But the vice president herself has worked on the speech almost line by line, according to two people familiar with the preparations.

The training and discussion sessions she conducted this week included teleprompters in Chicago at the Park Hyatt, at Howard University in Washington and in Arizona during her first campaign trip to a swing state, when some aides stayed with her at a hotel in downtown Phoenix.

The first of the speech’s three themes, according to campaign officials who were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the speech, is to tell his life story.

Kamala is expected to describe her middle-class upbringing, framing it as something that has given her a better understanding of the needs and struggles of today’s middle class. She is also expected to tell voters about her career before the vice presidency: her early work as a prosecutor and then as California’s attorney general.

The second goal is to frame the race as a contest between the future and the past, contrasting his promise to protect freedoms with darker warnings about Trump’s agenda and Project 2025, which Democrats have turned into a public cause for concern.

The third is an appeal to patriotism. The party has been handing out “USA” signs to delegates all week. Kamala must present herself as a president for all Americans.

“We love this country,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala’s running mate, said in his speech Wednesday.

Kamala’s relatively humble roots were a recurring theme throughout the conference, with speaker after speaker pointing to her McDonald’s beginnings in contrast to Trump’s inherited wealth in New York.

“We have an opportunity to elect a middle-class president because she is middle-class,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in her speech Monday.

It is worth noting that the only major policy area where Kamala has launched her own agenda separate from Biden’s so far is the economy, focusing on core issues like housing and grocery costs.

“She’s thinking about how to speak to the American people so they know she understands what they’re going through,” her adviser Cedric Richmond said of the speech. “She cares about what they’re going through, she wants to provide a solution to what they’re going through, and she’s going to do everything she can to do that.”

Just weeks into her candidacy, Kamala has already coined some catchphrases that have won her supporters over. They applaud “We’re Not Going Back” and look forward to her joke linking her past as a prosecutor to Trump: “I know his type.” But this time, Kamala has to consider a broader electorate, including independents and moderate Republicans.

The vice president is balancing presenting herself as the country’s new leader with being part of the current government. He is also seeking to combat the portrayal of Trump’s campaign as “dangerously liberal.” As a result, he has moved away from several of the more progressive positions he took during his 2020 presidential run.