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Will the election calendar help Harris?

Published: 27 Aug. 2024, 20:09

KANG TAE-HWA
The author is a Washington correspondent of the JoongAng Ilbo.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has been officially nominated as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Although she is serving as vice president, she had little presence until President Joe Biden’s resignation. This is why attention was focused on her speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) last week, which was the first stage to promote her.

At the United Center in Chicago, where the DNC took place, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton spoke. Harris’s running mate Tim Walz had been a little-known politician, but his 15-minute speech in the form of an American football locker room pep talk signaled that a star was born.

Harris received the loudest cheers as she came on the stage at the finale. But the cheers I felt at the scene were not very long. Harris spent the first 13 minutes of her 38-minute speech talking about her mother and her childhood. Unlike previous speakers who received constant cheers, an awkward silence fell repeatedly. Then, she mentioned Trump 15 times in the remaining 25 minutes.

Simply put, it means that the governing party first introduced its presidential candidate to its party members with about 70 days left before the election, and the candidate declared a vision to oppose the candidate of the other party rather than presenting her own future vision. Notre Dame Professor Robert Schmuhl, a scholar of U.S. political history, said that Harris should have shown future leadership, not her own growth in the past. The professor also pointed out that Harris didn’t convince the voters about why she should be the commander in chief.

Harris had been the attorney general of the state of California. She has had a short political career, as she was elected vice president after four years in the Senate. She has been criticized for a lack of experiences in foreign policy and economy as vice president. Nevertheless, her Gallup rating has risen to 47 percent.

This is different from the assessment of Harris as a politician. In June 2023, an NBC poll showed a 32 percent rating for Vice President Harris, lower than Trump’s 41 percent.

A Democrat I met at the national convention said that Harris has to prove herself. But time is on her side. In early October — shortly after the first television debate on Sept. 9 — early voting would already be in progress. Therefore, even if Harris makes a mistake or a fault is found, there isn’t enough time for that to be reflected in the voting on Nov. 5.

His comment sounds realistic. That’s why Trump demands a quick verification of Harris’s qualifications as the U.S. president, claiming that Harris is not giving media interviews. Unfortunately, Korea is sensitive to American politics. It remains to be seen whether it will be Trump’s second term, which Korea already experienced, or Harris’s first term, which is not yet verified.