DNC Day 3 Live Updates: Walz’s Pep Talk Is A Hit

The third night of the Democratic National Convention was the night that the party made its most naked play for the kind of moderate voters who will decide the election. After two nights in which the party spent most of its energy attacking Donald Trump, night three pivoted to discussions of border security, support for the police–especially for the police defending The Capitol from the attack from Trump supporters on January 6–and speeches from celebrities thought to be above politics like Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, and Mindy Kaling

This was the night that saw not just Bill Clinton, still the party’s best emissary to the working class and rural voters who have increasingly left the party, deliver a stemwinder of a speech, but the night that Tim Walz introduced himself to the American people by bringing out members of the high school football team he used to coach on stage, and speaking of his own fondness for hunting and eating meat. Even Pete Buttigieg made an appearance, introducing himself by saying, “You may know me from Fox News.”

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota managed to fire up the crowd even at this late hour. Preceded by the football players he’d once coached – an all-American image if there ever was one – Walz quickly took a shot at Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance by pointing out that none of his high school classmates in tiny Butte, Nebraska had gone to Yale. He leaned into his National Guard service, flouting GOP attacks in the process, and praised the social safety net. In doing so he played a theme that’s now common to his speeches: a conviction in the power of the common good.

Walz didn’t shrink from liberalism on stage, either, as he touted a record that included paid leave and free meals in Minnesota public schools.Walz is a natural speaker, but he didn’t necessarily say anything new tonight, which seems a little risky. What he’s doing is working for now, but at some point he’s going to need fresh material. At the same time, it remains powerful to hear a male politician talk about his family’s fertility struggles on such a public stage, and it was touching to see that family react so enthusiastically to his speech. Though vice presidential speeches aren’t usually memorable, as a rule, it’s clear the crowd loves Walz, who seems to be making liberalism relatable again.

Outside of one entrance to the United Center, about a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters sat on the ground, saying they will not leave until a Palestinian American is allowed to speak from the convention stage. As soon as I get a call saying they will support a Palestinian American speaker from stage, I will go home,” said Abbas Alawieh, an Uncommitted delegate from Michigan. “I just intend to stay here until I get a call from the DNC telling me that they won’t suppress the voices of Palestinian children, that they will accept our very humble request.”

Earlier this evening, the parents of an Israeli-American hostage held by Hamas in Gaza were granted a speaking slot.The sit-in comes after smaller-than-expected protests over Gaza have popped up around the convention. Chicago police said they arrested at least 55 people, including three journalists, during a protest at the Israeli consulate on Tuesday. So far the demonstrations are far short of the sort of widespread protests promised for the convention.

Photo: Rebecca Traister

It is 11:15 on the East Coast and Tim Walz has yet to speak yet. The pattern of the Democratic National Convention so far is for the program to run late into the night, well past the time many people on the Eastern Time Zone (which includes states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia) are awake.

The question is how much that actually matters these days. Infamously, George McGovern’s 1972 campaign was hampered when a floor fight meant that he couldn’t deliver his acceptance speech until 3AM in Miami Beach, well past when anyone was watching.

But in the 21st century, voters can watch YouTube clips of speeches at any time rather than having to wait until the evening news. It’s still ideal for everything to be wrapped up in time for the 11 PM news on the coast. It’s just not a potential catastrophe anymore.

A couple of possibly controversial takes on John Legend’s cover of Let’s Go Crazy there. 1) No one should try to cover Prince in the style of Prince. You’re only going to remind the world that no one can be Prince better than Prince was. 2) If you were going to pay tribute to cryptic, semi-reclusive Minnesota geniuses, was Hibbing’s Robert Zimmerman not available for this event?

Pete Buttigieg has been billed as speaking at the DNC tonight as one of the people Kamala Harris was considering to be her running mate. But it’s actually more interesting that he was one of her rivals in 2020 (as was Amy Klobuchar, who is up next). Buttigieg ran a very good campaign, but lost because he could never make a connection with the Black voters who played so key a role in the nomination contest. So it’s a nice turnabout that he’s now helping a Black Woman ascend to the presidency, and is being cheered by the kind of racially diverse audience he had trouble mustering four years ago. His presence is also a reminder that this is a pretty young party, which was for so long disguised by Joe Biden’s presence. He’s only 42.

You might think the organizers are pretty worried about scheduling right now, and they may be — once again this program is running pretty far behind schedule and maybe they’ll be forced to cut some speakers. They really do want to introduce Tim Walz, who remains mostly unknown to a ton of voters, to a big audience. BUT…they just got Oprah, a massive celebrity with a serious ability to capture an audience, to make a boisterous case for the ticket, and against Trump, to undecideds and independents just as we’re probably at peak viewership. They’ll take it.

Bill Clinton is famous to winging it and giving speeches extemporaneously–he once gave a State of the Union address extemporaneously when a technician loaded the wrong text into the teleprompter–but its fair to question whether he still has the rhetorical mastery to improvise, as he largely did tonight. He started off by ad-libbing his first sentence and although he returned to the prepared text here and there, he seemed to be just making it up as he went along at points. At one point he said he had been coming to conventions since 1976, then corrected himself and said 1972. (He worked on Governor George McGovern’s campaign that year.) “Lord I’m gettin’ old,” Clinton said. The crowd in the hall seemed to find it endearing. After all, as I noted in my piece on Clinton’s DNC speaking career today, he’s probably the party’s most important living link to the 20th Century. Whether or not it was effective political messaging, or a good use of the party’s precious network airtime, is another matter, as my colleague Jonathan Chait says. Still, there are a lot of Baby Boomer voters out there, and maybe it was worthwhile to remind them of the good ol’ days of the Democratic Party, in the 1990s.

Perhaps the biggest reception so far tonight for a speaker coming out is Oprah Winfrey. It’s not that the crowd wasn’t loud for Bill Clinton or didn’t give resounding applause to Josh Shapiro. But this is the first time all night attendees have seemed awestruck. Delegates are frantically waving at her for attention and generally giving her the reception of an A list celebrity, not just a politician.

The Republicans put a professional wrestler on in prime time. The Democrats sent a poet. And I have to say, from a political standpoint, the Republican play from probably smarter.

I’ve watched (in person or on TV) every Democratic convention since LBJ’s highly orchestrated reelection clambake in Atlantic City in 1964. That’s 16 conventions, believe it or not. And I haven’t lost my memory just yet; I can tell you all sorts of granular details about each and every one of those presidential elections. But I couldn’t recite a single line from a Democratic vice presidential acceptance speech in all that time.

It’s not like the people making these forgotten speeches were undistinguished. Some, like Hubert Humphrey in 1968, were famously brilliant orators. Others, like Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, shattered all precedents. Quite a few, like Humphrey, Fritz Mondale, Al Gore, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, were future presidential nominees. They weren’t chopped liver.

But there’s something about the veep acceptance speech–perhaps its placement in the convention between big keynotes and bigger presidential acceptance speeches; and the prime objective of every running mate to never, ever upstage the boss–that makes memorable oratory unlikely. Whatever the reason, when expectations of Tim Walz’s speech tonight are weighed, I’d say that if he says a thing anyone remembers a year from now it will be remarkable, and will almost certainly mean his ticket won.

Democrats have run wildly over time for three straight nights. They’ve misused the time window the networks give them to deliver their message straight to voters. One reason is that they seem unable to deny speaking requests to figures who have cache within the party, regardless of whether they are the best messengers for their party now. This is a version of the problem that prevented them from getting Joe Biden out of the race until July. The ethos should be: it’s not about feelings, it’s about winning.

The reception for Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention has been very different. The roar for Hillary Clinton on Monday night was cathartic. Eight years after she lost the presidential election to Donald Trump despite winning nearly three million more voters, Clinton was received by a crowd of Democratic regulars that treated her as a returning hero. The spontaneous cheering from the crowd lasted for minutes and attendees found a strange relief when a sudden chant of “Lock Him Up” broke out on the floor — a clear rebuke to Trump’s ongoing campaign to cast Hillary Clinton into prison.

The reception for Bill Clinton was far more solemn and restrained. The former president has been out of office for nearly two and half decades—there are delegates who had not been born when he left. It was still warm —many spent long minutes standing even after Bill Clinton began speaking—and he got repeated standing ovations as he riffed freely off the remarks loaded in the teleprompter. But it was clearly an entirely different mood on the floor

As Andrew Rice pointed out earlier today, Bill Clinton has been speaking at Democratic conventions since 1980, when he was a youthful–and believe it or not, kinda red-headed–governor from Arkansas. He was for years a voice of revitalization for a very old and tired Democratic Party and a font of energy. Tonight he has obviously aged, and seems frail. But he was a smart enough politician to turn his own antiquity into a barb with which to jab Donald Trump, pointing out he’s still younger than Trump. I am quite sure Bill Clinton has a pretty healthy ego, but it’s fitting he doesn’t mind pointing to the vigor he has lost to question the fitness of the party’s opponent, the man who thought he could benefit from the “age issue” in 2024.

It took approximately 30 seconds for Bill Clinton to stray from his prepared remarks, as he praised Joe Biden for stepping aside extensively. Probably a headache for the convention organizers, who know as well as anyone that (a) they really need to stick to the script after a long, long first night of programming and (b) Bill Clinton loves to talk. His prepared speech isn’t too long, but he’s famous for giving epic-length convention speeches. So settle in. Maybe.

On Tuesday night, Barack Obama compared Donald Trump to a neighbor who keeps his leaf blower on all day. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in a hip-hop reference-heavy speech that fired up the crowd, made a different analogy.

Democrats carved out a significant portion of Wednesday evening to focus on the January 6 Capitol riots. First, they showed a video that featured disturbing-all-over-again footage of the fateful day, and which documented Trump’s incitement to violence and indifference to stopping it — as well as the reality that Trump’s legal comeuppance depends on him losing in November.

Then, former January 6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson took the stage, followed by former Capitol police officer who was assaulted on January 6.

One of the sub-themes in tonight’s DNC segment on immigration and the border is to remind voters that there are some undocumented Americans who are unquestionably smeared by Trump’s description of non-citizens are criminals and terrorists and illegal voters. One video segment featured “Dreamers,” immigrants brought into the country illegally as children who have since lived exemplary lives. During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama announced the so-called DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program giving assurances against deportation for selected Dreamers, in part to preempt a similar proposal from his Republican opponent Mitt Romney. Even after Donald Trump became president, Dreamers were frequently praised by pols from both parties, and Trump himself periodically offered protections for them in exchange for border wall funding.

Now that’s all changed. Trump and his party now favor deportation of all undocumented immigrants in the most massive sweep in U.S. history. That includes Dreamers. So Democrats want to remind people how radical and heartless that position is.

Tonight’s DNC appearance by former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan ends quite the journey for this longtime Republican pol. Before 2020, he was a standard-brand conservative Republican who had risen from the state legislature to the second-highest position in Georgia government. He probably anticipated stepping up to the big job when Governor Brian Kemp (like Duncan, first elected in 2018) was term-limited in 2026. Then the 2020 presidential election happened, and like Kemp and Secretary of State Brian Raffensperger, Duncan supported the certification of Joe Biden’s narrow presidential win in Georgia, and spoke out against Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.

But when Donald Trump announced he would launch a purge of disloyal Georgia Republicans in 2022, Duncan chose to fold his reelection campaign, even as Kemp and Raffensperger trounced their Trump-surrogate opponents in the primary and went on to comfortable reelections. At that point Duncan looked a bit foolish and feckless.

But fast-forward to 2024, and it’s Kemp and Raffensperger that look a mite foolish and feckless, The national GOP is fully back in Trump’s hands, and they are in a position of great power in Georgia, where MAGA folk control the State Election Board (from which Raffensperger was ejected by the Republican-controlled state legislature). There is every indication Trump is preparing to foment havoc when votes are counted in the Peach State in November. Kemp has grudgingly said he’ll vote for Trump (Raffensperger won’t answer the question about his voting intentions), even as Trump comes to Georgia and harshly attacks both these leaders of the state GOP. The next 75 days — and perhaps beyond if the worst happens and there is another election coup attempt by Team Trump — will be excruciating for these decidedly anti-Trump Republicans.

But you know who’s feeling pretty good now? Geoff Duncan, who followed not just his heart in 2020, but his head in 2024. He followed the logic of his earlier position not by dodging reporters and making excuses, but by endorsing Kamala Harris. And while Kemp and Raffensperger dodged the RNC, Duncan will speak at the DNC tonight. If Trump loses and the GOP turns in a different direction, perhaps he can return to his old party with his head held high.

The parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American-Israeli kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, received a warm and emotional welcome at the convention, with the crowd chanting “Bring Them Home.” They detailed their agony over the last several months, and called for a ceasefire deal that frees all hostages and “ends the suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza.” Reaching that deal “is not a political issue,” Jonathan Polin said. “It is a humanitarian issue.” Their full remarks below:

Peter Doocy, the Fox News White House correspondent who made his reputation tussling with Joe Biden isn’t immune from the Democratic vibe shift in Chicago. He acknowledged the power of Barack and Michelle Obama’s back-to-back speeches when I interviewed him earlier today.

“It was powerful,” says Doocy, opening the door to the United Center. “I’m surprised that now that everybody in the world has a platform to put stuff out on social media, nobody can speak like that.” For “two people who are essentially retired from politics, they had such a command of this crowd.”

Update:

In July, anti-war protesters released maggots in the Watergate Hotel, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was staying at the time. They may have been up to similar tricks on Wednesday at Chicago’s Fairmont Hotel on Wednesday morning. The Wall Street Journal reports on the details — though it’s still not clear if anyone ingested any insects:

Fairmont Chicago spokeswoman Haley Robles confirmed that several people disrupted a convention-related breakfast on Wednesday morning.

Convention organizers told a local news station that “multiple unknown female offenders” had entered the hotel “and began placing unknown objects onto tables containing food.” WGN in Chicago reported that the objects may have been maggots.

“Our team acted immediately to clean and sanitize the area, ensuring that the event could continue without further incident,” Robles said in a statement. “We maintain the highest standards of food safety and cleanliness throughout our property and have strict protocols in place to handle any disruptions.”

Delegates from Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and South Dakota are staying at the hotel, according to convention officials.

For about a week now, Bill Clinton has been previewed as one of tonight’s headliners, along with Tim Walz. And for good reason: he’s spoken at approximately 7 million conventions, and often to great effect! But tonight’s schedule just came out, and he’s not exactly in the heart of prime time. Instead, WJC, who just turned 78, is in the 8:00 (local) hour, speaking between Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi. Seems clear the organizers aren’t expecting this speech to be a blockbuster. All eyes instead will be on Walz.

Scheduling has not been the DNC’s strong suit so far this week. On Monday, President Biden didn’t take the stage for his farewell convention speech until 11:28 p.m. After party bigwigs urged Tuesday’s speakers to keep things shorter, things went more smoothly — though Barack Obama, the evening’s final act, didn’t begin until 11:03 p.m. (This did not seem to affect ratings much.)

Whether Wednesday will go late probably depends on how many speakers Democrats will try to cram in before the night’s headliner, Tim Walz. But while we know that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, former president Bill Clinton, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are on the agenda tonight, there was no official schedule of events as of early evening. Perhaps some discreet cuts are being made behind the scenes. Or perhaps there’s a surprise in the works?

An RFK Jr. campaign RV just drove by the restaurant where I was eating lunch blasting The Safety Dance by the ‘80s Australian band Men Without Hats. A pair of bearded fellows were tossing copies of this newspaper out the window. Lead headline: “Kennedy is Weirdo.” While I can’t say I agree with much of RFK’s platform I do respect the Kennedy campaign’s commitment to the print medium. But I guess, like print itself, the campaign is not likely to be with us much longer. Enjoy this artifact!

Photo: Andrew Rice

We are at the point of the week where attendees of major-party conventions (I’ve been to seven of them) begin to hit a wall. Delegates, convention workers, media types and guests have by now adjusted to the venue, the security lines, the reliable places to find food and drink and quiet. Most have made contact with old acquaintances and gotten obligatory work assignments out of the way. But for the more peripatetic of attendees, a third day of breakfast meetings and caucus gatherings and delegation briefings and late-night parties–not to mention the long business sessions–will begin to take a toll. Between the high of the Obama speeches on Day 2 and the ultimate high of Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech, along with the ballon drop and all the other traditional foolishness on the final day, tonight’s relatively low-key business session may find the people in the arena a bit hard to energize. Democrats really do love Tim Walz, so maybe he can rouse them to an appropriate level of excitement. But I wouldn’t want to be someone on the agenda for earlier in the evening.

Ben Jacobs reports on a peculiar Convention party in Chicago:

Content creators and influencers gathered in a warehouse about halfway between the United Center and the heart of downtown where they danced under flashing GIFs of Kamala Harris dancing. Arrayed all around were memes about the Democratic ticket, all focused on abortion rights: free condoms emblazoned with messages like “Fuck Project 2025,” signs with slogans like “Trump Vance Sex Ends” and “Tim Waltz Got Me Laid.”

In a nod to Tim Walz’s famous attack line on Republicans, there was a “a Wall of Weirdos” including villains like Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Amy Coney Barrett, Larry Kudlow and Kimberly Guilfoyle, intermingled with anti-abortion quotes from various Republicans. Another wall featured progressive heroes that included what seemed to be AI generated images of Harris, Walz, Ariana Grande, Nancy Pelosi, and Jason Kelce. In case none of this was appealing, there were also skee ball machines and the opportunity to play “Feminist Mini Golf.”

Nobody is more associated with modern Democratic National Conventions than the former president, as Andrew Rice explains in his rundown of Clinton’s many appearances over the years:

Bill Clinton at the DNC” is one of those phrases that evokes a body of performative work, like “Springsteen at the Garden” or “Tiger at the Masters.” When he steps on the stage this Wednesday, it will be the 12th time that Clinton has addressed a Democratic convention. He made his debut in 1980, when he was just 33 and the nation’s youngest governor. He comes to Chicago this year as the embodiment of his party’s history. At his 1992 convention, Clinton harkened back to the election of 1960 and “John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship.” The same gap in time, 32 years, separates that 1992 speech and this one. Imagine if JFK had lived to give Clinton his endorsement; that is the role Clinton will be playing for Kamala Harris in 2024.

Fears that Chicago would be engulfed by Gaza-related protests during the Democratic National Convention have so far not come to fruition. But Axios reports that demonstrators have been disrupting some events, including one in grotesque fashion.

Several women senators attended a luncheon at Avli on the Park Wednesday afternoon, before CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin and co-director Danaka Katovich interrupted the event, chanting “there is no majority for Israel.”

Other reports include a disruption at the Indiana state delegation breakfast, where delegates allegedly were targeted and the FBI is investigating whether protesters deliberately put bugs — potentially crickets or maggots — in the delegation’s food.

Also, protesters bum-rushed the Axios Chicago event stage at RPM Events on Tuesday evening.

Probably not.

A suspension of Kennedy’s campaign might marginally help Trump against Kamala Harris. Recent polling shows Harris doing better in polls when non-major-party candidates are included. This is pretty logical, insofar as RFK Jr. was initially drawing support from a lot of the Democratic-leaning segments of the electorate (notably young and Latino voters) that appear to be returning to the Democratic column now that Harris is the nominee rather than Joe Biden.

On the other hand, Kennedy’s support has been dropping fast; he’s at 4.9 percent nationally in the FiveThirtyEight polling averages, after hitting over 10 percent as recently as late May. He is also only on the ballot in three of the seven key battleground states (Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina). Meanwhile, Harris is now steadily leading Trump nationally in head-to-head races without Kennedy or others (by 2.9 percent per FiveThirtyEight), and all seven battleground states are very close. So while a Kennedy withdrawal might worry Democrats a bit, it shouldn’t really change the dynamics of the major-party contest other than on the very margins.

We are beginning to hear leading Democrats warn each other that the euphoria surrounding the first few weeks of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign may not last forever. The Obamas were clear about that last night, with President Obama saying: “For all the incredible energy we’ve been able to generate over the last few weeks, for all the rallies and the memes, this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.” And Michelle Obama went further, implicitly calling out Democrats for a tendency to indulge in a “Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right…indulg[ing] our anxieties about whether this country will elect someone like Kamala instead of doing everything we can to get someone like Kamala elected.”

I don’t know whether this is the product of private polling showing the Kamala boom may be cooling off, or an anticipation of a bounceless convention (most recent ones have not affected polling much, and Harris has already received a large bounce since becoming the nominee). It may be something so simple as an acknowledgement of political gravity, or of the absolute certainty that pundits and activists alike will question Harris’s strategy and message at some point. But it was an appropriately sober note in the midst of two very upbeat speeches.

Democrats’ worries about RFK Jr. had receded in recent weeks, with the third-party candidate and dead-bear prankster falling in the polls, and proof emerging that he was damaging Donald Trump more than Kamala Harris. But on Wednesday, RFK Jr.’s campaign announced that he would speak in Arizona “about the present historical moment and his path forward.” ABC News reported that RFK Jr. would drop out of the race, and the Washington Post reported that he is strongly considering endorsing Donald Trump:

Kennedy has continued to talk privately with former president Donald Trump since the Republican convention, with multiple phone conversations and at least one in-person meeting, according to a person close to Trump. Kennedy has expressed that he has talked to his immediate family about the prospect of an endorsement. Another person familiar with the conversations says Kennedy has indicated to the Trump team that he plans to endorse Trump.

The impact of such a move is unclear, and may be slight. But it is unlikely to redound to Harris’s benefit.

Democrats are not exactly nervous about the fall, but they are asking how long the good times can roll.

“This is all great, but this isn’t the election,” says Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic member of Congress from South Florida. “What we are seeing in the polls is just what the vice-president said — she is the underdog. And we have to run like we are the underdog.”Among the pitfalls ahead: Democratic base voters, especially young Black and Latino men, still do not support the Harris-Walz ticket to the degree they supported Biden in 2020, even as she has vastly improved on Biden’s 2024 numbers in the swing states, according to a recent USA Today poll. Conversely, Harris is running surprisingly strong among older white voters without college degrees, as did Biden, but there is concern that these are the likeliest to return to the Trump fold as the campaign wears on.

There are plenty of opinions floating around today about the quality and purpose of the two prime-time speeches last night from Michelle and Barack Obama. In President Obama’s speech in particular, there appear to have been multiple messages and subtexts. And everyone agrees there are few orators to compare with either of these Chicagoans.

But from the perspective of the convention as a whole, it’s reasonably clear the mission of the Obamas was to turn the page decisively from Day One, devoted to a considerable extent to celebrating the accomplishments of Joe Biden, to a post-Biden message that owes more to the famous Hope and Change mood of the two Obama campaigns than to anything Biden was running on before the Great Switcheroo on July 21.

To be clear, the Biden-Trump race had become a bitter rock fight that felt more like a never-ending conflict between two old men shouting at each other in a bar than a real debate. In that race-to-the-bottom conflict, Biden, who was burdened by his age and a record that simply wasn’t popular, had little choice but to spend most of his time trying to out-shout Trump and compete with him in a sort of fear-and-loathing Olympics. But Harris advent as nominee reset the race, re-enthused Democrats (bringing many of them back to the fold) and created the rare opportunity for a fresh look from swing voters late in a presidential cycle.

The Obamas accentuated and to some extent even embodied the new and more positive Democratic message and the new audiences it might persuade. Sometimes the page-turning was a bit abrupt; it was a bit stunning that Michelle Obama did not mention the name of the sitting Democratic President of the United States, who served as her husband’s governing partner for eight years (Barack Obama did make up for that with a brief but emphatic thank you to Biden for his past and continuing leadership). But the page did need to be turned if Kamala Harris is to maintain her critical ability to serve as a symbol of post-Biden, post-Trump politics, in effect minimizing her incumbency as much as is possible (while confronting Republicans with a choice between treating her as Biden 2.0 and some sort of strange and dangerous new character). The 2008-2012 Obama message of inclusive change is as good a model for Harris to use as any available, and now she must put her own stamp on it tomorrow night.