Assertive Kamala Harris looks like a metamorphosis in New Orleans – and carefully avoids any mention of Biden’s fitness for office | US Election 2024

The ideal understudy is talented but discreet, ready at any moment to take on the leading role and yet happy never to do so.

In New Orleans, at the 30th annual Essence of Culture festival, the Kamala Harris, with her drab brown suit that matched her chair and her halting, technical comments about the needs of American politics, was gone. This was the Harris who spoke here in 2019, then a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, followed by fewer than 10 journalists.

Instead, on Saturday, Harris — dressed in a bright teal suit and followed by a press contingent more than four times his previous size — addressed a standing-room crowd in a room equipped to seat more than 500.

In what was billed as an onstage conversation with Essence CEO Caroline Wanga, Harris confidently offered a mix of standard campaign speeches — a recitation of the Biden-Harris administration’s key policy accomplishments with dire warnings about the dangers posed by a possible second Trump term and the critical importance of the choice voters will face in just 122 days — mixed with language of women’s empowerment.

To say that Harris has studiously avoided mentioning the recent questions about Biden’s fitness for office would be an overstatement, and Wanga either did not ask or apparently did not give much thought to the question that has been on Washington’s minds. Last week, the fallout from the president’s faltering performance in the June 27 debate manifested itself in calls to drop out of the race, with a handful of Democratic lawmakers joining the chorus. Many of those same critics are now hoping Harris could be the new nominee in November.

For those who tend to read coffee grounds, there may have been more in New Orleans. Harris encouraged the audience to embrace the ambition and difficulty of blazing new trails, even making history.

“Please, don’t ever hear that something can’t be done,” Harris said. “People in your life will tell you though, it’s not your time. It’s not your turn. Nobody like you has done it before. Don’t ever listen to that.”

“I like to say, ‘I don’t eat anything for breakfast,'” she said.

Harris was introduced as a woman who “does the hard work,” “smart,” “tough” and a “proven fighter for the backbone of this country.” Then she entered and exited to the Beyoncé-Kendrick Lamar collaboration, Freedom, as Beyoncé sings, “Let’s sing, freedom, freedom, Where are you? … Hey! I’m gonna keep running.”

As Biden has insisted he will stay in the race amid what he has described as a subset of Washington insiders and op-eds insisting he should withdraw, Harris’ poll numbers have improved and her public speeches and commentary — once a much-maligned element of her time on the national political stage — have become more assertive and assured.

Harris has spent the past few months crisscrossing the country to speak about threats to reproductive rights, maternal mortality, economic opportunity and inclusion. And in New Orleans, Harris described the election as more important than “any election in your lifetime,” adding that democracy might not survive a second Trump term. Trump, she said, is a convicted felon who was just granted immunity from prosecution by the Supreme Court.

Harris also discussed the administration’s efforts to address issues that are disrupting the lives of Americans, including many in the meeting: capping the cost of insulin paid by Medicare enrollees; expanding access to public health insurance for low- and middle-income women after childbirth, when many life-threatening complications occur; and canceling billions of dollars in student loans. When Harris called out those who had had some of their student debt canceled, hundreds of hands shot up in the room.

“You got this because you voted in 2020,” Harris told the audience.

She added that more work remains to be done, including reducing the cost of child care for all Americans to no more than 7 percent of family income, and that efforts are underway. The administration has tried to remove medical debt from credit scores and make it harder for some Americans to rent an apartment or buy a car.

Leshelle Henderson, a Cleveland nurse practitioner who provides family medicine and psychiatric care, said she was trying to serve her community and a country in the midst of a mental health crisis. And she was working double time to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, none of which had been forgiven. She came to Essence Fest to have fun, but she wanted to hear the vice president talk about student loan forgiveness and what a second Biden-Harris administration would do for the economic fortunes of Black men and women.

This was before the event.

“I liked what I heard,” Henderson said. “Yes, but I want to hear more. Honestly, I think what we heard tonight is the next president of the United States. Isn’t that something?”