Vice President Kamala Harris prepared for the highest-profile moment of her political life from a hotel suite in downtown Chicago, readying herself for an opportunity to turn the swell of momentum on which she arrived at the Democratic National Convention this week into a movement that propels her into the Oval Office.
The enormous stakes are not lost on Harris, who has been thinking about her speech for several weeks. From nearly the moment President Joe Biden removed himself from the top of the Democratic ticket, she has been formulating in her mind the argument she hopes to make on the final night of the convention.
Harris has never been regarded as one of the party’s master speechmakers. Yet her prosecutorial elocution and distillation of policy into understandable terms has helped her galvanize massive crowds since launching her candidacy less than a month ago.
Harris has been vice president for more than three years, but advisers believe Americans are unaware of large parts of her biography. All week in Chicago, pieces of her background have been sprinkled into one speech after another, with her campaign hoping to help define her on its terms – as a prosecutor, a fighter, a daughter of a single middle-class mother and more.
She is expected to hit those touch points and more in her address Thursday.
According to several Democratic aides and others involved in her speech preparation, Harris has refined the text extensively, working in part from the stump speech she delivers, almost verbatim, at her campaign rallies. At the Park Hyatt Chicago, where she is staying this week, she has practiced extensively and consulted with aides and family members in refining a speech meant to act as a high-profile introduction to American voters.
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