Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris appears at the Fiserv Forum during a campaign rally in Milwaukee, August 20, 2024.
The Democrats’ official convention theme on Tuesday night was “A Bold Vision for America’s Future.” But that label just didn’t resonate with me for a simple reason: I didn’t think “vision.” I thought “Mothers.”
Throughout the night, speakers offered up versions of womanhood and parenthood that could explain the complexities of Kamala Harris—whose persona seems to vex some people. She’s a “childless cat lady”… but also Momala? (Do stepmoms even actually count?) She’s a tough woman prosecutor. (Isn’t that kind of a man’s job?) But are women really that tough? (But wait … isn’t this just girlboss feminism anyway?)
Harris isn’t making gender a central feature of her campaign in the Hillary “I’m With Her” vein, but it’s still there—and Tuesday night was a first introduction of the gender and femininity narrative into the Harris-Walz campaign.
Michelle Obama delivered a touching tribute to her mother, Marian Robinson, who died in May at age 86. The former first lady offered a portrait of her mother who was at turns immensely loving and immensely tough. “The last time I was here in my hometown was to memorialize my mother, the woman who showed me the meaning of hard work and humility and decency,” Obama said. “You see, my mom, in her steady quiet way, lived out that striving sense of hope every single day of her life.”
This “steady quiet way” of being is about as motherly as it gets in American culture. Mothers are celebrated as the constants of the family, the hardworking forces of nature who rarely ask for—or receive—thanks for their labor.
“Of the two major candidates in this race, only Kamala Harris truly understands the unseen labor and unwavering commitment that has always made America great,” Obama said, specifically underlining a uniquely gendered concept of “unseen labor.” “The belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbor, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off—if not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren,” Obama said.
After honoring her own mother, Obama turned her attention to Harris and her own social justice–oriented mother. “Even though our mothers grew up an ocean apart,” she said, “they shared the same belief in the promise of this country. That’s why her mother moved here from India at 19. It’s why she taught Kamala about justice, about the obligation to lift others up, about our responsibility to give more than we take.”
“Kamala Harris was exactly the right person for me at an important moment in my life,” said her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff. In a short film before Emhoff’s speech, his son Cole described his dad as a goofy, well-meaning “wife guy” and commented on his own relationship with “Momala.” There’s another key reason to cast Doug Emhoff in the role of a dorky dad; how better to showcase Harris’s own role as a firm and accomplished parent. It’s a caricature of parental dynamics that many Americans can understand. (I certainly do. My dad is a silly cat lover, while my mom and stepmom are both exceedingly accomplished and straight-talking.)
Emhoff moved back and forth between Kamala and Momala throughout his speech—she’s a dynamic campaigner, always on the road, always handling crises, but also someone who makes time to take a call from her stepdaughter Ella. Harris will host Ella’s friends, cooking and chatting with them. But then she’ll begin grilling them about the political issues they care about and what they’re doing about them.
“With your help she will lead with joy and toughness, with that laugh and that look,” her husband said. Both Michelle Obama and Doug Emhoff sought to make Kamala’s womanhood relatable to Americans, a demanding but empathetic maternal figure who, in Emhoff’s words, “would be exactly the right president.”
