J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Nathan Hornes, right, former student at Corinthian Colleges, speaks as Tristan Snell, former New York state assistant attorney general, listens during the Democratic National Convention, August 22, 2024, in Chicago.
Nathan Hornes, a defrauded student at the for-profit Corinthian Colleges chain, who was one of the first to initiate a debt strike that seven years later led to the Department of Education canceling all Corinthian loans, appeared at the Democratic National Convention last week. Kamala Harris played a role on both ends of Hornes’s story, shutting down Corinthian as attorney general of California, and helping get the loans finally canceled as vice president.
But Hornes spoke a bit after Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans. Morial in fact served on the board of Corinthian Colleges, the same one that ripped Hornes off, right up until it was shut down. That would be bad enough, but on the same night a second Corinthian Colleges board member, old foreign-policy hand Leon Panetta, delivered a speech. (Panetta at least had the foresight to resign from the board in 2013, while it was under investigation.)
Maybe if that were the only dicey part of the night, I could write it off. But later on, the DNC gave the mic to Genesee County, Michigan, sheriff Chris Swanson, to discuss the success of community policing in interrupting violence. Which is fine, but Swanson is the same sheriff currently under a lawsuit for conspiring with monopoly prison telecom firms to ban in-person visits to county jails so that loved ones would be steered to use costly prison communication services. (Swanson has since reinstated in-person visits; the lawsuit is pending, though a separate lawsuit in another Michigan county was recently dismissed.)
Democratic convention organizers are adamant that they engage in significant vetting to ensure that things like this don’t happen. In fact, at the heart of the decision to not put a Palestinian American on stage to speak was the claim that there wasn’t enough time to do proper vetting. So then how to understand these missteps? One way is to say that you weren’t supposed to know any of this, and most people didn’t. The triumph of image over detail is a hallmark of really any modern convention, and maybe more so in this one for the Democrats.
I’ll give you another one: Hornes was an example of direct testimonials, something you see in a lot of conventions. There were people who got student debt relief, people who suffered complications during childbirth, victims of sexual assault who didn’t have options for abortion, Republicans who abandoned Trump, and countless others. There was not, however, any appearance by a homeowner who saw their home saved as a result of the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement, which was cited over and over again from the stage. The testimonials largely came from other attorneys general, not anyone who was supposed to be the beneficiary of the relief. If you’ve read me enough, you’d know the reason for that is that practically nobody was actually helped, but you’d think they would have ground down to find somebody.
There was, to be sure, a lot of attention to detail at the convention: in the talking points, in the optics, in the shading of what subgroups of voters Harris needed to reach. The actual details, like if your convention speakers contradict one another, or have actions in their past that contradict your overall message, weren’t prioritized.
So what’s the new way forward? Keeping your options open, apparently.
I think that dynamic of image over detail pretty well describes Kamala Harris. I was surprised at the rapturous response to her convention speech, though maybe the fact that she didn’t engage in a laundry list was what people were reacting to. I wasn’t seeking a laundry list, and I wasn’t the prime audience for any convention speech. I recognize that you highlight values over specifics; I think on the performance aspects of the presentation Harris did a fine job. But when I greeted someone outside of the convention hall afterward, I asked him, “So what did you think of Joe Biden’s speech?”
Outside of biographical details, this was a speech Biden could give. What launched Harris and created goodwill in the last month was primarily her not being Biden, but she also changed the vibes very specifically by not focusing on the anti-Trump rhetoric of the recent past. He was not depicted in sober tones as a threat to democracy, but more as a pathetic figure worth laughing at. That held for most of the convention until this final speech, where the sober tones all came back, even with a more joyous speaker. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” This led to a long section about January 6th and the dangers of him being unleashed by presidential immunity, followed by a longer section of essentially Biden’s foreign policy.
It’s not that these aren’t real things to think about; it’s that Democrats have been talking about the coming autocracy for eight years without a whole lot of success, while Harris and Tim Walz hit on a different formula that resonated without minimizing the hazards of a second Trump term. That was largely abandoned in the speech. The promise of Harris is that politics doesn’t have to be a chore, but she moved us back to the “eat your peas” rhetoric of campaigns past.
Harris articulated where she wants to take the country first by saying where she didn’t. She would protect reproductive rights, Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, Head Start, and really any other program under threat in Project 2025. She wouldn’t cut taxes by another $5 trillion, or conduct across-the-board tariff increases (the targeted ones that Biden initiated, we’ll see). That’s not different from any other Democrat who could have been nominated.
So what’s the new way forward? Keeping your options open, apparently.
The only bill Harris outwardly promised that could maybe get passed regardless of the congressional makeup is the border security–only bill that failed this year. The codification of Roe v. Wade and the various voting rights bills would need a Democratic trifecta and an exemption to the filibuster that some senators seem reticent to promise. I’ve seen enough polling in Montana (and heard more on the sidelines of the convention) to worry about even getting to that decision point.
If elected, Harris is going to have to handle a tax debate. What does she value? She has endorsed the $5 trillion in taxes from the Biden budget, but even the rosiest scenario doesn’t get you all of that. Where will she pick and choose?
The broad values in the speech were about the middle class, which extends to an income of $400,000 if you believe the cutoff under which no new taxes will be imposed. But one line—one word, actually—in the speech spoke to a different value. “We will provide access to capital for small-business owners and entrepreneurs and founders,” Harris said. “Founders” has a very particular meaning; it’s the self-regarding leaders of Silicon Valley startups, who have been moving fast and breaking things for a while now. This was picked up: “She said founders. I’m good,” said one CEO.
You combine this with the pleasing noises toward crypto, and the surge of tech donors into the campaign—3 of the 5 top employers for donors are Google, Apple, and Meta—and you begin to question the increased focus on tech and antitrust in a Democratic platform that predates her candidacy. (That Harris is taking debate prep from Google’s lead attorney in a Justice Department antitrust suit that starts next month, something that even Trump’s campaign has managed to figure out, is another image-over-detail data point.)
The idea here, I guess, is for Harris to not pigeonhole herself into anything, and to use her biography (particularly the state attorney general position) to prove that she’s on the side of the people. But if your biggest example of that is participating in a 50-state settlement that gave little to no relief to homeowners, let banks pay their penalty with other people’s money, and sent nobody who committed fraud to jail, then my fear of government-by-pleasing-press-release is realized. And that’s not the government we need.
