306. Did Kamala Harris' speech scare Trump?

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1:50Hello, welcome to the rest of the politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And I'll see you have an American flag. I know it's on the wall behind you. I did go at given as we were leaving the convention last night. There was an awful lot of stuff being given out. Lots of memorabilia, lots of sort of banners and stuff. So yeah, I suspect it will stay after I leave Rory. But it was quite tonight. And it's also it's very nice to see already coming through in the comments. We've got lots of people from we've got Pittsburgh, we've got Pennsylvania, but we've also got Melbourne, Auckland, London, Lake District.

2:24So thanks to everybody for joining us. So I am still in Chicago having been here for the whole of the convention. Rory is in Scotland where I will be tomorrow talking about my children's books at the Edden Festival. But it has been quite a week, Rory. I must say, did you, I assume you watch as president? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, so quickly just for for people joining us. And thank you all for all these people joining us forever. Norway, Prague, Denmark, Sydney, Minnesota. Fantastic. Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, really. Yeah, Brazil, very good. So Alistair and I were together at the convention. We had an incredible sort of epic day which involved starting at I think eight in the morning and then rolling through to one in the morning, which took us right the way through from AOC, Alexandria, Ocasio -Cortez, the incredibly charismatic congresswoman from New York, Hillary Clinton finishing with Joe Biden, who gave a nearly hour long speech finishing at midnight.

3:24And then we recorded the first episode. And during the day, we'd been meeting the most incredible sort of variety of different people, which will release our conversations with them on an independent feed, which which were certainly not an independent feed on our main feed, but it will be branded as DNC, where the first was up at Rory. It's on the leading feed, which is the the splendid pollster, John Anzo. So we go here and then we've got this amazing old guy, Bob Mullerland, who's we've built as the attack, the lifelong attack dog. We've got a young buck, we've got veteran congresswoman and we've also found the only Donald Trump lover at the convention.

4:05Yeah, so people listen, get a flavor of those five things for which we did together. I was particularly, I mean, I loved your polling guy and your company guy, but I was also really taken with Rosa Delaro, who's the veteran congresswoman, who I think is just a kind of wonderful human being, to be serious for a moment about these conventions. I mean, largely these conventions are about making speeches and laying out a platform for an election without much detail, policy content, but she has had one thing in her head, most of her career, which is getting child tax credits through, and she was the chair of the very powerful Appropriations Committee in the House, managed to push through for one year to get child tax credit under the Biden administration, coming out of COVID, and it made an incredible difference to poverty.

4:57I mean, literally millions of people lifted out of poverty and then it was dropped. And so she's been fighting tooth and nail to get it back in and she managed to get it inserted back into Kamaharis' commitment. So we were all given child tax credits stickers. Anyway, enough about when we were together. Tell us, just give us an overview first of the three days since, in general, before we get into the specifics of Kamaharis. I mean, it's been slightly overwhelming because there are so many speakers, like literally dozens of speakers, okay, you'd say with the Labour Party, the Congress, the Tory Party, there are dozens of speakers, but they tend to, they're in debate.

5:34They're having arguments, they're saying different things, but because what this was about was essentially people saying in different ways, the same things again and again and again and again. So Donald Trump is terrible. Kamaharis is going to be a great president. If she wins, Joe Biden's a fantastic guy, abortions on the ballot, you know, all the sort of issues that they want to talk up. And it's, so I got to the end of every day. And sort of you try to remember kind of highlights, great lines, great moments. And it's almost like there's a surfeit. You've got so much kind of coming at you in the head.

6:13I've not been able to sleep at all. And if, if, so you started to think of, you know, you, so you mentioned on day one, AOC, and Hillary Clinton, I guess on the next day, if I was picking for one highlight, it would probably miss Michelle Obama's speech. I actually thought it was in a way more powerful than Barack Obama's. Barack Obama is a wonderful orator, but I've heard him do that sort of stuff so many times, whereas what was interesting about Michelle Obama was that, remember, she famously said, when they go low, we go high. Now, she was reasonably high, but she was really putting the boot into Trump.

6:51And, and Donald Trump has hung over this conference like a kind of bad smell. I'd love to know whether there's an AI tool that could tell us whether Trump's name has appeared more than anybody else is including even Kamala Harris during this, this convention. So then you have this mixture. I'll tell you one thing I've noticed, Roy, this, this rolling right through. So you mentioned AOC and Hillary. I mentioned Michelle Obama yesterday, obviously, the main, the main event was Kamala Harris, but you also had Elizabeth Warren. You had Kamala Harris's sister. On every day, there has been a real sense that this is women that women are right front and center and often women of color.

7:37And I think that is partly related to her, partly related to the centrality of the issue of war, but I think it's also a way of targeting Trump as basically becoming the kind of in -sell guy who posters somebody who can bring the country together. Yeah. So again, for people who in the way that Elisabeth has literally sat through 25, 30 hours of this and you can sit through it. I mean, I think that's another difference from a laboral conservative party comes. There's no way on earth that you would stay in your seat for four or five hours. Well, yes, yesterday, a labor. Yes, he had no choice because there was so many people trying to get in.

8:15You had to get in there about three hours in advance. Now, we were very, very lucky. We struck lucky, Roy, in that we found this guy who offered his seat cities in one of the boxes, the sort of corporate boxes. So that meant we could sort of come and go a bit. Otherwise, you had to literally get in there three hours before. Otherwise, you wouldn't get a seat. And the result, though, is that it's so, I mean, it's so well done that you can do it. I mean, that's what astonished me. On that first night with you, I think I guess we sat for what we left at midnight, sat down to start to assemble four and a half hours, I guess we sat then.

8:50I would never sit for four and a half hours without moving through a laboral conservative conference. I'm afraid. And that's, I think, the main message that I took away from the quality of the speaking is unbelievable. I mean, what the Democratic Party revealed in the last four days is they are able to mobilize some of the most astonishing public speakers that you've ever seen. In fact, if you were doing a class for students on public oratory and communication, you could take probably 12 of those speeches and play them to them. And every one of them has a different style and Mike. And I'm afraid, sadly, I don't want to be rude to Britain, but I do not think we could produce half a dozen speakers of that quality.

9:33No. And if you think that not that long ago, there were something that you'd hear people say right around the world is how can a country of 350 ,000 ,000 people produce a choice between Biden and Trump. Okay. Right. But actually, I agree with you. And some of them quite surprising. Pete Buttigieg, who I think is an amazing television communicator, I realized this week is also a fantastic orator. We had Gretchen, we had Gretchen, who was last night. Yeah. She was absolutely brilliant. Michigan. Yeah. Josh Shapiro was definitely super. Matt Kelly was good. And then he had all these, the way that they brought speakers out who weren't famous, weren't well known.

10:13Some of them was powerful. Let yesterday, a woman who actually has become a congresswoman, who son was killed by shooting and talking about guns. And then this amazing, where Matt Kelly, Senator Kelly came on with his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, who'd been who survived an assassination attempt. So they took, they used these interweaving personal stories with the sort of big picture. And as I said, the other day, for example, on abortion, which really has been such a big thing this week. And I think that goes back to my point. I think women, I think they are deliberately using women. And as you say, and it's interesting how many people mentioned to be the woman, the the the delegate that Kattie K interviewed on the rest of this politics US, just these incredibly articulate young women who now are going out of here and they're going to try and persuade their friends and persuade their mothers and persuade their fathers.

11:10So that's the sort of energy that's being going. But the other thing, Roy, the speak, I totally agree with you. And it did. I'm a spoken to my friend this morning who'd been following it home and just as closely as I have really. And she did make a poem, which I think, you know, and I was with quite a few of the people from the Labour Party over here. There's a joy in the politics in this that sort of I don't really think we're getting in Britain at the moment. And we've got to find the way of getting that. We've got to find it. And one way of articulating it is that the way that the Democratic Party chooses to tell stories of coming from very, very difficult backgrounds is completely different to the way that the stories told in Britain.

11:53So it's actually the case that in Britain, if you look at the British cabinet at the moment, there are people from very, very tough backgrounds. But America, firstly has a myth, which is that it's only in America that these stories could be possible. It's obviously not true. She did a bit of that as well. Many countries in the world, including Britain, where people from minority ethnic backgrounds and very poor backgrounds have made it to very senior political offers. But the difference is that in Britain, when people talk about that journey, they often talk about it more from a sense of injustice and class inequality.

12:32Whereas in the United States, it's celebrated in its most positive possible way. You know, people talk about, you know, and people who just did it, he talks about his improbable journey. He talks about Kamala Harris's improbable journey. In the case of Whitich Edge, you know, it's a story of a veteran from Afghanistan whose gay and ends up with two kids and ends up being on the main convention stage. Kamala Harris's case is this incredible story of her, my mother. But in every case, it's positive. The story of them coming from difficult poor backgrounds. And my goodness, inequality is much more extreme in the United States than it is in Britain.

13:12I mean, that's the other thing that makes this so confusing. Yeah. Objectively speaking, socio -economic class -based inequality in the US is much worse than in Britain. It's really interesting you said that because last night, we were with sort of people who were fubriets, obviously mainly Americans, a couple of Aussies, and obviously political geek. So I'm not talking about, you know, people that you're going to meet on a bus. But it was interesting how, when they were talking about Britain, for example, how often they would say, you know, we love Angela Rainer. And the other thing, Roy, that it's joyful, though.

13:52She's got a certain amount of joy. I like Angela Rainer. Yeah. Yeah. So, and it's interesting how, you know, you've got a bit of this when you were here, but I got a lot more of it because I've been here all week. It's how many of these young Democrat Americans listen to our podcast and they say, in part because they have always had this sort of respect for labor, for the British politics and so forth. And it's interesting how two or three of them that I've bumped into, you know, mentioned, you know, my favorite interview was that one you did with your deputy, the Angela woman. And I just think as labor going to their party conference coming up soon.

14:32By the way, we should answer this. Quite a few people saying, why did you, why are you doing this stuff for the Democrats when you didn't do it with the Republican Convention? I'll be absolutely frank about this. We weren't going to do either until the Joe Biden change. That's just laying out our facts there. I was going to stay on holiday. But it's also, instantly, for what it's worth for people here, I think it would have been impossible for us to get passes for the Republican Convention. Trump's team has very much decided that people like us are not welcome. So we wouldn't be able to get in.

15:03Although one of our one of our five interviews, Roy, the one that you you'd sadly had to leave. But is this guy who who is an advisor and to Trump and a friend of Trump? And it is interesting because we want to be the other interview that we united yesterday, you were online that we'll put out probably next week with another American pollster, Frank Lutz, who was fascinating. But and he said to me that he thinks I have Trump derangement syndrome. And that whereas when we were new labor chasing Tory votes, we always tried to work out what our opponents were thinking and what people who voted them were thinking.

15:38But we sort of so low Trump. And it's a it's a very I thought it was a very fair insight. We you and I probably just cannot understand how anybody can vote from that man. So that stops us talking to them and thinking about this. So actually I found that conversation with this guy very, very interesting because he explained Trump in a way that Trump never explains himself. Well, I'm looking I'm looking forward to that looking forward to that. Can I can I just so quickly because I just just before we move on to the sort of big race who's just one last go through these speeches because they they have been extraordinary.

16:10I think Tim Walsh, if people haven't yet seen him speak. Yeah. I mean, as an introduction to why that is a phenomenal vice presidential pick that speech at the Democratic National Convention. He is not just approachable and likable. He's incredibly smart. Yeah. He makes some very interesting points about freedom, positive freedom, negative freedom, but he does it in a very relatable way. And that's him that's him stealing from territory that the Republicans think they own. Exactly. He's brilliant at weaving his personal life story. Then begins fat. He went to a high school with a 25 children in it.

16:52And using that and moving forward from that. But he's also able to communicate in a way that actually I'm not sure many of them were able to very, very clearly what's our policy. Yeah. He said, you know, I remember he said, this is the bit where I want you to concentrate on and clip for your family. Three things we're going to do. We're going to drop taxes from middle classes. We're going to deliver affordable housing. But he does it so warmly and naturally. And I think there's an article which I really enjoyed reading written in the New York Times back, I think in 2008, when he was still just a high school teacher about a class he taught on Rwanda in 1993.

17:38He taught a genocide class to his high school where he'd asked them to predict where future genocides might happen. And he took them through Cambodia. He'd taken them through Germany. And his class a year before the random genocide predicts it Rwanda as being the place where the next chance. Now, why is that interesting? That along with the fact that he has been 30 times to China that he taught in China for a year. I mean, it means that this story that this is a team with no foreign policy experience is missing something important. It's missing the fact that I think WALTS is a far more sophisticated, worldly man than this sort of coach WALTS branding is giving him.

18:19Yeah, I also heard that Kamala Harris has met 140 different world leaders in the Times Vice President. Just sticking with Tim Walsh and I agree. And funnily enough, seeing, if you remember, I said I thought that Kelly would be the pick. And I still think he's obviously got amazing strengths. But interestingly, when he spoke, it just didn't quite work as a as a noratorical event, whereas you're absolutely right, Tim Walsh did. I think we should just briefly, the one bit I find, you know, you get exhausted these things, you can get quite emotional if you not careful. The one bit that really got me emotionally and I felt myself slightly welling up was when the cameras inside the hall and on television cut to his son.

19:06And I knew that his son had special needs as a week, special educational needs, we call it and had speeches, shoes and neurodivergence, etc. But it was just so powerful. Him sort of stand up. The joy coming out of him is saying, that's my dad, that's my dad. And the response for the next in hours, these maga Republicans tweeting the most vile stuff. And I think the other thing, there's a very morning Joe, the TV thing here, let's put out the thing this morning, which we should put in the show note in the newsletter. And it says a tale of two speeches. And it's these clips of Kamala Harris last night talking about bringing the country together, talking about positivity, talking about the role of education, whatever might be, all the positive stuff.

19:58And then interspersed with Trump with just this sort of everything's terrible. It's all all. So I watched the Trump life thing. And it was the most disturbing speech. He's in it's very strange. He's time to he is standing on the border and he is reading from something that looks almost as big as the Bible. An intonation of atrocities, rapes and murders committed by what he calls Kamala's migrants or Kamala's migrants. And he just goes in Kony Island, a place that I know, well, I set up my business in Kony Island. They dragged a woman from the car and then they, and my mother who was watching it with me, who's from the right, said this is very disturbing, because unfortunately this man sounds like he's kind of enjoying this stuff.

20:53I mean, it was so brutally explicit, these atrocities one after another after another. And as you say, so unbelievably negative. What's the last couple of days, I was going to quite a few of the kind of democratic party strategists and people who work with Clinton and people who work with Obama and some who are still involved with Biden and Harris. And it is interesting how the delegates storm me out last night. We're really kind of, oh, we're on our way. This is just fantastic. What a week, what a speech, etc. You get down with the guys who've been in politics and campaigns a long time and their base alarm was, well, this has been great, but it's now going to get utterly brutal.

21:33And this party has to be ready for what is going to be the most vicious attempt at character assassination there has ever been. But I think as we have discussed with some of the people that we talked about, I think they're really struggling to work out how to attack her. She, what struck me last night was even though she had a very quite sure but very powerful attack on Trump with this new backdrop that they whisked in a few minutes before she spoke, looking slightly like this courtroom where she was the judge and she was judging Trump. But a, but I don't get the feeling that he's occupying her head in the way that she is so clearly occupying his.

22:16He was, he was live tweeting or live social truth thing, her speech in a way that I mean, to work. And it's interesting. I watched on one of the channels this morning. They did a focus group of about six or eight undecideds who'd watched the speech together and by the end of it, six said they were voting for Harry. There would vote for her. One said Trump and one said they were still undecided. And the thing that they kept coming back to was she looked presidential and she was so positive. Yeah. And she's got the electric smile hasn't she? I mean, it's something that that unfortunately Henry Clinton didn't have that huge sort of very natural warm smile.

23:01It bizarrely though. She does have it in real life. Yes, yes, she does. But she knows exactly. She does know. And I think Henry Clinton is one of those sad things you see so often in politics, which are people who are unbelievably impressive, one -to -one and in small groups. But don't somehow electrify the stage. But what I think you said, where you're on something with Tim Wars is I think both of them. And you have this, the sense, destroys of the families, even that little thing about the two little nieces who came on to explain how you pronounce Kamala. It was like, you got to say these are normal people that you can imagine being with these people having a nice time.

23:40Whereas Trump's people are just, they're kind of, they are weird and they are a bit vile.

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25:05You pointed to Buttigieg and I know I'm talking too much about styles of speaking, but just again, if people are looking for another speech to watch from the convention, Pete Buttigieg is just six to seven minutes long. So it's a really great clip to have a look at. And my goodness, he's whipsmart. The first thing he does, which is very clever, is he says that JD Vance has said that people who don't have children don't have a stake in the future. And then he says, well, I served in Afghanistan with a lot of young men who didn't have children.

25:43And I then he does this thing, which I thought was the most moving bit of all, which almost have my mother in tears, which is he said, it was just very simple. He said, I don't presume to know what's happening in your kitchens. But when you're sitting there, early in the evening, discussing the day or sitting up late at night, trying to address the bells, I think the one thing that every American would dream of is not having a politics, which is a rerun of some TV wrestling deathmatch. And I thought that was, and that again is touching on your point here, which is if they can pull this off, this phrase, which appeared in almost every speech, because they so scripted these speech speech around, they have more in common than separates, as they've clearly decided that the Joe Cox line from Britain than the United States should become the separate.

26:42And it's what they're running. And gosh, for me, of course, that's so exciting, because I do sometimes feel with labor in Britain that they can be quite sort of non -generous to the other side. And clearly, this is a team that's decided to be generous to Trump voters. Well, she's unapricated. Yeah, I mean, and one of the things that this Trump supporter that I spoke to said is that, you know, if I'm sitting that hall as an undecided, but kind of leaning towards Trump and these guys are trying to bring me back, I'm not hearing that much. I'm not hearing that much for me. But actually last night, I thought very directly, and it was interesting, we had an amazing view last night, because she was on the stage down there to our right, but we were right in front directly into the massive sort of 50 foot screen.