ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Tonight, Vice President Kamala Harris will try to convince the nation that she is ready to be president. After more than three years of being the deputy, there are questions about what Harris would be like as commander in chief. And when she formally accepts the nomination in Chicago tonight, she’ll have a chance to address some of those questions. NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid is here with me at the United Center. Hi, Asma.

ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Hey there. It’s great to be with you.

SHAPIRO: So tonight, Harris will have a lot of eyes on her, probably more than she has ever had before. What do you know about what she’s going to say?

KHALID: Well, she’ll have a chance to reintroduce herself, and she’ll talk about growing up as the daughter of a single mom in a middle-class neighborhood. She’ll also speak about how and why she became a prosecutor, and then she’ll try to offer a contrast with Donald Trump, the Republican nominee’s, vision of the country. You know, her campaign, I would say, in the last month, has really become about change in a way that, frankly, President Biden’s, when he was running, was not.

SHAPIRO: In the last month or so, you have covered the Harris campaign as she has brought out huge crowds and energized the Democratic Party. But you’ve covered her since long before that. So tell us more about where this Kamala Harris was before.

KHALID: I spoke to the expert, I would say, on the vice presidency. His name is Joel Goldstein. And he pointed out that most recent vice presidents who run for the top job – say, like Al Gore or George H.W. Bush – were VPs for two terms. And that meant they spent the first few years just getting their sea legs, and then later they could position themselves towards building a presidential campaign. But he would make the argument – Joel Goldstein – to me that because of the ambiguity over whether Biden would, in fact, be a one-term president, he says there was this sort of unusual, laser-like focus on Harris from day one. And he says it’s kind of remarkable, in his view, to see how she has been able to quickly switch gears now.

JOEL GOLDSTEIN: The sitting vice presidents who came before her in modern times have all, it seemed to me, had more trouble moving from being the No. 2 to the No. 1 than she has.

KHALID: And, Ari, to understand how Kamala Harris has made this pivot, you have to go back in time, and I want to walk you through that.

SHAPIRO: All right.

KHALID: Before Harris was vice president, she had usually been the primary decision-maker, whether that was as attorney general or as district attorney. And in the Senate, she became a star for her tough questioning during the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But that style had to change when she got to the White House. I talked to Terrance Woodbury about this. He’s a Democratic pollster who has now joined the Harris campaign.

TERRANCE WOODBURY: I think people expected her to keep that bully pulpit that she had in the Senate, and that’s just not the role of the vice president.

KHALID: Frankly, Harris had a rough start as vice president, and President Biden gave her a tricky initial assignment – figure out how to deter so many people from coming to the U.S. southern border. She traveled to Mexico City and Guatemala, where this interview with NBC’s Lester Holt overshadowed her work on the issue.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: We’ve been to the border.

LESTER HOLT: You haven’t been to the border.

HARRIS: And I haven’t been to Europe. And, I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discussing…

KHALID: Early on, Harris often seemed stilted and uncomfortable in the limelight. She was the first woman in the job, with a mom from India and a dad from Jamaica. And her supporters point out there’s not a lot of examples of women like her in leadership positions. There’s never been a Black woman, for example, as governor.

RACHEL PALERMO: There was a magnifying glass on her from the moment she joined the ticket.

KHALID: Rachel Palermo worked for Harris for nearly three years.

PALERMO: Working for her, I always felt like she had to overperform to get an average review.

KHALID: And Harris’ approval ratings, like Biden’s, were underwater. Democrats wondered why they didn’t see more of her. They didn’t know what she was doing in this job. But behind the scenes, Harris was putting her footprint on policy in subtle ways. Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, credits the vice president for spotting racial disparity in the COVID response.

JEFF ZIENTS: She pushed us to have a response that really met people where they were, lifting up community health centers, mobilizing a COVID community corps of volunteers. That was one of her original ideas that ended up making a huge difference.

KHALID: The job of vice president, by definition, requires you to be the hype person, not the person taking credit. But staffers say Harris has been key in pushing specific priorities. Ike Irby is a senior advisor for policy issues to Harris.

IKE IRBY: As we were building the initial proposal for infrastructure, the vice president said that we needed to make sure that lead pipes were included. She made sure that she’d be able to point to the legislation that she wrote as a senator as a throughline for how you could actually do this.

KHALID: But the major turning point for Harris was the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling in 2022. Suddenly, she had a clear public mission. Here’s Harris the day after that decision was leaked.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HARRIS: How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future?

KHALID: The vice president was on her way to an event about maternal health when she learned that Roe had been struck down. Aides told me she read the majority opinion, line by line, in the car, then rewrote her entire speech. Biden, a devout Catholic, has struggled to speak about abortion. Harris has not.

MINI TIMMARAJU: She’s been the most critical voice on the most galvanizing issue for Democrats in the last two years.

KHALID: That’s Mini Timmaraju. She leads the group Reproductive Freedom for All.

TIMMARAJU: She’s not just the top spokesperson. She’s been the person leading strategy.

KHALID: And for Harris, the strategy has been to link Trump directly to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s a message she’s been delivering for months, and it has become a central pillar of her campaign. Here she was in Milwaukee Tuesday night.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HARRIS: The former President Trump hand selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention – with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. And as he intended, they did.

SHAPIRO: That’s reporting from NPR’s Asma Khalid, who is still here with us. And Asma, for all that you laid out, there is still this hunger to understand what Harris would actually do if she wins the presidency. Are we going to get answers to that tonight?

KHALID: I don’t know how much of clear-cut answers you’ll get – right? – on policy prescriptions. But I do want to point out that the sort of consistent throughline we’ve been hearing from her campaign is this overarching message about freedom, trying to reclaim the vision of freedom and which party is really the party of freedom. And this is something that I’d make the case that she’s been talking about for a couple of years. I heard her first talk about this when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. It’s a message that she’s been delivering for a while. It is not something that broke through when she was vice president. But it is beginning to, I think, Ari, become much more sort of the mainstream message from Democrats.

Tonight, you know, it’s going to be a friendly crowd of enthusiastic Democrats. But to your point, Ari, about sort of policy prescriptions, I think in the coming week, she’s going to have more tests. For example, she’ll have, you know, pressure to articulate what her own vision of foreign policy would look like as a potential commander in chief. And then, of course, there is the debate against Donald Trump on September 10.

SHAPIRO: NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid. Thank you.

KHALID: Good to speak with you.

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