With Kamala Harris, It’s Cool For Liberals To Be Patriotic Again

CHICAGO — President Joe Biden is a patriot, in any conventional sense of the word. He ended his valedictory speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night with a refrain he’s delivered possibly hundreds of times since he began running for president again in 2019: “We just have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. And there is nothing we cannot do when we do it together.”

But Biden’s rhetoric never made the Democratic Party wave the flag as much as it has in the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris took over as the party’s nominee. And as she prepares to deliver the most important speech of her life on Thursday night, her version of patriotism — based more on individuals and possibilities than on the strength of American institutions — could help save her party’s presidential campaign.

The liberal patriotism wave started at the rally, where she introduced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, when she noted two “middle-class” kids from the Bay Area and Nebraska could be president and vice president.

“Only in America,” she said, repeating the phrase three more times.

The story Harris told was not about the strength of American institutions and the need to protect the Constitution, a warning Biden and other Democrats have issued over and over again. It was, as aides previewing Harris’ convention speech for reporters promised, about “her faith in the American people” and “the promise of America.”

This is what seems to separate the patriotism of Harris, and of former President Barack Obama, from the patriotism of Biden. Biden, who has spent more than five decades at the center of the American political establishment and frequently reminisced about the good ol’ bipartisan U.S.