From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. It is Thursday, August 22nd. We are just back from the arena having watched

Kamala Harris accept Democratic nomination for president. She gave a speech I think was quite

extraordinary and also quite unusual by the standards of recent Democratic

Convention speeches. She did quite a lot I think to define herself to the country

but also did define what kind of campaign she's going to run, what her

campaign's theory of this election and a victory in it would be. I'm joined here by my revered editor

Aaron Redica. Aaron welcome back to the show. Thanks. Let's cast our minds back

to the Paleolithic era by by which I mean, you know, July.

And just stop for a second and talk about the Republican Convention

and where things seemed while that was happening,

and then we're going to of course turn to the events this

we can particularly Kamala speech tonight. How would you contrast first

before we get into the nitty gritty of what she said, the overall feeling of the Republican Convention

when it looked to the Republicans like they were going to win, and this week in Chicago. Republicans ran a convention like they had already won,

and Democrats ran a convention like they wanted to win.

Everybody I talked to there, I was not myself in Milwaukee, said this.

The dominant mood at the Republic Convention was it was like the Victory Night Party, right?

That's what Tim Alberta said on the show from the Atlantic.

And I think you saw that in Donald Trump's speech. You also saw that by the way in

Donald Trump's choice of JD Vance, which I think has proven to be unwise. But you saw it in his speech that night.

It was self-indulgent. It was first, and do remember the context, he had just suffered an assassination attempt.

It was a long retelling of that, followed by an extremely long, all over the place, unfocused, rally-like performance by Trump.

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