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Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 20th, 2020.

I'm John Pudhordz, the editor of commentary magazine with me as always, associate editor Noah Rothman, Hi Noah.

Hi John.

Senior writer Christine Rosen, Hi Christine.

Hi John.

An executive editor, Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.

Hi John.

So Kamala Harris gave her big speech last night.

Uh, didn't mean anything.

There you go.

Yeah.

I'm going to go with no, but I would like to like.

Well, first, what's the only one who noticed that a lot of it was just retread of what she said when, when Biden first nominated her the other day?

I mean, it seemed like she was kind of trotting out some of the same rhetoric.

So it didn't seem fresh or new in that sense.

You know what, what, what struck me was that, um, you know, the first 10 minutes or something were her biography.

And I don't really think that's the usual point of vice presidential speeches, which is to throw red meat, to attack the other guy, and to, you know, sort of like, please the party faithful.

Um, that's what, you know, talking about her life and her career and everything like that is something that is what the sort of the introductory video is for.

Uh, she's there to serve the ticket to, uh, to say things that the presidential candidate ordinarily wouldn't say that is generally speaking what we have expected from, from the vice president's speech or the nominees speech.

At the convention, this was a little more like she was the presidential candidate going through the, you know, I did this.

Here's my mom and then I did that and I did the other thing.

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