Kamala Harris’s speech projected toughness. She’ll need lots of it

As Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president earlier last week, the California senator sought to reveal more of her inner life but also to project toughness.

She’ll need lots of it.

Joe Biden’s selection of Harris as his running mate marks a trifecta of firsts: No woman of color, Black woman or Asian American woman has ever before been part of a major-party presidential ticket. Being a first is never easy, because it means bearing such a heavy burden of hopes and dreams. In House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s speech to the convention, she said that Harris as vice president would be “a witness to the women of this nation that our voices will be heard.” No pressure or anything. Being a first means that you are underestimated by some and overestimated by others. It means that you need to have unshakeable sense of who you are - who you really are - because so many people, both foes and friends, will try to make you into something else.

From all indications, Harris knows who she is.

During her acceptance speech, which capped the third night of the virtual Democratic National Convention, she spoke of her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, as having inspired her commitment to public service. Harris said she was “committed to the values [my mother] taught me, to the word that teaches me to walk by faith, and not by sight.

“And to a vision passed on through generations of Americans . . . a vision of our nation as a beloved community where all are welcome, no matter what we look like, where we come from or who we love.”

She excoriated President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which “is not an equal opportunity offender. Black, Latino and indigenous people are suffering and dying disproportionately. This is not a coincidence. It is the effect of structural racism.”

Harris described Trump as “a president who turns our tragedies into political weapons,” and promised that Biden “will be a president who turns our challenges into purpose.”

The convention address of a vice-presidential candidate is generally seen as a debut, an introduction to the nation. Harris is hardly an unknown - viewers could hardly have missed her high-profile interventions at televised congressional hearings or her go-for-the-jugular attacks during the Democratic debates.

But those were tightly framed snapshots. The night was her opportunity to paint a more complete self-portrait.

One hopes she knows what is coming.

Trump and his campaign have tried mightily to “define” Biden in a way that works to the president’s advantage, and they have failed. They tried “cognitive decline,” but he looks and sounds perfectly fit. They tried “tool of the far left,” but his convention has gone out of its way to accommodate anti-Trump Republicans.

The basic problem is that Biden has spent half a century in the public eye. He is a known quantity, an open book — and not particularly scary.

So my guess is that the right-wing smear machine will train much of its fire on Harris. The onslaught began last week with a barrage of “birther” racism, which seemed designed to highlight her genealogy — the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants — and cloak her in a nimbus of exotic and dangerous “otherness.”

Next will surely come volley after volley of misogyny and smarmy innuendo. Members of her family will be scrutinized and slimed. It will get ugly.

“I know something about the slings and arrows she’ll face,” 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said during her remarks, adding that Harris “can handle them all.”

Harris’s best defense may be a good offense. In the first Democratic

debate, she staggered Biden with a blow he never saw coming — an attack on his opposition, decades ago, to mandatory school busing as a remedy for what was then called “de facto” racial segregation.

When Biden was settling on his running mate, some of his advisers reportedly grumbled about the fact that Harris had never apologized to the thenpresumptive Democratic nominee for throwing that punch. Biden resolved not to hold any grudges. But I hope he also admired the skill and fearlessness of Harris’s cobra-like strike — and appreciated what a deadly weapon she could be when aimed at Trump and Pence.

Harris said that young activists are “patriots who remind us that to love our country is to fight for the ideals of our country . . . . Let’s fight with conviction. Let’s fight with hope. Let’s fight with confidence in ourselves, and a commitment to each other.”

Emphasis on the word “fight.” I hope Harris gets in touch with her inner Muhammad Ali. I hope she comes out swinging.