The Democrats are rising to the urgency of the moment

Kamala Harris wanted to be president. A former prosecutor, she made what she called her “proven ability to prosecute the case against this administration” a centerpiece of her campaign. On Wednesday night, she put those skills to work for Joe Biden.

In the process, the senator who seeks to become the first Black American and the first woman to be vice president reminded a nation where Africans were brought to be enslaved, and where women were denied the right to vote, that it was possible to achieve “a beloved community.”

It would be a place, she said, “where all are welcome, no matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we love.”

In keeping with expectations that a vice presidential candidate will strike relentlessly at the opposition, Harris continued the online Democratic National Convention’s assault on President Donald Trump’s failures, lies and selfishness.

“Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives and livelihoods,” she said. “If you’re a parent struggling with your child’s remote learning, or you’re a teacher struggling on the other side of that screen, you know that what we’re doing right now isn’t working. And we are a nation that’s grieving. Grieving the loss of life, the loss of jobs, the loss of opportunities, the loss of normalcy. And yes, the loss of certainty.”

“The constant chaos leaves us adrift,” she said. “The incompetence makes us feel afraid. The callousness makes us feel alone. It’s a lot. And here’s the thing: We can do better and deserve so much more.”

Harris’s prosecutorial burden was lightened by former President Barack Obama, who offered a sharp and urgent case for change. Obama’s 2020 speech for his former vice president was, perhaps, more passionate and more insistent than his case for his own reelection in 2012.

For the last 3½ years, Obama clearly felt restrained by the norm that ex-presidents should not criticize the current occupant of the Oval Office. Those constraints fell away Wednesday.

When Trump took office, he explained, he had hoped the new president would at least “show some interest in taking the job seriously” and “discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.”

“But he never did,” Obama declared, and what followed was one of the most cutting and comprehensive attacks of the convention so far:

“He’s shown no interest in putting in the work,” Obama said, “no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”

Over and over, the party has stressed three themes: the catastrophe that Trump’s reelection would bring; the empathy and competence Biden would bring; and the Democratic Party’s devotion to diversity, inclusion and social justice — a nation, as Harris put it, committed to “the fundamental belief that every human being is of infinite worth, deserving of compassion, dignity and respect.”

But it fell to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, to be explicit about a fear that will animate Democratic activism.

“For four years,” she said, “people have said to me, ‘I didn’t realize how dangerous he was.’ ‘I wish I could go back and do it over.’ Or worst, ‘I should have voted.’ Well, this can’t be another woulda-coulda-shoulda election.”

One word summarizes Democrats’ mood: urgency.