Oprah Winfrey hosted a Kamala Harris online event last night that was surprisingly effective, I thought. I’m not usually much for town halls and tend to avoid them unless there’s a special reason to watch. But this one was quite good. maybe it’s the Oprah effect. She is a professional,after all, and very adept at evoking emotion. Here’s the lede in the Washington Post:
A star-studded online rally designed to showcase the enthusiasm and energy behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign turned somber as host Oprah Winfrey introduced the mother of a woman who died after waiting for health care in a state that has banned most abortions.
“You’re looking at a mother that is broken,” said Shanette Williams, whose daughter, Amber Thurman, died in what was deemed a “preventable” death stemming from Georgia’s abortion restrictions. “The worst pain ever that a mother, that a parent, could ever feel, for her father and myself and the family — you’re looking at it.”
Several people in the live audience were wiping their eyes by the time Thurman’s family members, including two sisters, finished speaking. The emotional moment prompted Harris to deliver some of her most forceful lines of the event — which over nearly 100 minutes turned the vice president’s campaign into a modern-day version of Winfrey’s popular daytime talk show.
“Amber’s story highlights the fact that, among everything that is wrong with these bans and what has happened in terms of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it’s a health-care crisis,” Harris said after lambasting Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for making such bans possible. “It’s a health-care crisis that affects the patient and the profession.”
Hundreds of thousands of people watched the event, which was an outgrowth of various Zoom meetings that came together in the days after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid — with groups including Win With Black Women, White Dudes for Harris and Swifties for Kamala gathering by the thousands to show their support for Harris. The campaign cast the event — which featured a live audience of a few hundred people — as an opportunity to showcase the breadth of support for Harris and as a call to action for those watching online.
Here are a few clips from the event which I thought was also rather creatively produced:
I especially appreciated this on behalf of us childless cat ladies:
By the way, this is what we’re up against: