With the pandemic-altered campaign in its closing days, Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris stopped in Lake Worth Beach over the weekend to energize and appeal to voters during the final days of early voting.
The California senator and former state attorney general did not waste time outlining her intentions at an outdoor drive-in rally on the campus of Palm Beach State College.
“We want to make sure everybody votes. We are three days away from directly changing the course of the history of our country,” she told the mask-wearing, socially-distanced, drive-in rally for invited supporters. “There is so much at stake. I don’t have to tell you guys.”
Sounding like the prosecutor she used to be, Harris opened her remarks by attacking President Donald Trump’s coronavirus pandemic response.
“Over 225,000 Americans, in just the last several months, have died. Many, so sadly, without their family members being present because of the nature of this virus. Over nine million people have contracted this virus with long-term health consequences,” she said.
She did not mince words on the president’s response to the global public health crisis, noting Bob Woodward’s reporting that Trump reportedly knew COVID-19 would be deadlier than the flu before it reached the United States and downplayed the threat.
“Palm Beach, it didn’t have to be so bad. It didn’t have to be this way,” Harris told the throng of honking vehicles, which have replaced applause at the drive-in events lately because of the pandemic. “He knew, on Jan. 28, about the seriousness of this virus when he was told it is five times more deadly than the flu. He was told it would impact people of every age, he was told it was airborne and lethal … and he sat on it. He covered it up. He told the people that it was a hoax.”
Harris during her speech also criticized the Trump administration on the economy and unemployment. She presented statistics showing that one in nine families across Florida describe their households as having been hungry, one in seven households are unable to pay their rent and one in four small business are out of businesses or are unlikely to reopen.
“You ask Joe Biden, ‘How is the economy doing?’ You know what Joe Biden asks, ‘How are working people doing? How are working families doing?’” she said. “On the other hand, you got Donald Trump, who when asked about how the economy is doing, ask about ‘How the stock market is doing? Ask about how rich people are doing?’”
The half an hour speech was the nightcap of her daylong tour of the Sunshine State just three days before Election Day. Earlier in the day, she campaigned in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
With new polls forecasting a neck-and-neck race for the state’s 29 electoral votes, Harris and several warm-up speakers — including State Senators Lori Berman and Bobby Powell — urged those in the crowd not only to vote early but to also take family, friends, neighbors and others to the polls.
The crowd also heard from Palm Beach County Mayor Dave Kerner, Commissioner Mack Bernard and Boynton Beach City Commissioner Christina Romelus.
She gave shout-outs to U.S. Reps. Ted Deutsch and Lois Frankel, while onstage.
Several Trump supporters, many in pickup trucks with flags flying, and others waving signs, were confined in parking lots on the outer edges of the campus.
The first Black woman on a major party’s presidential ticket, Harris also charged Trump with coddling white supremacists. She encouraged the racially diverse audience to “honor the ancestors” by voting. She invoked the memory of the late civil rights legend, longtime Rep. John Lewis, “who shed his blood on that Edmund Pettus Bridge for the right for us to vote, in particular for black folks to vote.”
“John Lewis realized that the fight for people’s right to vote is a civil rights fight, which is why in the course of his life, John Lewis was front and center in the fight for marriage equality, he was front and center in the fight the dreamers because John Lewis realized that all these issues are connected,” she said to honking horns.
“Let’s honor the ancestors. Those suffragettes who 100 years ago got us the passage of the 19th Amendment,” she added. “Let’s always speak truth, Black women couldn’t vote until 1965.”
C. Ron Allen can be reached at crallen@Delraybeachtribune.com or 561-665-0151.