A leader showed up in Philadelphia named Kamala Harris.

Sometimes you just need a heavyweight champion of the world running out of your corner. You can’t settle for less. Sometimes, with time running out, you need a quarterback to go get the ball in the endzone, or a linebacker to level the other guy. You need a gymnast to stick the landing, the high diver to nail the dive. Sometimes you need the clutch player to step up and hit an upper deck, grand slam homerun.

In a critical moment, with everything on the line, you need the right person for the right job.

Last night, we needed a prosecutor to shoulder our beloved country and make a precise, passionate, detail-oriented, pitch-perfect case for it, and for us. That was Harris last night, delivering.  In the inimitable words of Augie Torres, “Another lawyer.” In this case, the lawyer is a leader named Harris.

Shortly before the start of the debate, I was talking to a Vietnam veteran who marveled sadly at the country’s lack of overall attentiveness to the perils of our division and the depth of those expressed hatreds that threaten this mighty and precious experiment of the Enlightenment called America.

“Can it really come to this?” the veteran asked.

As it would turn out, Harris paid attention. Harris knew what this meant. She proved more than fit for the demands of this democratic republic. She understood the stakes, the play, the price, the intensity and meaning of everything backed up under those lights in the National Constitution Center last night. She was ready. She taught. She preached. She commanded. In the end she prosecuted. She made the case for America. We are not a nation of barbarians, but a nation of laws. We require sophistication; gravitas; savvy; savoir faire; urbanity; country; piety; toughness, humor, respect, hard won, hard-nosed; a depth of realization about the capacities of the men and women of our great civilization; and Harris showed all of that, while never losing the core argument: commitment to justice under the rule of law.

John Dos Passos once wrote, “U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills. U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.”

All true, and on that last point in particular, the speech of the people in Philadelphia on Sept. 10, 2024, proved profound, not weak, righteous, not diminished, goodwilled not riven by hate, marked by a strong tough intellect, a command of facts not fictions, and the trained, experienced prosecutorial rigor of one graced to singly shoulder – with time ticking down – the case for justice for the people, and by the people.

E pluribus unum.

A leader showed up. Her name is Harris.