Oprah Hosted Kamala Harris's Online Town Hall. You Get A Safe Abortion! YOU Get A Safe Abortion!
And a small business startup, and a democracy, and a middle class tax cut, and ...
Oprah Winfrey hosted a Kamala Harris town hall in Detroit Thursday, where Harris took questions from people attending via Zoom and talked a lot about her policies, particularly her pledge to sign a bill to enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade into law, if she gets a Congress that’ll pass that. She also discussed her economic proposals, like tax credits to help first-time home buyers, parents with new infants, and so on. It was a campaign event, for sure, but also pretty damn substantive, drawing very clear contrasts between Harris’s plans and the hateful vague concepts being pushed by the other major party’s creepy nominees.
Here’s the video, via the Harris campaign:
The first bit is nice, with a million or so celebrities (Jennifer Lopez, Chris Rock, Julia Roberts, Bryan Cranston, Tracee Ellis Ross, Ben Stiller, and Meryl Streep among them) and also an in-studio pitch for Harris from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, too.
Harris then joined Winfrey onstage and took questions, starting by pledging that she would absolutely push Congress to pass the immigration bill that Donald Trump deep-sixed earlier this year, then taking a question about the high cost of living from a young couple who had to live with parents while they were saving up to buy a home, and now are providing a similar living situation to her sister and brother-in-law.
That gave Harris the chance to talk about her plans to promote an “opportunity economy,” including her proposals to take on grocery price gouging, to give new homeowners $25,000 toward the down payment on a first home, and beyond that, her call to renew the expanded Child Tax Credit, and also to give new parents an extra $6,000 tax credit for new babbies. While she was at it, Harris also touted her proposal for a $50,000 tax deduction for new small businesses.
It was a hell of a lot of policy in just a few minutes! Not surprisingly, Fox News said nobody liked the town hall because Harris “rambled” and “didn't seem to have much substance.” Also, Fuck Fox News.
When the town hall turned to what’s probably Harris’s strongest issue, the protection and restoration of abortion rights, the tone became emotional, because goddamn it, freedom over your body is not a sterile philosophical discussion, it’s life and death for anyone who can become pregnant. That point was driven home by Hadley Duvall, the woman who discussed in a 2023 ad for Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear how her stepfather raped her when she was just 12. The audience gave Duvall, now 22, a standing ovation; Duvall, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention and is now appearing in a Harris campaign ad that was excerpted at the town hall, thanked Harris for her leadership on keeping the issue front and center. “Madam Vice President, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for seeing us.”
Duvall was followed by the most devastating part of the town hall, a segment on the horrifying death at a Georgia hospital of Amber Nicole Thurman in 2022, thanks to Georgia’s post-Dobbs abortion ban. Thurman had (extremely) rare complications from a medication abortion, resulting in fetal tissue not being expelled from her womb, and the doctors, fearing prosecution, waited 20 hours before finally agreeing to provide a D&C. Thurman, her organs shutting down from sepsis, died on the way to the operating room. A medical review found her death had been “preventable” if she’d received the necessary care in time.
Thurman’s mother, Shanette Williams, was joined onstage by Amber’s older sisters, and the family spoke out publicly for the first time about Thurman’s ordeal and death. Here’s the full discussion; it’s not an easy watch. Watch Harris’s face. It’s difficult to imagine the other major party’s nominee listening to the account with anything even resembling similar empathy.
“You’re looking at a mother that is broken,” Williams said. “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.”
The audience — yes, those of us watching on video too — teared up as Williams added, “I want you all to know that Amber was not a statistic. She was loved by a family, a strong family, and we would have done whatever to get my baby, our baby, the help that she needed.”
Harris will be campaigning in Georgia today to call attention to the reproductive rights crisis; at the town hall, she said the threat to women’s health — and to their lives — from abortion bans constitutes “a health care crisis. It’s a health care crisis that affects the patient and the profession.”
Also at the rally was Natalie Griffith, a 15-year-old student who survived being shot twice during the school shooting two weeks ago at Apalachee High School in Georgia. Weirdly, she and her parents didn’t seem to agree with JD Vance that school shootings are inevitable, so we need to “be prepared for it” and simply “deal with it.” Her mother, Matilda Griffith, asked, “What are we doing? We have a job, that job is to protect our children. We have to stop it.” Liked many in the audience, her eyes were full of tears, too.
Harris also made a bit of news when she reiterated that she supports a new ban on assault weapons, but that she is herself a gun owner; she added, when Winfrey said that was news to her, “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot. Probably should not have said that.”
So yes, please, Harris campaign, let’s have more events like this where Kamala can speak directly to Americans, even if it’s not the New York Times. It was incredibly compelling television.
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* For those who think the Town Hall livestream/zoom party Kamala did with Oprah last night was no big deal,
uh….she raised 100 MILLION DOLLARS in an hour, according to Act Blue.
That’s enough to fully contest FL and OH.*
Almost an embarrassment of riches at this point but for what’s at stake
Fox News says she "rambled."
And they're supporting Donald Trump.
The mind reels.