Kamala Harris has proved herself qualified to lead the free world

Editorial: As she accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination, the US vice-president delivered a serious speech that rose to the challenge of the moment. We must hope she succeeds in her fight against Donald Trump

Harris has promised lower prices and lower taxes for the majority of US citizens (Dave Brown)

Kamala Harris may not be the strongest candidate that the Democratic Party could have mustered if Joe Biden had given in sooner to the realities of biology. It was a missed opportunity for American democracy that a wider field could not have been tested in a full set of primary elections.

Ms Harris, after all, proved to be a weak candidate when she ran for the presidency in the primaries four years ago. She has no great record as vice-president, having been handed responsibility for immigration policy by Mr Biden, which has not been one of his administration’s successes.

She is, as she confirmed on Thursday night, a merely adequate public speaker – easily outshone by the stars who preceded her: Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton and her own running mate, Tim Walz.

However, she possesses important strengths. The most significant, perhaps, was demonstrated simply by winning the nomination. One does not become a major-party candidate for the US presidency in a competitive election by accident. As Lyndon B Johnson and Mr Biden have shown, the vice-presidency is a tried and tested route to the top, requiring a different set of political skills from those needed to win primary elections.

Ms Harris has done more, too, than merely allowing the nomination to fall into her lap when Mr Biden stumbled. There was a brief moment when the Democratic Party considered the possibility of other candidates, but she acted with some ruthlessness behind the scenes to secure her position, and the team that she assembled delivered a national convention of unprecedented unity and optimism.

This set the scene for the vice-president’s address on Thursday night. As The Independent’s Mary Dejevsky commented, the speech was “business-like, competent, what was needed”. High rhetoric would have been exciting, but it is an optional extra. If Ms Harris had failed on the basics, a few passages of high-flown oratory would not have compensated.

She promised lower prices and lower taxes for the majority of Americans. She offered to make it easier for the lower paid to buy a home, and to expand educational and professional opportunities for all. She defended women’s “right to choose”, redefined as “freedom”.

On foreign policy, she was unstinting in her support for Ukraine, and clear about the right of Israel to defend itself while condemning the suffering in Gaza and respecting Palestinian rights.

These are the right messages, for the United States and for the world. Many observers have been critical of the thinness of Ms Harris’s policies so far. This is misplaced. Policy detail is not what will defeat Donald Trump, and Ms Harris seems to be admirably focused on this larger objective.

The Independent does not believe that it would be in the interest of America or the world that Mr Trump should win a second presidential term. Ms Harris said it well: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”

In particular, Mr Trump’s role in inciting the violent storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his conduct during that perilous moment for American democracy, ought to disqualify him from public office. So it matters, for America and the world, that Ms Harris puts up the best possible fight in this election.

And it is striking that Mr Trump seems disconcerted by his new opponent in a way that he was not by Hillary Clinton eight years ago. He has even failed to give her a dismissive nickname, resorting only to mispronouncing her actual name.

The way she has conducted herself since Mr Biden announced that he would not stand for re-election, and in particular, the way she accepted her party’s nomination on Thursday night, have proved that she is capable of defeating Mr Trump. She has passed the tests that history has set her. More tests will follow, including a TV debate with Mr Trump on 10 September and unspecified interviews with journalists.

But she is as well placed as she can be, and better placed than Mr Biden was, to pass the biggest test – of winning the election on 5 November. We hope that she succeeds.