Oprah Winfrey surprise speaker at DNC: ‘Decency and respect are on the ballot’
(CHICAGO) — Oprah Winfrey, making a surprise appearance, called on Americans to choose “joy” and “common sense over nonsense” during a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night.
“What we’re going to do is elect Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States,” she said after taking the stage to one of the loudest receptions of the night.
Oprah laid out the 2024 election as a series of choices voters have to make, and singled out independents and undecided voters — while noting that she herself is a registered independent.
“More than anything, you know, this is true, that decency and respect are on the ballot in 2024, and just plain common sense,” she said. “Common sense tells you that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can give us decency and respect.”
She urged voters to further choose “optimism over cynicism,” “common sense over nonsense” and “the sweet promise of tomorrow over the bitter return to yesterday.”
“We won’t go back. We won’t be set back, pushed back, bullied back, kicked back. We’re not going back!” she said, as the crowd chanted, “We’re not going back!”
Toward the end of her fired-up remarks, Oprah told the crowd, “Let us choose truth, let us choose honor and let us choose joy!” — emphasizing the word joy, a common theme for Harris and the convention.
“Because that’s the best of America. But more than anything else, let us choose freedom. Why? Because that’s the best of America. We’re all Americans. And together, let’s all choose Kamala Harris,” she said, saying the name “Kamala Harris” in her signature bellow.
The first time Oprah put her legacy brand behind a political candidate was with Barack Obama in 2008.
“That was some epic fire,” she said of the Obamas speeches last night, taking inspiration from Michelle Obama’s call on the crowd to “do something!”
Oprah did not mention Donald Trump by name but appeared to reference the former president and his running mate JD Vance.
“America is an ongoing project,” she said. “It requires commitment. It requires being open to the hard work and the hard work of democracy, and every now and then, it requires standing up to life’s bullies.”
She then brought up Vance’s “childless cat lady” comments to cheers.
“Despite what some would have you think we are not so different from our neighbors,” she said. “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about a homeowner’s race or religion. We don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just try to do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.”
Oprah gave tribute to Tessie Prevost Williams, who died earlier this year. Williams was one of four Black girls who helped integrate New Orleans public schools in 1960.
She then tied Williams to Harris, saying Williams “paved the way for another young girl who, nine years later, became part of the second class to integrate the public schools in Berkeley, California.”
Harris famously reflected on her experience as a child being bused to school each day. During a spar with President Joe Biden on the debate stage on busing, Harris told him: “That little girl was me.”
(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump’s advisers may have publicly insisted he doesn’t need any debate prep, but the former president is preparing more than he’s letting on, sources tell ABC News.
Trump is holding informal policy sessions with a small team of advisers, including GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz and former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who once challenged Vice President Kamala Harris on the debate stage in 2019, the sources said.
Gaetz has been firing questions at Trump around some of the more challenging issues, such as his legal troubles, including his federal indictments on election interference and retaining classified documents, criminal conviction in the New York hush-money case and stance on abortion, according to the sources.
Two people familiar with Trump’s preparation also told ABC News that Trump has been briefed on Harris’ past debates, including the headline-making moment when she hit back at former Vice President Mike Pence with the words, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.” That exchange went viral then, and Trump has privately told his allies he won’t let that happen to him.
Sources told ABC News that Trump’s recent press address on Friday has left some on the GOP side with pre-debate concerns.
While Trump has continued with his campaign schedule, his movements on Friday puzzled some Republicans. Trump, following his appeal of the $5 million a federal jury awarded writer E. Jean Carroll after finding him liable for sexually assaulting and defaming her, came before the cameras rattling off — in often vivid detail — the accusations of sexual misconduct from multiple women over the years. All of which he has denied.
Meanwhile, as ABC News previously reported, Harris has been engaged in traditional debate prep in Pittsburgh.
The cameras caught her in the city on Sunday on a walk with second gentleman, Doug Emhoff. But, she ignored two shouted questions on Trump’s claims that he’ll jail his political opponents and how she plans to respond to personal attacks from Trump on the debate stage.
On Saturday, Trump posted on TruthSocial, writing, “… the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.”
Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 election have continually been disproven.
Harris, on Sunday, did respond to a third question shouted at her by the media about whether she was ready by echoing, “ready,” and giving a thumbs up before disappearing around the side of a building.
In related news, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, will appear in the spin room following the debate, ABC News has confirmed.
The ABC News presidential debate will take place on Sept. 10 at 9 p.m. ET and air on ABC and stream on ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu.
(CHICAGO) — As the economy tops lists of voter concerns ahead of the 2024 election, some speakers at the Democratic National Convention have sought to emphasize how much the economy has improved under President Joe Biden.
When Biden took office in early 2021, the U.S. was in the midst of the “worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on Tuesday. Back then, the economy was “reeling,” said former President Barack Obama later in the night.
The claims contrast with Republican depictions of the downturn in 2020 and the ensuing recovery. Former President Donald Trump has faulted COVID-19 for derailing the nation’s economy, while saying the U.S. had recovered in some areas by the time Biden took office.
“Nobody’s ever seen an economy [like ours] pre-COVID, and then we handed over a stock market that was substantially higher than just prior to COVID,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention last month.
An accurate picture of recent economic performance defies the narratives put forward by both parties, economists told ABC News.
The economy had already emerged from the pandemic-induced recession and begun to recover by the time Biden took office, experts said. However, the U.S. remained well below pre-pandemic levels in some key measures of economic health, including employment. Biden faced the difficult task of revitalizing the economy and getting Americans back to work, they added.
“There are kudos to be given to all the different sides,” Frederick Floss, an economics professor at Buffalo State University, told ABC News. “It’s very complex.”
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the economy performed robustly by some important measures. In February 2020, the unemployment rate stood at 3.5%, matching its lowest level in more than 50 years. Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product increased at a solid annualized clip of 2.1% over the final three months of 2019.
The onset of the pandemic — as well as ensuing shutdowns across much of the U.S. — plunged the economy into a recession. On March 12, 2020, the S&P 500 plummeted nearly 10%, registering its worst single-day performance in more than three decades. The following month, the unemployment rate skyrocketed to almost 15%.
In March 2020, Trump signed into law a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package, including direct payments of $1,200 and expanded unemployment insurance, among other measures. Months later, in December, Trump enacted a second $900 billion round of government support.
Over the period, much of the economy reopened and business activity returned to something resembling normal.
In turn, economic growth soared over the second half of 2020. The unemployment rate fell to 6.7% by the end of the year, nearly double pre-pandemic levels but well below the peak reached right after the outbreak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 ended the year at record highs.
The COVID-induced recession lasted two months in the spring of 2020, the shortest U.S. recession ever recorded, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit organization that serves as the recognized authority on economic downturns.
Economists disagreed over the extent to which Trump deserves credit for the initial recovery, saying it resulted from a mix of federal support that he had enacted as well as the withdrawal of restrictions imposed by state and local governments.
“It was a very short-lived recession,” Matias Vernengo, a professor of economics at Bucknell University, told ABC News. “That obviously happened under the Trump administration.
Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, added: “It’s faster than we’ve ever seen in any previous crisis but no other recession has had that form where we locked everybody up. It’s much easier to get it back when demand is still there.”
Despite its improvement over the latter part of 2020, the economy remained far from healthy when Biden took office, especially on the all-important issue of employment, economists said.
The U.S. lost 21.9 million jobs in March and April of 2020, U.S. government data showed. At the outset of the following year, the economy still stood about 10 million jobs short. In addition, pandemic-induced bottlenecks continued to snarl supply chains, restricting economic output worldwide.
“A fair statement is that the economy at the end of 2020 had recovered substantially but there were still millions of job losses that the economy hadn’t recovered from,” Dennis Hoffman, an economist at Arizona State University, told ABC News.
Rothstein, of the University of California, Berkeley, said the economy remained in peril at the outset of the Biden administration in early 2021.”I think calling it an economic crisis is totally fair,” Rothstein said.
Still, Rothstein added: “We did some right things in 2020 and we did some right things after 2020.”
In March 2021, Biden signed a $1.9 billion economic stimulus package of his own, including another round of $1,400 direct payments as well as an expansion of the child tax credit. The following year, Biden enacted the $891 billion Inflation Reduction Act and the $280 billion CHIPS and Sciences Act.
Over the course of the Biden administration, the labor market expanded at a rapid pace while economic growth quickened. By 2022, the economy had recovered all of the jobs lost during the pandemic. In January 2023, the unemployment rate fell even lower than where it stood pre-pandemic.
Economists who spoke with ABC News credited Biden-backed government stimulus for the reemergence of U.S. economic strength, but they differed over whether the spending had contributed to a severe bout of inflation experienced during that period.
“We were able to recover as an economy and job creation has been pretty remarkable,” said Hoffman, of Arizona State University. “That became a very successful program — it also brought inflation.”
Jason Furman, a professor at Harvard University and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, estimated that Biden’s American Rescue Plan added between 1 percentage point and 4 percentage points to the inflation rate in 2021, Roll Call reported. Michael Strain, of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, estimated that the legislation added 3 percentage points to inflation.
Vernengo, of Bucknell University, disagreed, attributing the bout of inflation to an imbalance of supply and demand that arose in the aftermath of the pandemic. “Inflation has more or less vanished,” Vernengo said, saying the moderation of prices indicates that the problem owed primarily to a temporary economic shock.
Price increases have cooled significantly from a peak of more than 9%, but inflation remains nearly a percentage point higher than the Fed’s target rate of 2%.
Vernengo, of Bucknell University, said both major parties have offered up misleading accounts of the 2020 economic downturn and the recovery that took hold afterward. “The story is somewhere in the middle,” Vernengo said.
(WASHINGTON) — Libertarian Party nominee for president Chase Oliver condemned a reportedly now-deleted comment from the New Hampshire Libertarian Party on X that appeared to encourage violence against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Oliver called the NHLP’s post “abhorrent” in his statement shared on X Sunday.
“I 100% condemn the statement from LPNH regarding Kamala Harris. It is abhorrent and should never have been posted,” Oliver wrote.
A New Hampshire reporter shared a screenshot of the since-deleted NHLP post, which reportedly read, “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.”
The NHLP addressed removing an earlier X post on Sunday, writing, “We deleted a tweet because we don’t want to break the terms of this website we agreed to. It’s a shame that even on a “free speech” website that libertarians cannot speak freely. Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority.”
Oliver went on to say in his statement that his party is committed to “non-aggression.” Chase Oliver, 2024 Libertarian presidential candidate, speaks at the Des Moines Register political soa…
“As Libertarians, we condemn the use of force, whether committed by governments, individuals, or other political entities,” he continued. “We are dedicated to the principle of non-aggression and to peaceful solutions to conflict. This is also something we pledge as part of attaining party membership.”
Following the posting of his statement, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire responded with a homophobic slur in a series of posts, accusing Oliver of being an “infiltrating leftist snake.”
The LPNH has not responded to ABC News’ request for comment.