Gliding past President Donald Trump's sexist depictions of her as "mean" and "nasty," the senator from California shredded Trump's White House record with the agility that comes from her years as a courtroom prosecutor. Yet she delivered those critiques with bright notes of hope and optimism -- accentuated by the smiles that are expected from female politicians. "The President's mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and we're experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that has brought a new coalition of conscience to the streets of our country demanding change," Harris said at the afternoon event in Wilmington, Delaware. "America is crying out for leadership. Yet we have a President who cares more about himself than the people who elected him," said Harris, who abandoned her own bid for the White House less than a year ago before a single vote was cast. "As someone who has presented my fair share of arguments in court, the case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut." It was a first performance that showcased Harris' political deftness and why she will be a formidable adversary for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence this fall, both in her ability to connect with stories of average Americans struggling through the pandemic and to throw a clean punch without fear of the ramifications. In her speech, she made a direct contrast between Trump -- who recently shrugged off the more than 165,000 American Covid-19 deaths by saying, "It is what it is" -- and what she described as Biden's qualities of "empathy, his compassion, his sense of duty," adding that she and the former vice president were both "cut from the same cloth." She charged that Trump's failure to take the virus seriously, to get coronavirus testing up and running, to offer a national strategy for ending the pandemic has led to 16 million people without jobs, "a crisis of poverty, of homelessness" that is "afflicting Black, brown, and indigenous people the most" and "more than 165,000 lives cut short, many with loved ones who never got the chance to say goodbye." "It didn't have to be this way," she said. Harris also sought to convey an understanding of what average families are dealing with by pointing to the "complete chaos" over when and how to open schools: "Mothers and fathers are confused, uncertain and angry about child care and the safety of their kids at schools -- whether they'll be in danger if they go or fall behind if they don't." She eviscerated Trump's leadership failures by noting that his family's wealth had paved his way to power, charging that he had "inherited the longest economic expansion in history" from the Obama administration "and then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground." Over her career in politics -- as district attorney of San Francisco, C
