Kamala Harris makes history as first woman of color to accept a major party nomination for vice president

It was a single word tucked into a 2,033-word speech, as easily missed by a casual listener as it was a ringing signal of the historic nature of Harris’s vice-presidential nomination.

A Tamil word illustrating her mother’s Indian heritage, Harris tucked it into a reference about her diverse background and the all-encompassing way in which she defines family.

“Family is my husband Doug, who I met on a blind date set up by my best friend,” she said. “Family is our beautiful children, Cole and Ella, who as you just heard, call me Momala. Family is my sister. Family is my best friend, my nieces and my godchildren.”

Obama, famous for his stoicism in the White House, appeared to choke up during his convention speech Wednesday night while discussing minorities overcoming and fighting for the promise of American democracy.

Obama told a story about meeting Black civil rights leaders at the White House, including one who told him he never dreamed he would see a president who looks like his own grandson. The man did the math and realized that on the exact day Obama was born, “he was marching into a jail cell trying to end Jim Crow segregation in the South.”

“American workers need a fighter more than ever and Joe Biden is that person because he has done it before and I’ve seen it firsthand. He and President Obama made it easier for home care workers to organize. They extended overtime pay to more than 4 million workers.”

— Former labor secretary Hilda Solis

Overtime regulations written by the Labor Department during the Obama administration would have extended overtime pay to an estimated 4 million workers in 2016. The overtime rule would have required employers to pay time-and-a-half to employees who clocked more than 40 hours a week and earned less than $47,476 a year.

As former president Barack Obama delivered a stinging indictment of the Trump presidency and warned that America’s democracy was withering, President Trump tweeted an all-caps rebuke that included a baseless charge.

“HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GOT CAUGHT!” Trump wrote on Twitter, an apparent reference to his repeated claim that the FBI under Obama wiretapped the phones at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. There is no evidence of that. Trump previously has accused Obama of “treason,” again with no evidence to support his claim.

Obama painted Trump as an immature and cold politico who cares more about himself than American democracy — juxtaposing the man in the White House with his former vice president Biden.

“For four years now, he has shown no interest in putting in the work, no interest in finding common ground, no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends, no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves,” Obama said of Trump at the convention Wednesday evening.

President Trump plans to appear on Fox News on Thursday night, the evening of Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention accepting his party’s nomination for president.

Fox announced Wednesday night that Sean Hannity is scheduled to interview the president on his 9 p.m. Fox show on Thursday. The Democratic convention’s prime-time programming runs from 9 to 11 p.m., though Biden is likely to deliver his address in the 10 p.m. hour, when the television broadcast networks air the proceedings. Hannity is an informal adviser to Trump.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was known as the policy pacesetter during the Democratic presidential primary, gave Joe Biden her form of the highest praise during an address on Wednesday night.

“I love a good plan,” she said. “And Joe Biden has some really good plans."

She pitched his plans on promoting union jobs in manufacturing and clean energy, on increasing Social Security benefits, canceling billions in student loan debt and reshaping bankruptcy laws.

“These plans reflect a central truth: Our economic system has been rigged to give bailouts to billionaires and kick dirt in the face of everyone else,” she said. “But we can build a thriving economy by investing in families and fixing what’s broken.”

Speaking from her couch at home in Chappaqua, N.Y., the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee offered words of caution as the 2020 contest approaches.

“For four years,” Hillary Clinton said, “people have told me, I didn’t realize how dangerous he was. I wish I could do it all over. Or worse: I should have voted. Look. This can’t be another woulda, coulda, shoulda election.”

Clinton’s narrow loss four years ago could be — and has been — ascribed to any number of factors. But it’s certainly the case that had an additional 78,000 Clinton voters turned out in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she might have triumphed in both the popular and electoral votes. That’s 0.6 percent of the votes cast in those states.