Kamala Harris kicks off 2020 campaign with Oakland Rally

Kamala Harris spoke of an America where “we welcome refugees” and denounced President Donald Trump’s border wall plan as a “medieval vanity project.”

Written by Stacey Solie

Sen. Kamala Harris of California officially kicked off her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination Sunday at an outdoor rally where she warned that the nation and the world were at “an inflection point” in history and called on all Americans to “speak truth about what’s happening” in the Trump era.

Before a crowd that her advisers estimated at more than 20,000 people, Harris threaded together a biography from her years in the Bay Area with her work as a prosecutor and a senator, and set those details against a broader populist vision about “running to be president of the people, by the people and for all people.”

Harris, 54, who became the second black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate when she took office in 2017, has joined an increasingly crowded field of Democratic candidates that lacks a front-runner. The pack is the most diverse in history, with Harris among four women serving in the Senate or House who are running for the Democratic nomination.

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In her remarks and at other recent events, she stressed unity and fighting for people, and her support for policies that are popular among Democrats, like “Medicare for all” and combating climate change. But she also laid out a vision of America and cast the 2020 election as a historic one.

“We are at an inflection point in the history of our world,” she said at the rally in downtown Oakland. “We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation. We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before. And we are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question: Who are we? Who are we as Americans?”