Washington:
US Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday acknowledged the uphill climb to defeating Donald Trump in November, but said her newly minted presidential campaign would overcome her Republican rival’s “wild lies”.
As Trump prepared to address a bitcoin conference in Tennessee, Harris spoke at a fundraising event in Massachusetts with celebrity guests including singer-songwriter James Taylor and cellist Yoyo Ma.
“We are the underdogs in this race, but this is a people-powered campaign,” she told the crowd at the event, which her campaign said would raise $1.4 million.
“You may have noticed that Donald Trump has resorted to some wild lies about my record. And some of what he and his running mate are saying, well, it’s just weird,” she said, the latest joke Democrats used in describing Republicans’ attacks.
The latest of these were Trump’s comments at a religious convention Friday evening, where he accused Harris of being an anti-Semite who plans to authorize the murder of newborn babies.
“She doesn’t like Jewish people. She doesn’t like Israel. That’s how it is,” he said of the vice president, whose husband is Jewish.
In perhaps his most outrageous statement of the evening, he claimed that Harris wanted to enshrine in federal law the right to “pull the baby out of the womb in the eighth, ninth month and even after birth – to execute the baby after birth ‘.
Trump, who at 78 is now the oldest major party nominee in history, is doing his utmost to reorient the election against someone 20 years his junior after expecting he would face with an 81-year-old incumbent Joe Biden beset by concerns about weaknesses.
Harris is trying to become the first female president in US history and is tasked with quickly mounting a campaign against an opponent who has been in near-permanent re-election mode since taking office in 2016.
Her late-start bid for the White House has gained early momentum. Polls that showed Biden steadily falling behind Trump now show Harris in a race that’s too close to call.
She has received support from Democratic heavyweights, including Biden himself and most recently Barack and Michelle Obama.
Torianna Parrish, 34, was among the crowd that greeted Harris upon her arrival Saturday afternoon at the airport in Westfield, Massachusetts.
“I wanted to show that there is strength in numbers. I wanted to show my support,” she said.
“We support her and we want her to make this country what it should be.”
Harris was introduced at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield by Taylor, who said, “Let us honor the woman and the moment and may our fervent support be the wind in her sails. Our hope goes with her and she stands for us all.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)