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“Hello?” Harris says, looking at the phone in her hand for a moment, with a broad smile. “Hi!”
“Hey there!” says Michelle Obama, warmly.
Harris: “Aw. Hi! You’re both together! Oh, it’s good to hear you both.”
A blue screen with white text lets us know what’s going on: “The Obamas call Kamala.” Then, we return to Harris, standing by an emergency exit. “I can’t have this phone call without saying to my girl Kamala, I am proud of you,” Michelle Obama says. “This is going to be historic.”
Lauren Hitt, a Harris campaign spokesperson, confirmed that the video captured an actual phone call, and not a voice message, and added, “I hope the significance of the moment is not lost.“)
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Finally, Harris is outside in front of a black SUV, and we hear Barack Obama again. “We called to say: Michelle and I couldn’t be prouder to endorse you and to do everything we can to get you through this election and into the Oval Office.”
“My goodness,” Harris says. “Michelle, Barack, this means so much to me.”
Among the video’s millions of viewers were more than a few haters, many of them from the political right, who called it cringeworthy, cheesy or staged. Piers Morgan, the right-leaning British broadcaster, likened it to “full-on Gorgonzola.”
But for Harris and her supporters, more important was the message: The former president, who remains an enormously popular figure, had given her his blessing.
Harris couldn’t have appeared happier. As she told the Obamas: “We’re going to have some fun with this, too, aren’t we?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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