Rich’s excellent column this morning relates that, in her “closing argument” before Election Day, Vice President Harris invoked the traditional Latin motto of the United States:

In her “closing argument” speech at the Ellipse, the vice president issued a passionate call for unity. “What Donald Trump has never understood,” she said, “is that ‘e pluribus unum, out of many, one’ isn’t just a phrase on a dollar bill. It is a living truth about the heart of our nation.”

It amused me, and not just because progressive Democratic commitment to identity politics is the antithesis of a mission to unite diverse factions into an identifiable American nation. Harris, in addition, reminded me of another sitting Democratic vice president, speaking 30 years ago, before he too sought the presidency (very narrowly losing the 2000 election). Lee Habeeb wrote about it in our pages in 2013:

It was, it seemed, a slip of the tongue. Al Gore was giving a speech in 1994 in Milwaukee when he uttered these words: “We can build a collective civic space large enough for all our separate identities, that we can be ‘e pluribus unum’ — out of one, many.”
Out of one, many. That’s how the then-vice president of the United States described the Latin phrase that has adorned the Great Seal of the United States since the late 18th century.
Gore was ridiculed for what some thought was a mistake. But he should have been praised by his allies, because it is precisely how they view the uniquely American idea of the melting pot. They don’t like it. They don’t want us all to melt into a common culture and set of ideals. Far better, goes their logic, to divide us along racial, ethnic, and class lines.

Vice President Harris’s Latin is better, but it was Vice President Gore who nailed his party’s vision of America.