Hey y’all,
A right-leaning friend of mine who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but is voting for him this year, cited Kamala Harris’ laugh as one of the things she dislikes about the Vice President cum presumptive Democratic nominee. Trump himself ridicules Harris for laughing, but whether he’s responding to his base of they’re responding to him I don’t know. It’s a chicken or egg situation.
One of the most enduring criticisms of Harris since she announced her candidacy in 2019 is her inability to connect with voters. A few months ago, I agreed with the assessment of the most centrist dad guy I know when he said she simply did not have the same gifts of oration, of persuasion, or relatability which carried Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden to the White House. She was more like an Al Gore or Hillary Clinton - knowledgable wonks, yes, but hardly someone you “want to grab a beer with.”
Harris supporters can argue the “beer test,” as we’ll call it, is a terrible metric by which to pick a president. Perhaps. It is a metric voters employ, though, and no amount of tutting will change that basic fact. I think MSNBC host Joy Reid made this point most cogently following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance:
“The president is an avatar for the American people. The American people have a high opinion of themselves. This country invented the super hero for a reason, because the American people think they’re Captain America. They think we’re strong and robust and they want the president to look that way… Americans want the president to represent them in the world in a certain way that has vigor, that has strength.”
The thing a lot of folks forget about the president is that he - or she, if Harris finally breaks the glass ceiling - is not just the head of government like the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The President of the United States is also our head of state. There’s a reason His Majesty The King addresses the U.K. at times of national crisis and grief, but in America it is the President who is called upon to be consoler-in-chief. Our executive plays both roles, essentially being the enactor of a policy agenda while also being the living embodiment of our nation. A prime minister wears one hat. A president wears many.
Since at least 1960, with the advent of modern television debates, image and relatability have become perhaps the two most important factors in presidential races. One must not simply be competent. One must connect with the soul of the electorate.
Kamala Harris has had a difficult time doing that, but the surge of electricity which has animated her campaign since Biden stepped aside and endorsed her indicates those difficulties may be abating. In her 2019 campaign, Harris had a hard time striking the right tone. She was to the left of Joe Biden but to the right of Elizabeth Warren, and her background as a prosecutor seemed more like baggage in a primary on the eve of the 2020 George Floyd protests (remembering Floyd was simply the point things boiled over; racist violence against Black folks in particular was an issue simmering since at least the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012).
I can’t read Harris’ mind, but I also suspect there was a certain amount of self-restraint born of concern over racist and sexist attacks. We certainly saw the latter deployed at Hillary Clinton plenty in 2016 and before. Clinton was too shrill, they said. She looked too angry or not cheerful enough, they said. When she was jovial, they criticised her laugh; remember the balloon memes? I do.
The 2016 election seems like yesterday to me, but in reality it was a long time ago. Since Clinton lost, the nation has experienced the #MeToo movement, suffered four years of Donald Trump’s blatant racism and misogyny, returned the gavel to the first female Speaker of the House, and elected its first female vice president. 2024 is a very different world.
Which brings me back to Harris. I’m left wondering whether “Harris can’t connect” was less a product of Harris not being able to connect with voters and more a product of, well, misogyny. Was the media holding Harris to a different standard than Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Quite possibly. No one can argue Mike Pence is charismatic - the man’s as boring as the endless cornfields of Indiana - yet that was seen as at best as a benefit and at worst a neutral fact about him.
I’m also left wondering, as I mentioned, if Harris herself (or perhaps more accurately, her campaign staff) fell into this same trap in 2019. Was Harris holding back? Or did we - did I - simply not pay enough attention to the woman in front of us?
I don’t know. What I do know is that the Harris we see today - energetic, jovial, excited, optimistic, confident, and most crucially, relatable - is the Harris we need. This is a woman meeting the moment, and in doing so I think she can save the Republic.
My opinion on Harris began to shift when I saw this video of Jonathan Capehart, a journalist with The Washington Post and MSNBC, getting advice on how to best cook a Thanksgiving turkey from none other than Harris herself. The video was posted in 2019, but I don’t recall seeing it until a year or two later. In it, Harris is delightful - confident, down-to-earth, and clearly passionate about culinary arts.
It isn’t that she was talking about cooking that spoke to me, though an uncharitable reading of this could interpret the subject of the video as latent misogyny. Rather, it’s that she was so relaxed. This was before an interview, and in interviews in 2019 Harris could seem stiff and overly prepared. In this video, though, we didn’t see Kamala Harris the prosecutor, the senator, and the presidential candidate. We saw Kamala Harris the person.
Harris is at her best when she’s allowed to be unabashedly herself. We’ve seen this in the years since she was sworn in as vice president. In talking about abortion, she effectively communicates the dire consequences of Dodds while also connecting to the concerns of women and even men who are afraid of losing other rights. We see this in her coconut comments, relaying a delightful phrase her mother used to remind us all we exist in the context. And we see this in her laugh - her infectious, contagious, gorgeous laugh.
Kamala Harris is competent. Kamala Harris is poised. Kamala Harris is sharp. Kamala Harris is intelligent, thoughtful, and imminently capable. She is all of these things.
But you know what else Kamala Harris is? Fun! And funny! She’s not afraid to be, as the kids say, “cringe.” She’s so comfortable in her own skin and leaning into everything that makes her unique and quirky that she makes us feel like we can be unique and quirky while also being utterly and unimpeachably capable.
The Harris I see today is not the Harris I saw in 2019. This is a Harris who is unbothered and unafraid. This is Kamala Harris the woman, and I think America is really going to like her.
I mean, come on. After nearly a decade of division wrought by Donald Trump, a man who can best be described as a walking scowl, doesn’t it feel good to laugh again? Donald Trump is campaigning on vengeance and retribution. Kamala Harris is campaigning on doing the hard work of not just fixing what has been broken but building a brighter tomorrow - and she’s gonna do it with a smile on her face. Ain’t that refreshing?
Americans are not typically known as an angry people. We are a nation of optimists. Perhaps it’s in our DNA; so many of us come, or our ancestors came, from across oceans and great distances. To cross The Atlantic in the 18th century, or to set out across prairies and deserts in the 19th century, to cross the Pacific in the 20th century or to trek the Darien Gap in the 21st, just to start over with nothing, or next to nothing requires a level of courage and optimism that is almost unimaginable.
This is who we come from, though. It’s something many Europeans pick up on but Americans ourselves, perhaps like fish who can’t tell you what water is, rarely consider. We’re known abroad as a smiley people. We smile a lot. Perhaps that’s because smiling is the only thing we know to do. Pessimism is anathema to the American spirit.
Kamala Harris understands this in a way Donald Trump, whose entire life is one giant grudge against everyone he perceives to have wronged him, never will. The massive groundswell of support she’s received over the past few days indicates to me she has her finger on the pulse of this nation in ways Trump no longer does, if indeed he ever did. (Remember, this is a man who has never won the popular vote.)
“What can be, unburdened by what has been,” Harris famously says. Damn if I’ve never heard the American spirit so perfectly summed up in one quotation. She gets its. She gets us.
I firmly believe the American people are tired. We are tired of the hate. Tired of the division. Tired of every single push notification being an existential crisis. We want politics to be what it used to be - civil, with robust disagreements between people who were not disagreeable, and with leaders who can take a joke or make one at their own expense.
Ronald Reagan understood this when he ushered America out of the divisive 1970s and into a new American morning.
Bill Clinton understood this when he proved he felt our pain.
Barack Obama understood this when he proudly declared that “yes, we can.”
Kamala Harris understands this today. “What can be, unburdened by what has been.”
It’s a long way to November. A lot can happen, as the past four weeks have shown. Predicting whether Harris will defeat Trump is a fool’s errand. I don’t know, and neither does anybody else.
What I do know, though, is that I have never seen a campaign rollout like this in my 20 years in politics. What on Sunday morning felt like the summer of 1968 today feels like the summer of 2008. Democrats are energised. Our candidate is too. She feels fresh, forward-thinking, utterly in tune with the mood of the nation and in touch with everyday Americans who are also ready to just move on from the current Trumpian era.
Kamala Harris is the epitome of the old Disney song “Whistle While You Work.” Our politics are too devoid of joy, of optimism, of unbridled hope and potential. Harris knows she has a tough job ahead of her, but while she does it she wants to make America laugh again. And we desperately need a laugh.
Y’all be blessed.
x. Skylar