Will Kamala have the last laugh? Her exuberant style masks a superpower

One thing you often hear said about Vice President Kamala Harris is that she has a terrible laugh. Indeed, if you believe its critics, you’d think her laugh is a big reason why she was such a poor candidate for her party’s presidential nomination four years ago, and partly why so many people think she’d make a poor replacement for her failing boss. Harris is “unlikeable”, and one big reason is her cacophonous laugh. Donald Trump, likes to call her “laughing Kamala”. Of course he does. 

On the one hand, I generally hate the sort of political chatter that focuses on things like a candidate’s laugh. It’s one of the ways in which we in America accept forms of shallowness and meaninglessness in our politics that are so forthright as to be nihilistic. I mean, according to both game theory and the philosophy of language, people are supposed to hide their strategic intent when they use false speech to manipulate others. 

But in American politics we’ve made strategic falseness an open part of our electoral dynamics. “You know, he did a good job of ‘pivoting’ from the primaries where he said the one thing to the general election when he’s saying the totally opposite thing. That was a good pivot. He’s doing well.” When hypocrisy is this overt, vice is no longer — as the saying goes — paying tribute to virtue. Instead it’s waving dismissively at virtue and telling it: “Get lost, old man.” And nobody could possibly believe that someone’s fitness to govern hinges in any way on what their laugh sounds like. But, because the laugh might have some negative subconscious effects on some voters, we grant it real political meaning and carry on vetting candidates for the most powerful political office in the world until we’ve found someone with a better laugh. The shallowness of this is so stark that it borders on self-contradiction.

On the other hand, it’s a pretty bad laugh. It comes at you hard and weird. The cringe you feel when you hear it makes you think: “Something is not working here. Something is off.” The discomfort the laugh induces in the listener, I think, reflects a corresponding discomfort in the laugher, a nagging and unfixable mismatch between her inner nature and the public role she’s playing. The discordant notes in the laugh, in other words, are neurotic, they’re symptomatic, and, I have to admit, I have a soft spot for people whose inner selves burst out in compromising, vaguely neurotic ways, in public.

For example, along with my profound admiration for his footballing skills, I have strangely tender personal feelings toward Uruguay striker and former Liverpool ace Luis Suarez, precisely because he bites people. I’ve always viewed Suarez’s biting incidents as Freudian slips, accidental confessions of insecurity about his conspicuous teeth, his horsey overbite. Suarez is an exuberant guy, and, I think, this exuberance fuels an anxious fixation on his teeth that is totally understandable, and then, in rare moments of emotional wildness on the football pitch, and in the classic manner of the Freudian slip, he does the nightmare thing he’s consumed with not doing: he makes the whole world think about his teeth. When those incidents have happened, I’ve given brief consideration to the startled guy with fresh bite-marks on his shoulder, but my enduring sympathies lie with the biter, Luis Suarez, whose morbid unease with his own teeth has just performed itself again, in public. 

Likewise, when one of those discomfiting laughs escapes from Kamala Harris, to circulate for the world’s mockery as viral content on the internet, my deepest reflex is not to mock her as well but to sympathise with her. Like Luis Suarez laying out his dental anxieties through acts of biting, Harris seems to be speaking in subtext when her laugh bursts the bounds of normality: “I know this is unnatural!” she’s saying. “I’m trying to be ‘likeable’ but I can’t keep it from being weird!”

I think it’s really a sign of mental health that she can’t always meet the performative requirements of being a politician, that the contradiction between being a real person and straining to be likeable and electable sometimes displays itself in these symptomatic flare-ups. If this seems obscure, consider as illustration the contrast between Harris and Bill Clinton. Like Harris’s, Clinton’s personality was so big it had a physical presence of its own, but, unlike Harris, he was uncannily good (at least in public) at containing his powerful inner force, making it serve rather than complicate his vocation as a political actor. His animal charisma rarely flagged as he contradicted himself on policy and when, in moments of legal and political jeopardy, he covered his ass with obvious lies. He was at odds with many things in his years as president, but he rarely, if ever, gave off that queasy vibe that said he was at odds with himself. 

It’s to her credit, I think, that Kamala Harris can’t pull off the same trick, that her exuberant inner self hasn’t been entirely subsumed by the political character she’s chosen to play. But Harris is at odds with herself, and thus prone to her moments of spectacular awkwardness, only part of the time, generally while addressing only one segment of her potential audience — activists and loyalists of her own party.

These people, her admirers and allies, are the real tormentors of her authentic self. They bring a mix of personal adoration and niche ideological fixations that requires a particular mode of expression from the politicians they embrace, especially those who tick the higher-salience identity boxes. For them, Harris is above all her race and gender. She is the first female Vice President of the United States, and the first black female Vice President of the United States, and also the first Indian (or South Asian) female Vice President of the United States. In this role, she is often required to sit down with women who also bear the same identity descriptors as she does and talk about herself in the manner of an actress opening up to a talk show host, but with the added expectation that she dwell on the census traits that link her with people she’s talking to. After all, she’s there as a woman, or as a black woman, or as a South Asian woman. This might seem like it would be the easiest of her PR tasks, just sitting before adoring listeners and being her ostensible self, but this is where she creates her most cringeworthy content. 

In one example, which was so odd that The Daily Show built a sketch around it, Harris is giving an extemporaneous speech and barks out the question, “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” — and then she laughs her unnerving laugh. From there she goes on to say some vague stuff about how a person exists as a moment in the larger flow of time. The regular listener hears this and thinks she’s being kooky and New Agey, and the The Daily Show plays on this sense, but she’s really doing something else, or, she’s trying to do something else and screwing it up.

With her rhetorical question about a “coconut tree”, she’s supposedly quoting her Indian mother. But, in the way she says it, she’s also trying to capture a certain idiom of rural, Southern blackness, to associate herself with wise black grannies and aunties answering the callow arrogance of young people. “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” is supposed to mean “Child, you belong to a whole history that you apparently need reminding of”. Such sayings sound wise and earthy coming from them, but when Harris — daughter of a Jamaican economist and an Indian biologist who grew up in Berkeley and Montreal — says this stuff, people don’t hear the folk wisdom of the black South. They just hear a lawyer talking about coconuts for some reason. The digression about the flow of time is likewise an attempt to capture a black American way of speaking of ancestors, the debts the young owe to the old, and the living to the dead, but from Harris this sense doesn’t come off at all, and instead of earthy she sounds spacey. 

Just as her obligatory performance as a celebrity of identity politics brings out her awkward side, Harris has looked weakest and most rudderless in competition with other Democrats. One large political memory that dogs her, and makes people doubt her electability, is her performance in debates ahead of the 2020 Democratic nomination, when she suffered badly at the hands of her rivals. But she suffered for reasons that would actually be strengths were she to face Trump this November. That is, she started her political career as a prosecutor, first in Oakland, where I now live and where Harris was born, and then in San Francisco. And as a prosecutor she did things that the liberals of 2019 and 2020 briefly believed they didn’t like, and that Democratic presidential hopefuls temporarily pretended to be against, but that pretty much everyone else heartily supports. She prosecuted people who’d committed crimes. She saw them convicted and sent to jail and prison. This made her an easy target for primary opponents playing to Left-wing voters. 

As if anticipating this problem while writing her two books — her (comically bad) 2020 campaign memoir The Truths We Hold and her (occasionally good) 2009 book on criminal justice Smart on Crime — she describes her work as a prosecutor in terms carefully chosen not to offend liberal readers. When she’s bringing the state’s coercive and carceral power down upon criminals in these books, they’re typically child murderers, child molesters and wife beaters, rather than muggers or armed robbers or men who’ve merely killed other men. This is Hollywood criminology, in which the bad guys are rousingly bad and their victims have a sort of categorial innocence, and even liberals can cheer at the dramatic climax where a criminal convict goes to prison. Of course, it didn’t protect her in her first presidential run, because Harris also prosecuted other sorts of criminals, very successfully, and pushed hard-nosed (and sometimes misconceived) measures as California’s Attorney General. She was thus roasted by her primary opponents, for her association with the impure institutions of criminal justice. Trying to escape this predicament, she waffled awkwardly. 

As the Democrat’s nominee in the national election, she won’t have this problem. In fact, the one time we’ve seen Harris on the national stage where she didn’t have to satisfy the niche politics and personalised cultural fetishes of the Left wing of the Democratic Party was the 2020 Vice Presidential Debate, when she clearly outperformed Mike Pence. As the (presumptive) Democratic nominee, she already stands in florid contrast with the man she’s (presumably) replacing, Joe Biden, with his pinched mouth and stunned little eyes, and his uncertain speech which increasingly sounds like something whispered from a head propped on a hospital pillow. Biden’s last months have placed a premium on qualities Harris has been accused of having too much of — physical energy and vitality, a brain capable of lively and spontaneous if not brilliant cogitation. We might find that, after the troubling decline of President Biden, the country is fonder of laughing Kamala’s exuberant nature than Republicans are bargaining on.  

More to the point, she would stand in challenging contrast to her 78-year-old opponent, Donald Trump. As I said, I don’t generally find this beauty pageant stuff very edifying, but Biden’s disturbing frailty made it relevant, and, anyway, it’s Trump’s supporters who’ve made his vitality a campaign issue, especially in the wake of his photogenic brush with assassination.

Unfortunately for Trump and his fans, the rush of adrenaline that stood him from the floor of that Pennsylvania stage, triumphantly grazed, to shake his fist and yell “Fight!” a few times with blood scored across his face like warpaint, wore off almost at once. His 90-minute acceptance speech at the Republican Convention a few days later — in which he quickly abandoned his prepared text and lapsed into a list of complaints that he himself has rendered hackneyed with repetition — was one of the great missed opportunities in America’s recent political history. Handed such a propitious moment, Trump lacked the imagination, the discipline, the energy to exploit it. The fact that it went listlessly, boringly on for an hour and a half didn’t express stamina and vitality so much as inertia — Trump’s urge to complain about the same old things being an entity that, once set in motion, will tend to remain in motion.

Harris, by contrast, has been a lively, relaxed, concise campaign speaker since her quick and dubious coronation. She’s in an enviable if not paradoxical position, where “(presumptive) Democratic Presidential Nominee” is the most comfortable, least risky, least political role she’s played in recent years. Running for president lets her be less of a political animal, as we’ve come to understand that species in the era of presidential primaries and personality contests. She no longer needs to placate progressives with waffling and apologies, which she isn’t very good at. And, between now and November, she won’t have to sit for intimate conversations with her sisters of political identity, where she’s often overdone the chummy relating and ended up generating cringeworthy content. She just has to be what she already is, an ambitious ex-prosecutor who wants millions of people she doesn’t know to vote her into a better job.  

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