But it is telling that Harris should think of herself as an underdog. As she has done all her professional life, it seems, she is basing her strength on what she wants to sell as her historical weakness — as a woman, as a black woman, as a woman of South Asian descent. This former prosecutor seems only to excel at special pleading. It is excruciating that an unimpressive, incompetent-seeming figure like Harris should be the one person able to obstruct Trump’s plans to cause chaos on the grandest scale.
Having said that, I intend to vote for Harris. If what the Republicans say about current Democratic machinations to ensure their victory is true — I hope it is — I will vote for her several times. I would vote for Gumby if that were the Democratic candidate. But if Harris is going to win, she is going to have to find someone to write her own Jeremiah Wright speech for her. (No, I am not saying that she cannot write a speech like that because she is female/black/of South Asian descent. I am saying that she can’t because she can’t. Let Michelle Obama write it.) The challenge will be to talk about the particular ways in which Americans suffer now, rather than mouth pieties about what has become a boutique, self-serving caricature of social injustice.
After Trump implied that Harris uses her various group identities as vehicles for political and social advancement, liberals rushed to celebrate the brutality of it all. The New York Times ran a piece with the following headline and standfirst: “Trump Remarks on Harris Evoke a Haunting and Unsettling History: White America has long sought to define racial categories — and who can belong to them.” What followed was the white-owned — reportedly a mere 12% of The Times’ employees are black — paper’s numbing, antediluvian bromides about how white people define race.
In fact, many Americans agreed with Trump. Harris is a type, known both to exasperated whites, and also to talented and accomplished black people who are used to tolerating both white inferiority in high places and, with sadness and understanding, the race-opportunism of certain black figures. Harris comes across as someone who, on account of her deft manipulation of group affiliation, has never been criticised in a substantive way to her face, and who therefore cannot tolerate criticism. Allow a tasteless joke from my own special, protected group: What does a Jewish-American princess say when she knocks over a Ming vase? “It’s okay, I’m alright!” That’s Harris.
It is remarkable that she retained her embarrassing nervous giggle for so many years. Did nobody point out how alienating it was? And now the sudden disappearance of the laugh is nearly as unnerving as the laugh itself. This indifference to the insular way she comes across is obvious to everyone. It is, perhaps, the result of both a flaw in temperament — watch: she never connects with an interlocutor, thus the laugh, now de-escalated into a maddeningly knowing smile, meant to fill the emptiness —and a reliance on the rarefied liberal snow-globe she has thrived in her entire professional life.
The election is hers to lose. And she will lose it if she doesn’t embrace all those people, of every race and background, who do not want to see Trump back in power, but who do not want to experience on a national level the insulting deception and fix-is-in that they sometimes encounter in their daily lives. With the Democratic Convention taking place next week, Harris needs to, with all the charm she is able to muster, raise the issue of her manipulation of identity in order to laugh it — with a real, genuine laugh — away. “Hey, I use whatever I can. As we all do. Donald would love to be a black, South-Asian woman. He’d put it on a T-shirt and sell it on X.” Something like that. She needs to directly address white people who suffer, not like 18th-century slave-masters, but like humans who rarely think about race, and say that she will be their president. She needs to bravely say that no one is born indecent because they are white. That no one is born indecent because they are anything.
“The election is hers to lose. And she will lose it if she doesn’t embrace all those people, of every race and background, who do not want to see Trump back in power.”
She needs to say that she understands how the idea that boys can become girls and vice versa can strike some people as unnatural, even perverse. Then she needs to wonder aloud how liberating it must be to be someone entirely the opposite of yourself. “Maybe we all need to calm down and spend one day dressing up as each other. I’ll be Steve Bannon.” She needs to tell people they can keep their gas stoves and cars. “You tell me when the storms and power outages and heat waves become too much. Then I will do whatever you think needs to be done.” That’s populism.
She needs to tell a story about black lovers arranging to meet in a small southern town by the local Confederate monument. You are young and in love. They are defeated and dead: trophies of your happiness. She needs to tell a poised epic about good black cops and good white cops hating bad black cops and bad white cops, and about good cops catching bad guys without harming good guys in bad neighbourhoods, so that people’s good kids can live long enough to get into a good neighbourhood. She needs to say that physical illness, mental pain, heartbreak and death have no colour. She needs to acknowledge the narrow world she comes out of, and then ask people to believe that she is larger than her environment. Then she needs to invite everyone to help her change their environment.
True, it won’t be Jon Meacham, the former editor of Newsweek who ran the magazine into the ground before reappearing as Joe Biden’s main ideas-man and speechwriter, and who kept Biden sounding vapid and banal for four years. From Meacham’s lily-white speech to the 2020 Democratic Convention: “In its finest hours America’s soul has been animated by the proposition that we are all created equal and by the imperative to ensure that we are treated equally.” It was mind-numbing banality like that which used to make Trump seem like Voltaire. Which at times made Trump, for all his dissembling, sound so honest he seemed black.
No. Harris needs the gripping candour of Obama 16 years ago. Without some kind of electrifying departure from routine politics — Obamaesque, or Trumpian, for that matter; whatever works — and some soaring, eloquent acknowledgment and then disavowal of the pious groupthink that put her where she is today, and that has driven people away from the Democratic Party, she will never win. “It’s okay, I’m alright.” Somebody has to level with her about that.
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