How Kamala Harris Is Already Changing the Face of Presidential Power
"I have not been the biggest fan of Kamala Harris, but to my surprise, the candidate who underwhelmed in 2020 is gone. I have watched all of candidate Harris’s public appearances since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for a sense of how she intends to run and possibly govern. The audiences have been vastly different, among them: the annual conclave of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, a National Federation of Teachers convention and the Philadelphia rally where the Harris-Walz ticket made its first official appearance.
What I took away: Kamala Harris is a different candidate than we saw four years ago. She is even a different rhetorician than we saw six months ago.
Nominee Harris lands her applause lines. The former prosecutor is comfortable going on the attack. Her most consistent message is that Donald Trump wants to send America back to the Dark Ages. Unlike her predecessor, she relishes calling Trump out by name. Even her wacky humor, which has been mocked on social media, suddenly works. She sounds authentic. That’s the holy grail of electoral politics. Every wide-jawed cackle she offers the audience, every twinkle in her eye as she pokes at Trump — it all comes off as someone who is in on the joke. That is hard for any candidate but it is an almost impossible tightrope for a Black female candidate to walk.
Authenticity is a mirage. Americans crave the performance of authenticity as a sign that our values are in safe hands — hands just like ours. Of course, people who study this stuff for a living don’t quite agree on what authenticity is. It’s a “you know it when you see it” situation. Political candidates have to negotiate ideas about identity with an audience’s expectations of who should be in power. A tall white guy with a healthy head of hair simply looks presidential.
That’s where gender tripped up Hillary Clinton, the first, most viable female candidate for president. Americans were used to looking at her — as first lady, as a congresswoman, as secretary of state and as a national obsession. But for many reasons, a lot of voters (although not a majority of voters) did not think she was authentic enough to be president. She never figured out how to communicate presidential power during her campaign. She couldn’t make the idea of a president look like a woman.
Kamala Harris has an even more difficult task: She has to make the presidency look like a Black woman.
It would be easy to assume that means her challenges are a mash-up of Barack Obama’s race problem and Hillary’s gender problem. But that is wrong. Harris has a unique challenge about what her race and gender mean together.
Research shows that Black women struggle to authentically wield power as leaders, from the C-suite to the ballot box. That means she needs to win over a lot of voters who have never, ever engaged with or imagined a Black female leader. Political punditry pretends to predict the future. But polls, focus groups, campaign experience — it is all based on historical precedent. There is no playbook for a President Kamala Harris because presidential politics has never imagined a Kamala Harris.
On the one hand, that leaves a lot of unchallenged stereotypes without a playbook on how to overcome them. The best way to describe Harris’s mixed-race background is “woman of color.” But the best way to understand how she is perceived in electoral politics is to describe her as she describes herself: a Black woman. Black women are often depicted in the media as emotional, like white women, but are also often coded as aggressive in a way that white women are not. This will be a particular problem for the Harris campaign: How can it combat the angry Black woman stereotype when angry voters want a candidate who reflects their anger?
A high-spirited man ready to come to fisticuffs for policy is appealing. When Joe Biden shows that ol’ Irish Joe temperament, voters and pundits reward him with authenticity points. On Harris, that same righteous anger could box her into a stereotype. But not being righteously angry when by all accounts we should be — because of an activist Supreme Court, the end of Roe and the Jan. 6 insurrection, for instance — could make her look inauthentic or out of touch.
On the other hand, because there is no playbook for a Black female presidential candidate of any kind, much less a biracial one with South Asian heritage, that means Harris may not be judged by the standard that has doomed female candidates.
In regular life, Black women have a huge asterisk beside our gender. Michelle Obama is the only other Black woman to have occupied the White House. The attacks on her were so vicious that it hurts to recount them. Even Hillary Clinton was not painted as an animal or a man. The message was relentless: Black women are not real women. It is a pervasive and insidious stereotype that once justified slavery. It justified assigning Black women to menial, underpaid labor. It continues to justify excessive police violence and surveillance of Black women. That stereotype is a cross to bear in almost any circumstance, but it could open a space of opportunity in this particular presidential contest.
The idea that Black women are masculine might counter the expectation that female candidates have to be likable. Maybe it sidesteps the demand to perform motherhood that is often placed on female candidates. Perhaps it’s the key to putting a woman behind the Resolute desk, for the first time.
You can hate the identity politics of it all, but Harris is a historic candidate no matter how you slice it. She is a woman, yes. She is also a woman of color and a tough-on-crime former “top cop” with a silk press and a power suit. She is nothing like Joe Biden or anyone else who has ever gotten this close to the presidency. If her image is crafted just so — and, for sure, crafting it is a high-wire act with no net and an electrified wire — the Kamala Harris campaign could exploit this absence in our limited imagination of power. Harris might be able to act like a boss without being punished for being a boss.
For any chance of doing that, her campaign would have to embrace what makes Harris unique and brand that uniqueness as authentic leadership. The best evidence to date that this campaign might be up to the task was her decision to cast Tim Walz as her running mate. Forget the conventional wisdom about what a running mate is supposed to do. That is for conventional candidates. Harris did not need someone who could deliver Pennsylvania. She did not need a veep that would give her gravitas. Above all, she needed a vice-presidential pick who would not in any way question that a Black woman is in charge. That meant a white guy who wouldn’t tank her campaign but also one who would not compromise her ability to govern.
Walz bounded out to the stage at their first appearance together in Philadelphia like a coach and a cheerleader. Harris landed her big lines with a solid mix of audacity and showmanship, and Walz confidently followed her without looking like he was henpecked. Whether it was an act or just the kind of guy he is, what matters is that voters saw a white guy who was authentically a white guy happily play second to Harris’s first.
If I didn’t know any better, I would say the Harris campaign is applying some of the best lessons from social science to the political arena in a political contest that may change the entire historical trajectory of this nation. If Democrats were ever going to do the reading, now is a great time to have done it.
This campaign has only three months to run a successful — and historic — campaign. So far, they are campaigning as though the nation’s limited imagination about what power looks like could be malleable. Against so many expectations, Harris looks and sounds like a president even though no other president has ever looked like her. That in itself takes a remarkably nuanced appreciation for how race, gender, class, power, leadership, perception and politics actually work. Not how they work in theory. Not how they worked 50 years ago. How they work today.
That is why the Harris campaign has managed to wrest the media narrative from the G.O.P. That is why a Democratic base that was demoralized two weeks ago has suddenly awakened. The shortest presidential campaign against one of the most popular previous incumbents in modern presidential history seems poised to also be the most transformative. In many ways, only a Black woman could have done that. Because we never imagined her, she can reimagine what the future of power will look like for all of us.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.
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