More Happy Warriors

Theme of my weekend Substack post,

an extended version of  Friday's blogpost here, following on a discussion in the comments, which you've probably had a chance to read. 

There was more in those comments I wanted to address, starting with a complaint from longtime blogfriend (and frequent legal adviser to Rectification Central) Jeff Ryan, who put up a very grouchy dismissal of Vice President Harris, in the following terms:

Jeff: I disagree. I haven't been particularly enthralled with her as V.P.

Me: Jeff, you're sounding like one of those kids Scott Lemieux makes fun of, who think voting is supposed to be the expression of your personal consumer choices.

To which he offered a more serious response:

Jeff: You couldn't be more wrong.

It may sound facile to you, but leadership and talent manifest physically with successful politicians. The great ones show it as naturally as great athletes show it in performance. When they talk, they have things to say. When they talk, you pause what you're doing and pay attention. It's called presence. And they have ideas and purpose to go with it.

Harris was my first choice in the primaries. Unfortunately, when the actual campaigning started, I found it impossible to be enthusiastic about her. And I wanted to be.

The vice-presidency is still a warm spit job, but the good ones manage to stand out. Al Gore was a tremendous vice president. Despite his wooden delivery, you could see a passionate mind working, and a brilliant one. And he brought the goods. Not seeing it with Harris, and I was surprised and quite disappointed. In the beginning of the primary campaign, I kept waiting for her to break out, and it never happened despite her high standing at the start.

But, you know, that's exactly what I was talking about. It doesn't sound facile at all, that's not the issue. I do disagree about the universalism of holding that a good politician is as easy to identify as a good athlete, and I guess I disagree about Harris very specifically; I enjoy listening to her talk in the way Astead Herndon criticizes—

When Harris speaks in an interview or to an audience, it can sound as if she’s editing in real time, searching for the right calibration of talking points rather than displaying confidence in her message.

—which Herndon clearly doesn't mean in a complimentary way, but it reminds me a bit of Obama, or, when you think about it, John Kennedy or Bill Clinton, not about the talking points but about the editing. Maybe I like it precisely because it's writerly, and it shows a respect for the writers she's talking to, the way she works to refine her message to say what she wants to say, and gives them a chance to hear it developing.

She wasn't my own candidate in the 2020 primaries, of course; I liked the idea of Kamala and her complex ethnicity and witty presentation, and her experience of trying to enforce justice, but she never gave me a strong sense of where she stood, and I didn't think she was ready for the presidency. I liked Elizabeth Warren best for ideological reasons, her equality-favoring economic agenda especially, but also for her personality, professorial and homey at the same time. 

But once a nominee is chosen, partisans need to be less involved with their personal feelings. For me, after Biden's triumph in the South Carolina primary, that phase seemed over: Biden had won, and the Black women organizers who had been helping to remake the party since the advent of Stacey Abrams in 2006 or so had won with him. It's not time for a shift in loyalties, it's time for a shift in perspective. I didn't stop liking Warren's personality better than Biden's, but I started trying to think of doing something different with it: specifically of getting the Biden campaign to make use of some of Warren's economic ideas; which he did, as I've explained in various places. Not that I give myself credit for this, but enough people who were thinking similar ways, and made it happen.

Once the primaries are done, it's really not about you. It's about the electorate.

I broadly agree with Jeff about Gore's quality, but I don't know that it was a significant factor in 1992 and 1996, and it certainly didn't get him elected president (even if it was only the Supreme Court's garbage argument that stopped him, it shouldn't have been anywhere near that close; his qualifications vs. Bush's should have made him a landslide winner). I think he's wrong about Harris, but that too is neither here nor there.

Biden was a great vice president in terms of what he delivered in policy terms, especially foreign policy, but what he brought to the 2008 and 2012 campaigns wasn't about that; it was the folksy and lovable persona, and evident affection and respect for Obama, that helped a lot of white voters find their way to voting for a Black president. Obama himself needed to be cerebral and emotionally restrained, and Biden played a major role in keeping his image down to earth.

Kamala Harris may not have been a great vice president so far in that sense, though she's done an immense amount of work acquiring a Biden-like expertise in foreign policy, and I think she'll turn out to have been pretty effective on those issues when the record comes out. But she's definitely done the political job for which she was nominated; her presence and prominence have helped a lot of Black and Asian voters find their way to supporting a white president for a party that has frequently disappointed ever since it started trying to be the civil rights party in the 1940s. And (speaking of the 1940s) she's certainly better prepared to be president than Harry Truman was.

Commenter Scopedog wrote:

But why does Harris have to go beyond those limitations of the normal to prove that she's some particularly new kind of charismatic figure, the way a presidential candidate does?

Hmmm...how about we just cut to the chase and state the obvious: Kamala Harris is a Black woman. That is what is setting off all of these alarm bells.

Maybe it's because I'm a Black man and I'm seeing things a little differently from the usual Doomsday+1 crew (like Steve, sadly).

I replied,

Yes indeed, and it's a vital point of view that non-Black Democrats really need to listen to right now, as I've been trying to do (and it's not clearly reflected in polls either, for similar reasons to the ones Steve points out for Trumpers).

Black men and women were an indispensable element of the coalition that did this in 2020 and are needed even more in 2024. Every time somebody suggests dumping Kamala Harris I want to say "and which other of your best friends do you want to offer a mortal insult?"

We need to stop the quest for the holy grail of a white majority and start recognizing the diversity of our party as a real advantage that hasn't reached its potential (though it's been coming very close since 2018). Biden recognizes this as well as anybody, and that's one of the things that's been occupying Harris the most while good-hearted white liberals wonder why she's not impressing them. She doesn't need to rn! Biden can take care of that (as I believe he's beginning to do in response to the Middle East and congressional crises). She's where she needs to be.