Senator Barack Obama was well ahead of the country in 2007, or so believed some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisers. “Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” Mark Penn, her top strategist, wrote in an internal campaign memo in March that year. Mr Obama was trying to celebrate his background as “diverse” and “multicultural”, but Americans were not ready for that message. “Save it for 2050,” Mr Penn wrote.
The future arrived much sooner than Mr Penn expected. But then it went on to prove stranger than anyone could have imagined. To attend Kamala Harris’s rallies in the closing days of this year’s presidential campaign is to be reminded what the future once looked like, before the rise of Donald Trump and his destabilising synthesis of atavistic and innovative politicking, of old dog whistles and new media methods, of nostalgia and revolution.
Many recent news reports have noted that Ms Harris has shifted from her politics of “joy” to a more solemn message about the menace of Mr Trump. That is partly true—she has honed her case against him—but her rallies are still exuberant. On October 19th in Atlanta, Georgia, about 11,000 people, a pageant of diversity, filled the lawn spreading uphill from the stage of the Lakewood Amphitheatre. They all seemed happy. Young or old, singly and in synchronised groups, they danced in the late-afternoon sunshine as a DJ played hip-hop and pop tunes.
Ms Harris’s soundtrack tends to be more contemporary, and blacker, than the pop ballads, classic rock and country tunes at Trump rallies. Yet in Atlanta the crowd belted out the chorus of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” as lustily they did the chorus of Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman”. The seating section reserved for pink-and-green-clad members of Ms Harris’s black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was among the signs the Harris campaign is different from that of any nominee who came before.
But when the candidate appeared onstage, to ear-splitting cheers, the rally turned into a throwback to a more conventional time. Ms Harris is a strong stump speaker. She improvises confidently—“You guys are at the wrong rally,” she responded to some hecklers recently in Wisconsin, “I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street”—but she delivers only slight variations of a standard speech. This can be a strength. In Atlanta the crowd rapturously chanted “We are not going back!” as she reached that signature line. When she mocked how Mr Trump described his proposal for health care, she spread her arms wide and made air quotes with her fingers that the crowd filled in by roaring his limp assurance he had “concepts of a plan”. Unlike Mr Trump, Ms Harris smiles and laughs, warmly and often.
Mr Trump connects to his audiences in a different way, through the free-form speechmaking he calls “the weave”. In execution the weave can conjure less an image of disparate threads forming a beautiful tapestry than of a drunk lurching down a pavement. But though Mr Trump’s digressions may be baffling or squalid, as when he recently rhapsodised about the penis of Arnold Palmer, a golfer, his storytelling creates a sense of intimacy. Whereas Ms Harris might be on and off the stage in half an hour, Mr Trump can meander about himself and his relationships for nearly two hours. To critics this seems like self-indulgence, but to his audiences it seems like generosity and authenticity, the candidate’s real thoughts rather than the speechwriter’s epigrams that signpost Ms Harris’s remarks. Whereas her rallies succeed in the conventional aim of commanding local publicity, his often make national news that crowds her out of the spotlight and excites the disaffected voters he is trying to prod to the polls.
Ms Harris reels off policy objectives and criticisms of Mr Trump, but she is not given at rallies to telling stories about herself. The closest she came in Atlanta was to say “I took care of my mother when she was sick”, in explaining her proposal to have Medicare cover home health care. But she couched even that experience in generic terms. “It’s about trying to help them put on clothes that won’t irritate their skin,” she said. Her supporters hear in such universalising an authentic generosity, a signal Ms Harris is more interested in their experiences and needs than her own.
This approach seems true to Ms Harris’s guarded persona, and it also seems intended to supply a soothing, grown-up counterpoint to the melodrama of Mr Trump’s unending perils-of-Pauline act. And unlike Mr Trump’s messages it seems meant as much for swing voters, particularly female ones, as for her core audience.
Woman’s work
This was underscored by Ms Harris’s choice to campaign with Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman. Together the two made a case against Mr Trump that was not just bipartisan but decidedly female. In Malvern, Pennsylvania, on October 21st Ms Cheney spoke “as a mother” who wanted her children to grow up without worrying about the peaceful transfer of power. She condemned “the misogyny that we’ve seen from Donald Trump and J.D. Vance”, the Republican nominee for vice-president. Describing herself as pro-life, she nevertheless decried “what has happened to women” since the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion. It was a glimpse back at what the future looked like when Mrs Clinton was the nominee.
By clinging to the presidency, President Joe Biden put his party in a deep hole. Ms Harris has had less than three months to establish her claim to the office while trying to shuck the burdens of the dismal public opinion of his presidency and of her own former leftist positions. She has made considerable progress because of Mr Trump’s own enduring unpopularity and because, unlike Mr Biden, she has promised to give Americans back their old idea of the future. The question is how many still have faith in it. ■
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