When I saw on Wednesday morning that Kamala Harris had released a short video marking and celebrating her selection as Joe Biden\u2019s running mate, I clicked \u2014 eagerly and instantly. I wanted to continue riding my wave of excitement about all the firsts: first woman of color on a major party\u2019s presidential ticket, first Black woman specifically, first Asian-American.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the time I finished the video, that wave had crashed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
OK, that\u2019s an overstatement. But as I listened to her flat, desultory recitation of her biography and philosophy, I did feel a sense of frustration, and it was familiar. I\u2019d wrestled with the same letdown during the Democratic primary, when the experience of Harris didn\u2019t live up to the idea of Harris. She often skipped or skimmed over facets of her background that she would have benefited from dwelling on. She frequently zoomed past the poetry to the prose, more a steely lawyer rattling off lists than a soulful leader serving up inspiration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Harris the prosecutor can find the holes in your argument and make you tremble. But can Harris the history-making vice-presidential candidate find the cracks in your heart and make you cry?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s certainly not a requirement \u2014 most politicians not named Barack Obama fail to do that \u2014 and I\u2019m not complaining per se. As I wrote when the news broke, her presence on the Democratic ticket makes total sense in terms of the experience that she possesses, the values that she represents and the contrast that she helps Biden draw between his politics of inclusion and Donald Trump\u2019s politics of division.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m articulating a wish, one that\u2019s tied to my belief that a decent future for this country hinges on an end to Trump\u2019s presidency and my concern that Biden and Harris use every arrow in their quivers to defeat him. I\u2019m venting a worry that Harris doesn\u2019t fully use one of her arrows. She did poorly in the Democratic primary because, yes, her campaign was a mess. But she also did poorly because she never discovered the right, stirring way to tell and sell her story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want her to discover it on Wednesday night, when she speaks at the Democratic National Convention (or however we\u2019re describing its virtual facsimile). I want her to hold on to it between then and Nov. 3, because I want to call her the vice president of the United States soon after that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although Trump would cringe at the following thought and never understand it, Harris reflects this country\u2019s ideals and its reality much better than he does. \u201cHer story\u2019s America\u2019s story,\u201d Biden said when he and she first appeared together as running mates on Wednesday afternoon. He\u2019s right, and I want her to embrace that and flesh it out at every turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She\u2019s the biracial daughter of immigrants: Jamaican father, Indian mother, both beckoned to this country of newcomers and transplants. Growing up in California\u2019s Bay Area, she was bused to an elementary school in a richer, whiter neighborhood than her own, so she knows the fact of segregation and the dream of integration from the road she traveled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She understands how families, despite their best intentions, fray. Her parents divorced, and when her mother found teaching and research work in Montreal, she moved for her middle and high school years to that largely white, French-speaking city. For college she went to Howard, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., that allowed her to appraise America \u2014 its past, present and future \u2014 from a different vantage point. From there she forged her own path, with her own rules. She didn\u2019t marry until she was 49. Her husband is white and Jewish and she\u2019s a stepmother to his two children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What a rich mix of influences: as multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural as the country in which her parents wisely invested their hopes. What a portrait of life as it\u2019s lived, with all sorts of swerves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her public remarks she makes references to some of this, but they\u2019re usually just that \u2014 references. After she mentioned school busing (\u201cthat little girl was me\u201d) to attack Biden in a primary debate for his opposition to it, I went back and looked at the big speech that she\u2019d given to kick off her presidential campaign. Busing was nowhere to be found. In fact her speech didn\u2019t have all that much biographical detail, period, at least if you edited out the professional stuff. It was strikingly impersonal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I recently read much of her memoir, \u201cThe Truths We Hold: An American Journey,\u201d published shortly before that speech, and came away with the same impression. She gives you less of her history than you expect, not more. She steers away from emotion, not toward it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe that\u2019s what a woman aiming for top jobs in a man\u2019s world has to do. Maybe that\u2019s even more incumbent on a woman of color. A scintilla too angry and you\u2019re unhinged. A soup\u00e7on too misty and you\u2019re unraveling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s worth noting that when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood in the House last month to call out the misogynistic remarks of a male colleague, she twice stressed that she was speaking from the perspective of principle, not of upset. \u201cI want to be clear that Representative Yoho\u2019s comments were not deeply hurtful or piercing to me,\u201d she said, adding that she was made of tougher stuff than that. She later reiterated that she \u201cwas not deeply hurt or offended.\u201d To be at all emotional, she had to establish that she was unemotional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A male lawmaker wouldn\u2019t have felt that need. John Boehner, the House speaker from 2011 to 2015, certainly didn\u2019t: He was famous for weeping at the drop of an amendment. If Nancy Pelosi behaved as soggily, she\u2019d be savaged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in the book \u201cThe Firsts,\u201d about the women who entered Congress in record-breaking numbers after the 2018 midterms, Jennifer Steinhauer of The Times notes that several of those newcomers did permit themselves to tear up at appropriate times \u2014 for example, when discussing an issue that had greatly affected them or their loved ones \u2014 and it came across as authentic, not weak. Maybe the world is changing for the better. Or maybe there\u2019s more allowance for women in House seats than for women in even higher posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Kamala Harris I\u2019ve met and chatted with informally, in person, is warmer and more winning than the version I\u2019ve watched on the stump. More transparent. More accessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I saw flashes of her on Wednesday afternoon, during that appearance with Biden, when her huge smiles suggested that she couldn\u2019t contain her exhilaration. She shouldn\u2019t try. Her story is genuinely exhilarating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Storytelling is everything. Trump won the presidency with a story about America that appealed to many Americans. It mixed imaginary villains with real ones, lies with truths. But he told it expansively. He told it effectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Obama\u2019s rise was rooted in his own story, in the eloquence with which he spoke of Kenya and Kansas and how their commingling inside him was the American dream. I can\u2019t count the number of times, on his path to the White House, that he put a lump in my throat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Harris\u2019s story is the rival of Obama\u2019s. She just has to give it a comparably mythic shimmer. I know \u201cthat little girl\u201d was her. But I want to know more about<\/em> her, and I want to hear her voice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I saw on Wednesday morning that Kamala Harris had released a short video marking and celebrating her selection as Joe Biden\u2019s running mate, I clicked \u2014 eagerly and instantly. I wanted to continue riding my wave of excitement about all the firsts: first woman of color on a major party\u2019s presidential ticket, first Black […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}