Kamala Harris taps into the long-lost positivity rhetoric to great effect.
As the sudden and still inconceivable juggernaut that is the Kamala Harris campaign rolls across America on the heels of her adding the perpetually animated Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to the ticket, a new and rarely heard message has emerged: Joy.
How novel. How radical. How refreshingly poignant.
Joy.
I, for one, did not see that coming. Nevertheless, here it is.
Walz perceptively coined this wild concept at the rally to introduce him as the vice-presidential pick in Philly, when he turned to Harris and thanked her for “bringing the joy back.” Walz is apparently good at bumper sticker stuff – he was the originator of laying “weird” on his opponent J.D. Vance – which stuck and ain’t going away – and if there is one thing that is emanating from this paradigm-altering Democratic duo, it is a forward-thinking positivity and youthful exuberance we haven’t seen on the campaign trail since 2008.
Joy?
Whatever the Harris machine is doing is working. To the tune of poll numbers that have completely flipped in her favor, as she now leads her domestic terrorist, convicted felon and thief of women’s reproductive rights opponent, Donald Trump in the national and many battleground state polls. Much of this, as discussed here last week, is the consolidation of Democrats who were lukewarm to outright turned off to vote for President Joe Biden again, but polls and enormous rally crowds, 300,000 new volunteers, 100,000 freshly registered voters, and considerable bumps in the youth, Black and Hispanic numbers do not answer the pressing question: Why has Harris’s appearance, rallies, and speeches seemed ever more joyous than we’ve seen around here in some time?
Because they are.
If you track our political trajectory since Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States, something broke in our vox populi; Obama’s run in ’08 was so furiously bright and inspiring, it had to tumble eventually. Nothing is otherworldly or infinite in politics, or anything, really. Ok, maybe art, but even that is fleeting. There is a shelf-life to “Yes We Can” and “Hope and Change.” I felt it days after Obama was sworn in when he began filling his cabinet with Clintonites and chumming up with Ted Kennedy and hunkering down to business as usual – the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars continued, Guantanamo Bay remained a stain on the nation, and the Affordable Care Act configuration, voting and roll-out was a political bummer. And this is the objective observations of a commentator: what of those people who thought that we were in a post-racist world, or that college and health care would be free and that the sun would shine brighter, and their food would taste better. There was very much an Obama hangover.
So, the Dems coughed up the House and Senate in 2010 in a wave of Tea Party complaints, and then when Obama ran for re-election, he appeared tired and beaten by the gig, as all presidents do, limping along all summer behind in the polls until in the end he was able to retain much of his coalition, but lost the significant enthusiasm he enjoyed four years earlier. His stump rhetoric homed in on “staying the course” and the usual incumbent thing, but our “outsider new guy” was “establishment” now. The joy was sucked right out of the thing.
In comes Donald Trump and his angry, anti-American grievance shouting and name-calling. At first, Republicans lashed out against the con-man, this monosyllabic racist/misogynist blather that was unbecoming to the crap they’d peddled for decades – shining city on the hill, moral imperative, family-oriented conservatism. Trump didn’t give a shit about that nonsense. He cynically wanted to regain name recognition after his ignominious firing at NBC, get his speaking fees up, and toss some dirt on the Clintons, who he used to worship but now felt betrayed by, because it’s all about knocking people down and tearing apart solidarity for the “one man can fix things.” On the other side was another Clinton, as Hillary used her Party machine to snuff out the Dems version of populism, Bernie Sanders, and appeared at rallies to be a craven political mouthpiece for going back to a time before Obama, and there were many of his former voters who did not want that and took a shot with Trump.
Then followed the dismal four years of Trump’s presidency, which were exhausting to say the least. Constant haranguing on Twitter and negativity in his rallies that he held for only MAGA sycophants with more name calling, an avalanche of non-sequiturs, blatant lies, and childish tantrums, not to mention the traitorous cozying up to dictators. When the pandemic hit, he bungled it miserably with more lying and crazy shit. As the world shut down, he kept calling more people more names.
When the Democrats were searching for an alternative to this dark insanity, instead of embracing another woman or a gay man or a true progressive, they went for convenience, and thank the good Lord they did, because Joe Biden – white, older, mostly centrist ,and a font of the Blue Wall/Rust Belt set – was the right nominee to beat Trump in 2020. However, it was strategic – not inspiring or joyful. Biden’s campaign became all about “recovering the soul of our nation.” It was a grim march to halt fascism, lunacy, and return the nation to something resembling a working construct and away from Trump’s back-alley profit grift. The ‘20 election was a battle against incompetence and evil – “Hope and Change” be damned.
But today, as I write this, Kamala Harris is engaging in something wholly different. Simply due to her gender, race, and youth (compared to the 78-year-old Trump and certainly her predecessor in the race, the 81-year-old Biden), she has flipped a switch and scratched an itch of this nation we have not experienced in some time. Emerging from the bleak and frightening days of the pandemic and this slow but prideful trek to come out of it (and we’re still the best economy in the western world), we can now see a light at the end of the tunnel, and Harris is articulating that view: an America not framed as carnage with blood in the streets and dangerous Brown people threatening our daughters and starving children and dying pets and Lady Liberty slitting her wrists. It’s “We’re not going back,” and that works, as it worked for Ronald Reagan after Viet Nam and Watergate and riots and all the rest. Reagan defended America as a flawless beacon, and he did so because while the past is set, the future has possibilities. The future is what built this nation – King George is a nut, and while we might be better just sucking it up, let’s take on the most powerful army on the planet and see what lies around the corner instead.
You might remember, whether it was crazy-talk or not, Reagan was elected president twice!
In a very real sense, Donald Trump is the King George of 2024. That rambling incoherent palaver he presented this week from his bunker in Mar-a-Lago is a fine example. Harris is this year’s revolution model. Trump is yesterday’s revolution filled with dour retribution and angry rebukes to “Make America Great Again,” as if we needed to be saved by a privileged rich man-child who declared bankruptcy six times and bragged about assaulting women. People wanted change in 2016 –any change – but it was filled with griping anger. No one, if the polls are any indication, wants that in 2024 (and they didn’t want the guy who stopped Trump the first time by simply “not being him” either).
Kamala Harris and her cheery partner, Tim Walz, are turning on a light long since dimmed around here and it’s fun to watch them speak about having more in common than our differences and how America is not a hellscape peddled by rodeo clown cable hosts. Their message of positivity, whether it works all the way to November 5 or not, is connecting with a whole lot of people, many of them too young to remember “Yes We Can” and jazzed by the contrast to rancorous hate-speech about cat ladies who can’t or won’t procreate being ineligible to cast a vote.
“We are a nation of people who believe in the ideals that were foundational to what made us so special as a nation,” Harris said in Detroit the day before I wrote this. “We know we are a work in progress, we haven’t yet reached those ideals, but we will die trying because we love our country, and we believe in who we are.”
Maybe, just maybe, this is the year of Joy over Grievance.
Right now, it sure looks like it.
More importantly, it feels like it.
