Illustration by hanna barczyk
Once Joe Biden had chosen Kamala Harris to be his running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket, a fascinating detail arose about the gruelling vetting process: The 11 candidates for the job were asked what nickname they thought President Donald Trump might give them. “Sleepy” was already bestowed on Mr. Biden, while the perfectly good adjectives “Crooked” and “Crazy” had been affixed to Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.
The world didn’t have to wait long to find out. Shortly after the announcement, the President tweeted out a campaign ad slamming “Slow Joe and Phony Kamala. Perfect together.” We will leave aside for the moment the rich of irony of Mr. Trump, the Barry Bonds of hitting whoppers out of the park, calling anyone else “phony.” Instead, let’s move to the fundraising e-mail the Trump campaign sent out accusing Ms. Harris of flip-flopping during her own presidential bid: “And then voters REJECTED her because she’s a PHONY.” (Imagine being the style guru in charge of rANdom cApitalizAtioN on the Trump campaign.)
Clearly, Republicans are afraid of the Senator from California. They are afraid of her for the reasons that many Democrats embrace her: She is tomorrow’s woman, and the Republicans are yesterday’s party. She is a historic choice, a fantastically accomplished biracial woman, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India. And because they’re afraid of her, they turn to the most common, cheap insult aimed at women who dare to run for public office: That she is inauthentic, an opportunist, an untrustworthy flip-flopper.
Mr. Trump’s surrogates stepped in to help. Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to George W. Bush, called Ms. Harris “a fake, empty-suit.” Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose fratboy fatuousness deserves to be called brotesque, said: “There are timeshare salesmen you would trust more than Kamala Harris. You could find payday lenders who are more sincere.” The right-wing TV host Mark Levin resurfaced a criticism that Ms. Harris is not the right type of African-American to appeal to voters, because her father is from Jamaica.
In other words, there’s just something not quite right about her. Could it be, perhaps, that she has ambitions to be president? Voters’ ambivalence about women who seek power for themselves, and not in the service of some man-boss, is well documented. So it’s not surprising, but still disheartening, that the mere pursuit of this goal makes a female candidate seem wrong, inauthentic and untrustworthy.
The Center for American Women and Politics’s analysis of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign drew this conclusion: “While expectations of gender and candidacy are often complementary for men, they are often contradictory for women, who face distinct challenges in proving they are both man enough to do the job and women enough to appear authentic.”
In Ms. Harris’s case, the calls are coming from inside the house, too. That is, some Democrats have also expressed reservations about her, specifically around her sharp upbraiding of Mr. Biden’s historic stands on issues of racial justice. Osita Nwanevu wrote in The New Republic, “Her lack of remorse over the criticisms she leveled at Biden during the primary has reportedly convinced some in the campaign that she’s an inauthentic striver more interested in succeeding Biden than supporting him.”
As is often the case, even an attempt to be more “authentic” ends up being perceived as contrived. When Ms. Harris laughingly told The Breakfast Club radio show that she had smoked weed “a long time ago,” and that she was also a fan of Tupac and Snoop Dogg, critics accused of her lying to look cool: Those artists’ first records hadn’t come out when young Kamala was hitting the bong! This dumb controversy led one (male) commentator to argue that “Kamala Harris has yet to demonstrate Barack Obama’s ability to be human.” Maybe that question came up during the vetting process: “Senator Harris, can you prove that you are in fact a carbon-based life form a voter might enjoy having a beer with?”
It cannot be pleasant to have to defend your basic humanity to people who do not want to see you as fully human. This occurred to me four years ago, as I stood at a Donald Trump rally listening to the crowd chant “Lock her up,” while one individual tried to convince me that Ms. Clinton was both a literal demon and a murderer.
Later, I would read in Ms. Clinton’s memoirs: “As the campaign went on, polls showed that a significant number of Americans questioned my authenticity and trustworthiness. A lot of people said they just didn’t like me.” This seemed a weak-sauce description of what I’d heard myself, but maybe even Ms. Clinton didn’t want to look too deeply into the heart of the beast.
Ms. Harris is perhaps in a better position to become the first female president than Ms. Clinton ever was. While she’s already being labelled as fake, she still is not as laden with what has been quaintly called “baggage” (though there is certainly legitimate reason to question her record on criminal justice policies when she was a prosecutor and California’s attorney-general). Ms. Harris is the running mate of a man who will be 78 if he’s inaugurated, and who may be a one-term president. The Oval Office is not that far away.
That must terrify corners of the population who believe the future occupants of that office should all look like most of the previous ones. One way they can sow anxiety is to suggest that this deceitful woman – this phony – is not really content with being a sidekick after all.
Hope won the elections in 2008 and 2012; then fear slunk back and dragged it away in 2016. Let’s pray that hope makes a comeback.
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