Kamala Harris is not going back to the failed politics of 2016

She's good at this. And her speech was a shift away from Clintonian politics — and from wokeness.

There's a lot of news today! For our detailed take on the impact of RFK Jr. dropping out, please see here.

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I didn’t watch Kamala Harris’s convention speech live last night due to a book tour event that ran late, instead coming back to my hotel after a quick drink with my cousins to view the replay and take notes with a relatively fresh pair of eyes. I’ve found that watching speeches after everyone else has gone to bed is sometimes helpful in avoiding groupthink. For instance, I thought Joe Biden’s State of the Union address this year was quite mediocre and that he was being graded on an extremely generous curve by the media.

This time, I’m more aligned with the generally favorable pundit buzz for Harris’s speech, but if anything I don’t think it goes far enough. I thought this was an excellent speech, delivered by someone who’s become a pretty good — maybe even very good — politician. As friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Glassman reminds us, the difference between a good speech and an excellent speech may not mean that much in terms of immediate impact in the polls. But it suggested a strategically smart campaign, one that really wants to win and has a plan that it can execute with quite a bit of precision.

Last week, I wrote about how Harris’s challenge at the convention was that she’d need to find two gears. On the one hand, it’s strategically advantageous for Harris to be in Challenger Mode: to treat Donald Trump as the de facto incumbent in a political climate where voters are perpetually unhappy with the direction of the country. And to give voters something new and fresh in a race that had previously featured two candidates with a combined age of 159. On the other hand, she can’t entirely escape Incumbent Mode. Democrats own the White House now, and she’s the incumbent vice president.

And although this term makes me cringe, she needs to appear plausibly “presidential”, with the added degree of difficulty that she’s trying to become the first woman president. In conjunction with Harris’s remarks, I watched Hillary Clinton’s 2016 acceptance speech, basically dividing each speech into thirds (beginning, middle, end) and toggling back and forth between them. It’s the natural comparison point. Joe Biden’s 2020 speech was delivered during Deeply Weird COVID Times, and unlike Clinton or Harris, he had the advantage of running against an unpopular incumbent.

My conclusion? Perhaps the contrast with Clinton — and the hindsight bias of knowing Clinton lost — was inevitably going to make Harris look good by comparison, so that’s one potential flaw with this methodology. But man, Kamala Harris is approximately 1000x better at the stagecraft of politics than Hillary Clinton ever was.¹

The theme of Harris’s speech was “we’re not fucking around”

There was one good sign for Harris’s speech right away. The first video clip I found had a relatively short runtime — 38 minutes — forming a contrast not only to Clinton’s 57 minutes in 2016 but even more pointedly to Trump’s 92-minute speech in Milwaukee last month. (Which would have been a good speech if Trump had stopped at 38 minutes.) I think this should be the norm for nearly all political speeches: 30 minutes, 45 minutes tops. You want to talk for 90 minutes? Great, go on a podcast.

Clinton’s speech was filled with all types of padding. Shoutouts to her daughter, who introduced her, to Bill Clinton with a shit-eating grin on his face, to Barack and Michelle Obama, to then- vice president Biden, to future vice president Tim Kaine, to Bernie Sanders (who looked decidedly nonplussed) and to his millions of primary voters who put “economic and social justice issues front and center, where they belong” — a rather weird framing of the Sanders campaign.² Who has time for all that shit? 

Clinton was acting like she was accepting an award, that the hard work had already been done, mission accomplished. The dominant color, including Clinton’s dress, was white, as though in a coronation. All of this was quite explicit: that it was Clinton’s turn — finally a woman’s turn! — after Obama had beaten her out of the 2008 nomination. Because boy, had she earned it. “I have to tell you, as your Secretary of State, I went to 112 countries,” Clinton reminded the delegates at one point. The subtext was “there’s no way in a million years that we’re going to lose to Donald Fucking Trump” – even though polling at the time showed a very close race. 

Harris did have some shout-outs and thank-yous too — you can’t entirely avoid that. But what was the very first line of her speech, according to the New York Times’s transcript?

OK, let’s get to business. Let’s get to business.

This is a woman who doesn’t have time to fuck around. Indeed, the bio clip that introduced Harris included a [bleeped] f-bomb, from a speech Harris gave in May where she recalled her mother saying sometimes you “need to kick that fucking door down.”

That set the tone for the rest of the speech. It was competitive — something out of the River, not the Village. It was patriotic – at times, aggressively so. Harris spoke approvingly about how America has the “most lethal fighting force in the world”. Lethal! Not usually a word you’d expect to hear in a convention speech! A precise and deliberate choice, not triangulated and focus-grouped like Clinton.

This line also stuck out to me:

I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence. That America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.

It wasn’t a huge applause line in the room — I guess it’s mostly still geeks like me who care about AI — but this is different rhetoric than we’re used to hearing from Democrats, who often aim their remarks at women. A lot of Harris’s rhetoric was quite male-coded instead. There was a decent amount about abortion, but less than I’d have expected. (Perhaps there should have been more.)

Contrast Harris’s vibe with this representative passage from Clinton’s speech:

A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.

I can’t put it any better than Jackie Kennedy did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started — not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men — the ones moved by fear and pride.

America’s strength doesn’t come from lashing out.

Strength relies on smarts, judgment, cool resolve, and the precise and strategic application of power.

That’s the kind of Commander-in-Chief I pledge to be.

And if we’re serious about keeping our country safe, we also can’t afford to have a President who’s in the pocket of the gun lobby.

It starts with a pretty good zinger but after that there’s just … a lot going on. Dating herself by invoking the Cuban Missile Crisis. The awkward transition to talking about “the gun lobby”. Trying to emasculate Trump — you can be the judge of whether that worked. And attempting to come across as cool and collected, but maybe coming across as cold and entitled instead.

I am fully aware that we’re getting into territory where there are extremely gendered and often misogynist perceptions of women when they act aggressively or seek to wield power. Gender is not my beat. I’m just telling you that even as a somewhat oblivious middle-aged dude, I noticed that Clinton and Harris were navigating the question of gender extremely differently. And in addition to the words, there was the visual contrast. From Clinton, there was a lot of this:

Whereas from Harris — who remember, needs to code-switch between Challenger Mode and Incumbent Mode — we got a mix of this:

And this:

I didn’t cherry-pick these stills — they’re just from a couple of points where I happened to pause the video — and you could certainly find more flattering images for either candidate. But with Harris, there is a lot more warmth projected, even when in kicking-ass-and-taking-names mode.

Harris’s speech was low-key post-woke

Finally, I noticed what wasn’t said. How many times did Harris say the word “Black”? 

Zero, at least according to the New York Times’s transcript. 

And not because Harris is totally “color blind”, but because she can invoke her racial identity in ways that are a lot more nimble than the nails-on-a-chalkboard tones of what I call “Social Justice Leftism” but most of you call “wokeness”. With the subtle reference to her father being a “a student from Jamaica”. With the color palette. With the call-out to “Aretha, Coltrane and Miles” — full names unnecessary, because if you know you know.

And how often did Harris say the word “woman”? Just once, in reference to her mother — “my mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall brown woman with an accent” — and in the context of a classic American story of an immigrant’s desire to assimilate into her new country. There was none of the breaking-the-glass-ceiling stuff of Clinton 2016 — because Harris didn’t need to say it.

And there was optimism, a quality that is sometimes in short supply among Democrats and completely absent in the Matrix of Intersectional Oppression. In fact, Harris turned some woke tropes 180 degrees around: it’s Republicans who are pessimists, who are weird and unpatriotic:

You know, our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.

America, let us show each other and the world who we are and what we stand for: Freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities.

And then in the closing of her speech — in contrast to Clinton, who invoked the musical Hamilton (!) and the lame motto “stronger together” — Harris reframed another word that is often associated with the Social Justice Left: “privilege”, as in “check your privilege”. Instead of privilege dividing us into identity groups, Harris said, our shared privilege as Americans is what unites us. And not only that: instead of feeling bad about ourselves because of our privilege, it gives us a duty to go out and continue kicking ass!

It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American. So let’s get out there, let’s fight for it. Let’s get out there, let’s vote for it, and together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.

This was a remarkable speech, in the sense of being both very good and unusual. It’s not the color-by-numbers approach you usually get at a convention.

Look, I don't know what (if any) bounce Harris is going to get out of it in the polls. We’ll wait and see what the model says. But here’s an optimistic framing for Democrats that I find somewhat credible. Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate. And Hillary Clinton almost beat Donald Trump, coming 80,000 votes away in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Kamala Harris is a much better politician. Surely she can get over the bar?

Unfortunately for Democrats, it’s not quite that simple, because Trump is actually quite a bit more popular than he was in 2016 so the bar is higher. But instead of Clinton’s complacency, Democrats have a candidate who knows she has a fight on her hands, and the instinct to go for the jugular.

1. Harris even landed the Gaza issue well, which I appreciated as part of the silent majority of Americans who are not radicalized on the issue.

2. “Economic justice”, maybe, but the 2016 Sanders campaign wasn’t particularly “woke” — instead it was the Clinton campaign that introduced terms like “intersectionality” to the discourse.