The Opinions - Tressie McMillan Cottom on Why Trump Is Struggling to Box Harris In

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Should voters care about Kamala Harris’s identity? In this audio essay, the sociologist and New York Times Opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that while we shouldn’t ignore the unprecedented nature of Harris’s campaign, the Democrats need to balance that newness against the electorate’s desire to return to a time of political normalcy.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Tressie McMillan Cottom. I am a sociologist, a professor, and a columnist at the New York Times. I have been studying race, gender, class, and what it means for how we live our everyday lives for maybe 15 years or so now. I was expecting a very different DNC just a month or so ago, but now all of the drama about changing candidates seems to have settled down. And now I'm going into this convention thinking about how the presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris, will present her personal biography.

The campaign so far has not wanted to play up the historic nature of her campaign, but I think that we, the voting public, would be remiss if we did not acknowledge. that not only is this a woman running for president at the top of a major party ticket. This is a black woman, a woman of color, a Gen X woman of color, by the way. And so I'm very interested to hear how the Kamala Harris campaign understands the significance of her identity and biography relative to what voters expect from a presidential candidate. It is really interesting that the Harris campaign so far has really dialed back the significance of identity in this campaign message. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that.

One, let me start by saying, I think it is smart. After eight years of feeling like, you know, the democratic process is crumbling around them, that politics have become a circus. I think that this campaign understands that as significant as this candidacy is, most voters, right? right now are really craving a return to normalcy. And so they've got a challenge here this campaign, right? How do they sell a maverick historical candidate while promising a return to normalcy? And so far they are splitting the difference by saying, you know this campaign is significant. You know this candidate is unique.

We don't need to say it. We will instead focus on policy and platform and message. And we will let everybody else talk about the self-evident historical. nature of the campaign. The American public has a historically informed idea of what a president of the United States looks like, what they sound like, how they perform. And frankly, that means that for most Americans, the president by default, is a white male. What someone like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and now Kamala Harris are doing is they

are having to build in a new set of expectations with the American public about what. what leadership looks like. And the challenge there, of course, is that not necessarily that everyone has a knee-jerk negative reaction to that, but that for most people, we fill in the gaps of what we don't know with stereotypes. Those stereotypes usually are negative, even when they sound kind of positive,

in that they flatten how unique or particular a person is. And in the case of running for the presidency, see, stereotypes can be handy in that they can deliver a quick message to voters who are not paying a lot of attention to an election. I think that is something that the Trump campaign has been very good about historically, about using those stereotypes to quickly encapsulate and characterize what their opponents are. But you see Trump really struggling here to box Kamala Harris in on the stereotypes that he thinks should work, right?

So these are things like she's not very serious. You know why she hasn't done an interview? Because she's not smart. She's not intelligent. Which is, of course, linking ideas about racial inferiority and intelligence. Then with J.D. Vance, they have gone after her status as like a woman without biological children. We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the DHS.

Democrats, is controlled by people without children. The intersections of her identity is actually making it tougher for Trump to figure out a line of attack because he sort of has these broad stereotypes. But right now, they're very clunky and far too broad to capture what Kamala Harris actually is. He can't figure out how to get a more nuanced tool and does not account for the ways that we think about race and gender together. What does it mean for a black woman to be making executive decisions? on behalf of a multiracial plural society.

It is challenging. It is also fascinating to watch this campaign assemble that in real time. And I keep coming back to the fact that this is a very short campaign cycle for them. They have not had a lot of time to build this new vocabulary for the American voter. That they are able to do so fairly nimbly so far is really quite remarkable. They have actually been very surprised by people's enthusiasm. rallying around not just Harris, but a ticket that with Harris and Walls is really unique in the way that power there is being performed and played out through these characters that we've really never seen before, right?

A white male candidate being the sort of cheerleader and coach for a black female presidential candidate, I think there's just a lot there to challenge the American public's imagination. And in this moment, especially coming out of this sort of long, hangover of what Trump and Trump politics has done to us. Yeah, if you had asked me three months ago, I would have said, no, there's no way we're ready to rally around this candidate. Today, if you ask me, I say it was actually a moot point. They've already rallied around this candidate. So I have apparently come up with a tradition. I did not know that I was developing at the time, but for each of these sort of historical candidacies, I have been in my home. home state of North Carolina. I watched Obama speech at North Carolina Central University,

which is my undergraduate alma mater, an historically black college in Durham, North Carolina. If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy. democracy. Tonight is your answer. Thanks to you, we've reached a milestone. I watched Hillary Clinton's speech. I happened to be in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time. The first time in our nation's history that a woman will be a major party's nominee. I will now be back home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to watch Kamala Harris accept the nomination for president of the United States. And that feels

exactly right to me. And my drink of choice, it will always be a nice bourbon cocktail, and that means it'll probably be an old-fashioned while I watch history happen. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Veshaca, Phoebe, Feebillette, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabarrow, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.

Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.