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Kamala Harris’ unbridled laughter. Tim Walz’s comment “these guys are just weird.” Making fun of JD Vance and his “childless cat ladies”.
Democrats haven’t had so much fun during a campaign season since the presidential hopeful Bill Clinton removed his saxophone on ‘The Arsenio Hall Show’ and made a ambitious version of “Heartbreak Hotel”.
Social media is full of happy memes of Harris dancing and chatting on coconut trees. His recently announced vice presidential pick, Minnesota Gov. Walz, is already inspiring big-dad-energy jokes. And all Vance has to do is show up to elicit laughter.
It’s a stunning change of pace for the Party of Perpetual Hand-Wringing, a cautious body that usually approaches elections with the seriousness of a bomb squad dismantling an explosive device. One wrong move and – boom! – we are Gilead, the police state in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It is better to be cautious and sober.
But Harris’ sudden candidacy broke a fatal cycle that has plagued the left since Al Gore lost to George W. Bush, making Gore the first candidate since 1888 to win the popular vote but lose in the electoral college. Donald Trump still didn’t win the popular vote in 2016, but he still made it to the White House. The uphill climb to victory has given Democrats little to smile about, so far.
buoyancy is, Dare we say, joy generated by Harris and Walz’s brilliant new candidacy feels unprecedented, even compared to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and its message of hope.
The vice president actually used the F word — funny — in a call with Barack and Michelle when Obama reached out to Harris to announce that they had endorsed her for the Democratic nomination following President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race. . Harris broke down during the call, and said she, her husband, Doug Emhoff, and the Obamas were “going to have some fun” on the campaign trail. “You’re a happy warrior,” the former president said of Harris, to which the former first lady added, “And the country needs a happy warrior.”
Harris with former President Obama during a 2022 event on the Affordable Care Act.
(Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)
Harris’ battle skills are another reason blue states feel a little less blue. When she says she will fight for them, it is believable.
He put criminals behind bars in his role as a prosecutor. As a district attorney, she was celebrated and criticized for a conviction rate in San Francisco that jumped 52% to 67%.
And as a senator representing California, he nearly melted Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg with his tough questions about privacy issues. And last week, former President Trump announced that he was withdrawing from a planned presidential debate hosted by ABC News. He offered to move to MAGA-friendly Fox News, which in no way means that he is afraid of her.
Walz and his no-nonsense humor present another unique threat to the Republican ticket. The former schoolteacher and football coach’s pointed comments calling the former president and his running mate simply “weird” shattered the pervasive illusion of Trump as a powerful villain.
When Trump made a strange digression at the Republican National Convention last month about a fictional serial killer, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” Walz tweeted: “Say it with me: weird.” And on Tuesday, at a rally in Philadelphia where Harris and Walz appeared together for the first time as partners, Walz threw some more shade at his opponent. “I can’t wait to debate,” he said of GOP vice presidential candidate Vance, adding: “That is, if he’s willing to step down. the couch and it manifests itself. “
On “The Drew Barrymore Show,” Harris explained her laugh and made it clear she had no intention of toning it down. “I got my mother’s laugh,” he said. “And I grew up around a bunch of women…who laughed from the belly. They laughed. They were sitting around the kitchen…drinking their coffee, telling great stories with great laughs.”
Walz, before he was tapped by Harris as his running mate, observed on “Inside with Jen Psaki” that “Donald Trump is trying to mock Vice President Harris for laughs. And I made the point: Don’t have you ever seen this guy laugh. You never see him doing these normal things.”
Scowling one’s way to the center of the media churn doesn’t seem to be working as well as it once did. Trump’s superpower of capturing all the attention all the time is on the wane, and it’s a losing currency in the attention economy while Harris’ value rises.
All this could change overnight, of course, as elections often do. But we have seen something remarkable in recent weeks: a sense of joy in a time that seemed out of reach.
MAGA agents tried to use Harris’s laughter and lightness against her. It’s proof she’s not fit for the job, they say, but it seems to be that very exuberance that’s cut through the noise of an otherwise ugly election year.
“I call her ‘Laughing Kamala,'” Trump told a crowd at a campaign rally in Michigan a few weeks ago. “Have you ever watched him laugh? It’s crazy. You know, you can tell a lot from a laugh.”
Yes we can.