Kamala Harris' campaign offers the lesson that candidates must define themselves simply, early and often
THE THREE most recent Democrats to win the White House—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter—had similar speaking styles on the campaign trail. They were centrist and inclusive, given to hopeful rhetoric, but—most importantly—just opaque enough about precisely what they wanted and stood for to let the broadest possible range of voters project their own hopes and desires onto them.That is trickier to pull off than it sounds.
When she launched her campaign in Oakland in January, before around 20,000 cheering spectators, she praised law-enforcement and criminal-justice reform, promised tax cuts as well as Medicare for All and free college, and she took unimpeachable positions in favour of unity, truth, grandmothers and America. Temperamentally and biographically, Ms Harris was a centrist; stylistically and demographically, she appealed to the party’s younger and more liberal electorate.
She proved gifted at delivering scripted zingers—“That little girl was me”, her reminder to Joe Biden that she benefited from the school-integration policy he opposed; “America does not want to witness a food fight; they want to know how we are going to put food on their table”, bringing a moment of order to an unruly debate in June—but less skilled at thinking on her feet.
Precisely what share of those struggles stemmed from her race and gender is impossible to determine: not none, but not all either. She may have found more success had she stuck firmly to the centre lane, and had her campaign staff remembered that she was running to be president of the United States, not president of left-wing Twitter.
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