A funny thing happened in the hours after the exit of Joe Biden from the US presidential race and the entrance of Kamala Harris in his place: a huge and genuine surge of excitement for a candidate who had previously failed to inspire. This wasn’t just expediency. In the 48 hours after Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, donations came in amounting to more than $100m and there was a reported 700% rise in voter registrations. It was overwhelming and igniting; the feeling that this was someone who could actually win.
These attacks will inevitably narrow and personalise. But on the evidence of the first 10 days of Harris’s candidacy, the Republican machine is struggling to find a workable way to undermine her. JD Vance, a man so palpably unappealing that he seems to have spooked even those who think that Trump is a good thing, had this week to defend remarks he made several years ago attacking Harris for not having children. (She is a stepmother of two.) There are circumstances in which this kind of mockery still works, but it doesn’t work here, and Vance, at 39, looked properly absurd – like a Victorian hologram poised to break out the word “spinster” – for making a song and dance about motherhood.
But the cat lady thing doesn’t work with Harris. Per Trump’s own metrics, she’s simply too young, too polished, too far above him in the rankings in which he puts so much store and habitually uses to denigrate women. In this, Trump’s own value system, it’s Trump himself, two decades her senior, who looks like the guy on the couch picking crumbs from the creases of his vest. Harris looks like his worst nightmare: a former attorney general of California in heels, slick, telegenic, with a corporate image and politics that have been largely in the centre – so that when Trump says “She is a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country,” he sounds ridiculous.
Best in Moderation
Article URL : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/01/kamala-harris-donald-trump-democrat-candidate