CAN HARRIS MAKE HOPE A WINNING MESSAGE AGAIN?

Keith Boag

There have long been those who see Donald Trump as psychologically broken, but lately he seems broken in more transparent ways. His zingers don’t land. That old Trump magic might finally be circling the drain.

It’s been four weeks since Kamala Harris exploded from the starting blocks in her race for the White House, and still the former president hasn’t settled on a childish nickname for her.  The schoolyard bully, whose greatest hits include “Crooked Hillary”, “Sleepy Joe”, “Lyin’ Ted” and “Little Marco”, is desperately fumbling for a catchy Harris smear, but coming up with nothing better than a ho-hum third rate snore-fest of unimaginative put-downs such as “lunatic” “low IQ” and “dumb”. 

He’s even experimented with the bogus claim that she’s not really Black.

In the grand scheme of things, so what? — nickname insults are for schoolboys.  Though to the cynical Trump, nicknaming has always seemed like his superpower. Maybe his failure to tag Harris is a “tell”— a sign that he’s been knocked off his game by Harris and by the new shape of the presidential campaign. He is not, after all, blind to what’s going on.

Democrats glide into Chicago this week, their sails billowing in a breeze of fresh hope — the antithesis of Trump’s dark cynicism. Exhilarated by their course correction from the path of looming disaster, they’ve apparently recovered nicely from the political dirty work it took to give Joe Biden the word and move on to this giddy moment. Each day seems to produce another opinion poll that illuminates new paths to victory. On Saturday a New York Times/Siena survey found Harris is now competitive in Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada and Georgia.

Away from the horse race, Harris has made some important moves to define her as more than just “not Biden, not Trump”. Her economic statement on Friday was less a vision statement than a hearing test—as in “Yes, I hear you, struggling America!”.

She gets that the Biden economy looks great on paper, but she resists the temptations that too often seemed to seduce the president — that briefing-book wonkiness about inflation rates, jobs numbers, the GDP; a kaleidoscope of macroeconomic mumbo jumbo utterly disconnected from anyone not watching Morning Joe.

Harris spoke instead about prices at the grocery store, disappearing affordability, and the feeling people have that they just can’t get ahead anymore.

Maybe her plan to crack down on price gouging is just an easily forgotten pipedream about something that might not even exist, but that’s not the point. The point is to say it, to make the right friends by picking the right enemies. That’s worked for Trump, why not for Harris?

Similarly, who knows what the fine print will reveal about her promise of $25,000 towards a down payment for first time home buyers?  It sounds like something that might interest a lot of young people; give them something to talk about, at least.  That’s good politics on an issue where Harris still trails Trump.

Likewise, though, she must say something about immigration and the border, another top-of-mind issue about which voters trust Trump more than Harris. It’s tougher because Biden delegated the border crisis to Harris long ago and her failure to make any headway there remains her most conspicuous political vulnerability. But face it she must.

Nor are the accomplishments of the Biden administration of much use, though they are significant: infrastructure projects, COVID relief, reshored manufacturing and others. It is a cruelty of politics that voters, while quick to punish failure, remain a thankless lot. They immediately lose interest in the great thing that someone did for them yesterday, and move on to new demands for the future.

Logically, Biden was handcuffed in any debate about the future because his strongest play against Trump is Trump’s history: felon, fraud, misogynist, insurrectionist, weirdo.  A convention with Biden at the center of it would necessarily have replayed all that on a loop.

But with Harris it’s different. There’s room to move. Despite having only four weeks to retrofit their convention, we can expect a completely different frame from what we might have seen had Biden remained the nominee: less Trump, much more talk about the future.

Also expect some echoes of the Barack Obama “hope and change” campaign. “Hope” is back—also “joy”, “fun” too, it looks like. All that’s  missing, so far, is the Michelle Obama thing about “when they go low we go high”. That has never worked with Trump. This Harris campaign sees a knife fight for what it is, and arms appropriately.

What the otherwise unremarkable Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin once derided as that “hopey changey stuff” might be a timely contrast with the cynical self interest that has characterized Trump’s public life. It is, perhaps, time for that showdown.

“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but is the furthest thing from it,” said late night host Stephen Colbert some years ago. Last week Colbert invited the artist Nick Cave on his show, and through several minutes that circulated widely on social media, Cave thoughtfully elaborated: “Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us,” he read from a letter he’d written to a despairing fan. “Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”

There is an assumption among politicos that fear always messages better than hope, and that’s why negative advertising works. But New York Times columnist Charles Blow reports that research is showing young Black voters — men in particular — are more responsive to political messages of “gain and empowerment” than to messages of “fear and loss”.

Naïve and wishy washy “hopey changey stuff” is not the deal.  But hope, “the warrior emotion”, sounds like anything but that. It sounds fierce; it sounds like fighting words.   If Harris is looking for something to inspire her party this week, she could do worse than that.

. . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Keith Boag - The US presidential ticket is set: Trump + Vance versus Harris + Waltz. And to cover that election, we're bringing our readers and listeners a brilliant journalistic mind and political correspondent legend, Keith Boag! Keith was with the CBC for more than 30 years, including as Chief Political Correspondent. His career included work for many years in Washington, D.C., and as Ottawa Bureau Chief. Keith covered seven federal elections in Canada, ten party leadership campaigns, as well as several US elections. Keith will regularly offer his written analysis via "QUOTES" at Air Quotes Media.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Air Quotes Media. Read more opinion contributions via QUOTES from Air Quotes Media.