How the First Black Female President Breaks Barriers: What Happens When You Walk Into Grayling and You Tell Me What You Have Done
Authenticity is a mirage. Americans crave the performance of authenticity as a sign that our values are in safe hands — hands just like ours. Of course, people who study this stuff for a living don’t quite agree on what authenticity is. You can be aware of a situation when you see it. The audience has expectations about who should be in power, and the candidates have to come up with ideas about their identity. A tall white guy with a healthy head of hair is presidential.
Harris lands her applause lines. The former prosecutor is comfortable going on the attack. Her most consistent message is that Donald Trump wants to send America back to the Dark Ages. Unlike her predecessor, she relishes calling Trump out by name. Her wacky humor, which has been mocked, suddenly works. She sounds like she knows what she is doing. That’s the holy grail of electoral politics. Every wide-jawed cackle she offers the audience, every twinkle in her eye as she pokes at Trump — it all comes off as someone who is in on the joke. That is hard for any candidate but it is an almost impossible tightrope for a Black female candidate to walk.
People in Michigan had signs that looked bad for Ms. Harris. That is literally. While driving to Grayling, I spied a digital billboard that said Willie Brown Endorses the candidate, a reference to a previous chapter in Ms. Harris’s life.
The Harris rally, which took place near the Detroit airport last Wednesday, was not the kind of gathering that would make a believer out of anyone. The crowd including Republicans who had never been to a political rally before, United Auto Workers members in matching red shirts and Black sorority sisters dressed in pink and green, were all new to the rally. Some of them mentioned experiencing the same magic they’d felt during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as they pondered the possibility of breaking another barrier — this time, the first female president. I asked Sigro if she missed out on Obama. “I didn’t want to miss out on history again.”
Those comparisons are both inspiring and worrying. Inspiring because it does matter that such barriers are broken, and worrying because it can tempt Democrats to focus on style and symbolism over substance. This risk is most evident, and most significant, on the issue of Gaza. The U.S government support for Israel in the wake of the attack by Hamas has become a major point of contention within the Democratic Party. If the Harris campaign isn’t able to address the issue in a way that feels substance, the Democrats may not be able to win the election.