On Monday, Charlotte Alter and Time Magazine reintroduced us to the already well-known vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, describing the energy at her early August Pennsylvania rally as Barack Obama-reborn. A 14,000-strong “exuberant” crowd filled the stands, cheering for “more than one minute,” wearing light-up bracelets like those of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour while holding homemade signs encrusted with “glitter and glue.”
We’re told that fundraising goals are now being “smashed,” stadiums “packed” and that TikTok has been “dominated.” Grassroots fundraising and volunteers have been “seeing an explosion” in participation. Celebrities, including pop stars and rappers such as Charli XCX, who christened Harris as “brat,” and Megan Thee Stallion, have shown up to offer support. Some labour union president called her a “badass woman.” Her Harris-Walz camo hats even “sold out within half an hour.”
More importantly, someone’s niece is happy “Genocide Joe” is gone, and digital Gen Z users in the “coconut tree” of the “K-Hive” are breathing a sigh of relief, finally free to express their true feelings about Israel.
After a “blockbuster summer of Barbie, Beyoncé and Swift,” Atler suggests that, maybe, all the “hand-wringing” about electing a woman will finally end …
The “Her Moment” cover set to accompany Alter’s piece in Time’s Aug. 26 magazine features a large vignette of Harris’s face. She’s surrounded by campaign signs displaying “Kamala” and the slogan When We Fight, We Win in blue and white, which, at the outer edge, fade out with a nostalgic softness usually reserved for distant history. A steely blue-grey Harris gazes upwards, as if to the heavens: proud, confident, already victorious, somehow haunting us from a glorious past that never happened. But of course, Harris’s race has barely started, and it certainly hasn’t been won.
The image communicates a woman memorialized as an icon of American progress and accomplisher of great things, instead of what she actually is: a current, and rather untested, presidential candidate with an undeniably poor track record the last time she ran for Democratic leadership. Looking at it made me wonder, is Time trying to manifest this vibe-shift “brat” future into being? Are they trying to make fetch happen?
Other outlets similarly fawned over Harris as a transformational figure. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capeheart wrote in 2022 that she “had to contend with the negative reactions and low expectations that come with shattering ossified notions of who should be (president)”. The same day, Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast suggested that Harris is “way friendlier and more accommodating than a man in her position would ever be.” Just last week, Katie Rogers of the New York Times referred to her as “emanating joy.”
I searched for other Time covers with grey-blue faces, seeking out other living politicians with such a cover — maybe Hillary Clinton or Obama — to find out their significance. Nope. One cover did pop up, though: it was the March 16, 1953 edition depicting a recently deceased Joseph Stalin, of all people.
Time, obviously not commemorating Harris’s recent passing or a massive historical event, seems to serve as a hagiography — an idolizing biography typically reserved for saints or venerated persons. Hagiographies describe these individuals as perfect or much better than they are in reality, often in service of a political agenda.
Indeed, with the exception of gently pointing out that Harris has held positions in her past that she needs to “explain” in interviews that she has yet to agree to, the article paints her as suppressed by President Joe Biden and campaign members, forbidden from shining her light, saddled cruelly with what Atler refers to as the “difficult” and “thankless work” of investigating the root causes of illegal immigration from Central America.
And now that Biden is finally gone, Atler tells us that Harris is tasked with cleaning up the mess his administration made while she was vice-president, such as ruptures in the party and its losses of Black, Hispanic, Arab and young voters in recent years.
Now Harris emerges from Biden’s shadow to do the saintly work she has always been destined to do, work we are told she has been planning in the background since 2022. Many meetings were had. Powerbrokers were consulted. Allies were spreadsheeted.
The takeaway is that Harris herself is “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” to borrow one of her more memorable phrases. Un-Bidened from what has been, if you will.
The glorification of Harris and her campaign all seems very strange, considering that the press and Democrats have constantly critiqued Donald Trump for similarly campaigning on a cult of personality. Not unlike Trump, as Atler points out, Harris and the Democrats are now placing emphasis on feelings, energy and “viral memes” — anything that can “snatch the spotlight away from (Trump).” I mean, are MAGA and camo hats really all that different?
More to the point, this iconic, Obama-esque Harris appears to have been invented from whole cloth less than a month ago, as if she had been grown in a Democratic campaign vat precisely for this purpose. There is little evidence that before Biden stepped down, anyone thought of Harris at all in this way.
Look. It’s cynical, it’s artificial, it’s hypocritical and it just might work. Political cults of personality rely not on whether someone is the best candidate, knows all the facts or has the better policies. They rely on the ability of voters to project their fears and desires onto a willing candidate who will wear them proudly in an imagined Epic Rap Battle against the other side. Republicans have their champion in Trump and Democrats now in Harris — it’s no accident they both use the word “fight.”
National Post
Terry Newman is a communication in engineering course lecturer at McGill University.