Terry Prone: Kamala Harris in need of communications overhaul

US vice president Kamala Harris. 

Sunday

My gifts for other people are misshapen and over-sellotaped. They have the look of survivors of Storm Barra. Still, if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.

Monday

Donald Trump is upset that former chief of staff Mark Meadows, in his memoir, recounts just how awful the president’s hair looked the day he was taken to hospital with Covid-19. He’s right. Nobody should be photographed or described when they’re miserably sick. Nobody.

Tuesday

What kind of a Christian addresses a congregation filled with children and tells them that Santa Claus is “fantastical, that he never existed”? 

Bishop Antonio Stagliano, that’s who. 

One of the horrified children who heard him told the bishop that her parents had said Santa was real, only to be instructed by His Grace to tell her parents they told lies. 

One wonders where, in the gospels, Christ advised his followers to simultaneously torch myth, magic, and the child/parent relationship.

Wednesday

I would sell my soul to get the chance to work with Kamala Harris. The chances of it happening are slim to none, but she needs a radical change to her communication if she is to survive the vice-presidency and stand a chance of succeeding Joe Biden.

Of course, she has excuses aplenty if she doesn’t do either. The first is the virus. In an Independence Day speech in July, Biden somewhat clunkily proposed that America had achieved independence from the coronavirus. “While the virus hasn’t been vanquished, we know this: It no longer controls our lives,” he said. “It no longer paralyses our nation and it’s within our power to make sure it never does again.”

Delta blew a hole in that and Omicron turned it into a crater.

The virus is one reason why only 40% of people rate the vice-president positively, compared with over 50% who regard her unfavourably. She is also suffering what female politicians here and the world over are currently suffering; a frighteningly disproportionate hostility on social media. Plus she accepted a portfolio related to migration that was calculated, however she handled it, to make her popular with precisely nobody.

Excuses for Harris’ languishing poll numbers indubitably exist, but nobody ever built a career on excuses, no matter how legitimate.

Harris was swept in on Biden’s coat-tails, having not done well in her own bid for the nomination, largely because of poor communication. Arriving, she seemed full of promise, presence, warmth, and confidence, with a husband who looked like an unobtrusive asset. It was easy, in the cool November sunshine as she was sworn in, to gloss over doubts expressed about her speeches and her communication in the previous months — doubts expressed by faithful Democrats.

Much of the limited commentary at the time on this theme was shallow, instancing her failure to share emotional details of her upbringing. That wasn’t the problem. Her communications failures lay elsewhere but, in the celebrations, they went unaddressed, to her detriment.

Her communications failures are best exemplified in a press conference she gave after meeting the Mexican president in June. From the moment she stepped on to the podium, it was a dud. She looked right. She was confident, but her greeting to the journalists was an eyes-downcast sigh they could not take as a ringing endorsement of their function or her delight to be in front of them. She then told them she would tell them things and, for the first 90 seconds of the briefing — precisely the window within which a good speaker catches the listeners’ attention by cutting right to the key issue and expressing it in memorably striking words — this lawyer bored her way through generalised guff about “what matters abroad matters to the United States” and similar waffle.

She then moved straight into lecturing the hacks. Migration was complicated, she told them. You can just imagine them grabbing their pens to write that one down.

Migration was complex, she added, in case they didn’t understand “complicated”. Many factors were involved, she went on, lest they miss the implication of “complicated” and “complex”.

Then she stated the obvious — “Most people do not want to leave home” — as if this was something that would have escaped them and needed to be reinforced by her fingers hammering the desk and her head nodding in agreement with herself.

The last US politician to do that self-agreement nod was Hillary Clinton. It never works and it isn’t working for Kamala Harris.

To watch this press conference is to see a woman stating the obvious in a pattern of pointless repetition.

It is to witness a politician sermonising as if the journalists were her students. It is to see a woman failing to directly answer even soft-ball questions about what came out of her meeting with the Mexican president, focusing instead on the process so that, at the end of it, we know for sure they discussed things. It is to listen to conceptual language so dispiritingly deployed, it makes the listener wonder if the vice-president understands real life, real relationships, real people. It is to be sure that Harris has lost the room, knows she has lost the room (her dry-mouthed unhappiness is agonising to watch), and has no idea how to get the room back.

Nor was this a one-off. Today, she pompously ticked off a broadcaster for a snidely phrased question.

This woman’s communication needs rescue. Otherwise, short of an assassination or sudden illness on Biden’s part, she will never be president. Were either of those scenarios to happen, she would not know how to talk with the American people.

Thursday

Sex and the City is unique in that if, like me, you’ve never seen even one minute of the show or its spin-off movies, you still cannot claim ignorance because of the ubiquitous publicity. Particularly this week, when Peloton’s shares dropped like Mr Big, the character who had a heart attack while riding the static bicycle in an episode.

Peloton quickly fought back, uploading footage of Mr Big restored to life and discussing (infelicitously, for Irish viewers) his need for another ride. 

However, then several women accused actor Chris Noth of rape and sexual assault. 

Peloton took down the clip.

Friday

Much of our reverence to Christmas cuisine is misplaced. Marzipan should have been put down centuries ago.

Saturday

While completely compliant with the new restrictions, we hope that, while Omicron may infect thousands of Irish people, it may kill few of them; that it will give the “herd immunity” the living-with-Covid lads have been looking for; and that it will prove to be the last sting of the dying pandemic.

No harm in hoping.

Migration was complicated, she told journalists. It was complex, she added, in case they didn’t understand ‘complicated’.