Terry Prone: Competent Kamala Harris has her ear to the ground and an eye on the prize

Everything has changed in ways nobody anticipated

Democratic presidential nominee and vice president Kamala Harris is welcomed by running mate Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota governor Tim Walz at a campaign rally in Wisconsin. Picture: Kerem Yücel/Minnesota Public Radio via AP

Let us address two Democrat tropes this morning. 

The first is the sign James Carville reputedly stuck on the wall of the election HQ during one Clinton election. 

Everybody recalls what it said. All together now. “It’s the economy, Stupid.” 

Meaning that canvassers and ad-makers and the candidate himself should not be lured into anything other than the topic which did the candidate most good, which, at the time, was the economy.

It seemed, back then, to be an eternal verity that would apply in every subsequent presidential election, but that turned out not to be true.

Increasingly — and not just in the US — economic stats are not necessarily reflective of the personal experience of voters, and, as a result, those voters go “Yeah, yeah, yeah” when candidates (usually the incumbent) point to the robustness of the economy as their central achievement in office. 

Now, when voters go “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” they usually mean “No, no, no.” No, don’t talk to us about the economy. No, don’t give us stats that are so vast and cosmic as to be unrelated to our lives. No, don’t give me facts if the feels don’t match them.

What might usefully replace Carville’s sign, today, is one reading “It’s how the voter feels about themselves, Stupid.” 

New politicians always believe they get votes based on how the voters feel about them, the candidate, whereas the reality is that they get votes based on how the vote makes the voter feel about themselves. 

First time around, when he was up against Hillary Clinton, Trump’s core vote felt great about themselves for being supporters of The Donald. 

They felt morally traditional and defiantly cool for supporting a guy they felt they knew well from TV. 

Hillary, meanwhile, made precious few of her potential voters feel good about themselves. 

Except for a core group of her own age and gender, who felt loyally feminist and who believed they were uniquely prescient in their capacity to spot a warmth and humour in Hillary the majority of observers were seriously missing.

Four years later, and four months ago, Team Trump was all set. 

Despite 70+ failed lawsuits taken in an effort to support the former president’s delusion that the election had been “stolen” from him, or perhaps because the failure of those lawsuits fed into his core voters’ matching delusions, that core felt good about themselves for sniggering at “Sleepy Joe” and were convinced their man would win. 

Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump. Picture: Evan Vucci/AP Photo

The opinion polls suggested that they might be right.

Then Joe Biden did a wise and generous thing which turned the whole thing upside down and inside out. 

He removed himself from contention and was no longer a target of mockery. 

Kamala Harris became the candidate. 

Everything changed in ways nobody anticipated. 

It changed to an astonishing degree, because, let’s face it, Harris has not been a shining light in her four vice presidential years, and that’s putting it mildly, even if we insert all the usual caveats about how thankless the role is and how the poor eejit who has it always gets left out of everything, except when it comes to woeful jobs, when they suddenly find themselves front of the queue, as did Harris on the immigration issue.

Back then, her inadequacies were in florid display. Like Hillary Clinton, she had a compulsion to lecture the American people about the complexity of the issue rather taking care of business. 

She seemed incapable of cutting through to simplicity. 

The minute any politician gets off on the “there’s no simple answer” lecture tour, they need a reality smack. 

Voters have less than no interest in the relative complexity of the problem. 

We elect you to solve it so go do it. 

Plus, you should always remember we’re up to here in lectures from experts and we didn’t elect you to join their ranks. 

Harris lectured the electorate about immigrants in a caravan coming up from south of the border, made zero progress on the issue, maddened listeners with her lecturer’s conceptual language, and irritated them further with a constant mouth click.

The vice president went from promising to unpromising in no time at all. 

So her elevation to presidential candidate could have been a disaster, if her track record were anything to go by. 

But it wasn’t. 

It was a sudden sunny game-changer. 

Supports hold up signs in support of vice president Kamala Harris in Wisconsin. Picture: Kayla Wolf/AP Photo

Upturning the odds the way she did on her arrival on the presidential ticket was surprising and instructive. 

She left the solemn lecturer at home and presented, instead, a happy, positive, laughing version of herself which went down a treat. 

She left the conceptual language behind, and told of how she had prosecuted bad guys of specific types and how this meant she understood Trump’s type. 

Media of all kinds blinked with pleasure at the clarity, the short sentences, the illustrations, the soundbites. 

Media of more interrogative bent noticed and began to check for the verbal tic; the mouth click. It seemed to be gone. 

Now, here is where high-minded commentators sniff at the notion of paying attention to a mouth click and equate it to criticising her laugh or her coconut tree stories. 

That sniff is unjustified. 

Any trainer will tell you the eradication of a long-standing verbal tic is horrendously difficult at any age. 

But it would be particularly difficult if the owner is pushing 60. Old habits die hard. Yet Harris appears to have amputated a deeply engrained habit.

That one single excision proves that this woman, who is not young, no matter how young she seems, relative to Biden or Trump, can change. 

Can pivot. 

Can listen to people who advise about bad approaches, absorb, and accept their advice and deliver on it. 

That’s one hell of a set of competences, not one of which Trump possesses. 

We’re hearing leaks from the Trump campaign about advisers effectively saying “Enough, already, with the endless unevidenced complaints. You need to sound sane and focused on topics like the economy.” (Clearly, someone in Republican HQ has been influenced by Carville.)

Now, those advisers are half right. 

Even his own most faithful followers are getting visibly bored by his rambling diatribes. 

What was fresh and new and exciting eight years ago hasn’t aged well. 

Where the advisers aren’t right is on the economy. 

Trump, turfing the set-piece economic speech despite it being heavily flagged in advance, would have been fine if something more entertaining had been substituted.

But it wasn’t. It seriously wasn’t. Trump goes through advisers thus: Each is the new saviour. Each bites the dust with amazing celerity. 

He proves, every time anybody doubts it, that he is incapable of change. 

It has worked for him, thus far, which convinces him that it will always work for him.

But if Harris can continue to be a warrior of joy, delivering memorable entertaining accusations and timing her killer lines, the chances of it working for him, this time around, are much, much smaller.