My favorite thing about Kamala Harris—and the list is not very long—is that she never held that silliest and most un-republican of all titles in American public life: first lady.
Harris seems likely, at the moment, to become our first female president. We might have done worse—and almost did.
At the Democrats’ convention this week, Hillary Clinton made the inevitable glass-ceiling speech, and the moment must have been for her at best bittersweet, leaning into the bitter. But Mrs. Bill Clinton always exemplified one of the worst ways to be a woman in politics: She was an appendage of a powerful, politically successful intern-diddler who treated her poorly and used her as a prop.
Mrs. Clinton does not lack for raw brainpower, but she was never a patch on the politician her husband was, lacking his charm, his remarkable gift for extemporaneous speaking, and his skill as a practical politician. I have no doubt that she is utterly his match when it comes to totally cold and self-seeking amorality, but whereas President Clinton could fool people into thinking that he genuinely gave a rat’s ass about them and their petty little problems with seemingly no effort at all, Mrs. Clinton was always more of a grinder, and you could see her doing the hard work of pretending to be a morally and psychologically normal human being. For 30-odd years (some of them very odd), Mrs. Clinton has been one of the most painful people to watch on the lavishly appointed stage of our ghastly politics. She will likely go down in history as the only person ever to lose a general election to Donald Trump, that champion of evangelical Christians, serial bankrupt, game-show host, and quondam pornographer.
Harris, as she will tell you—and tell you, and tell you—checks some other boxes. She wouldn’t be the first black president (she would be the second black president with no ancestral connection to the larger African American community composed of the descendants of slaves, which will be of interest to somebody somewhere, I am sure) but she would be the first president of Indian background and of Caribbean background. So she’d be putting points on the board for two increasingly important minority constituencies simultaneously. (Colin Powell, our first black secretary of state and the man who might have been our first black president, if he had desired to be, also was of Jamaican ancestry, a child of immigrants raised in the South Bronx.) This state of affairs seems to have confused Trump, possibly because he is a rage-addled ignoramus, but if you’re looking for a political class that—pardon the odious expression—“looks like America,” Kamala Harris and Tim Walz together cover a lot of ground.
But I wonder: Are her indelible characteristics still all that interesting? Kamala Harris does not seem to me a very interesting sort of person in general, but, if I were making a list of interesting things about her, her sex and her ethnic background—and the fact that she was the first person with such characteristics to hold certain offices—still wouldn’t be very high on the list. (Top of the list? Her pissy authoritarianism.)
In the coming years, we’ll have a lot of first Mexican American woman to hold this position and first gay man of color to hold that position, and, unless I grievously misread the national radar—a distinct possibility given the work I put into insulating myself from the tsunami of raw sewage that is American popular culture—it is all starting to feel a little bit silly to a lot of people. For example, it probably mattered, or at least was of interest, when one of those big corporations founded in the late 19th century or in the early 20th century had its first chairman or CEO who wasn’t a white man. But was it really a big deal at a company like Microsoft? Or at firm of more recent vintage? If your IPO was announced on Twitter, your company is really part of the world in which it was accepted as utterly ordinary that the commanding heights of business and politics would not be entirely dominated by white men. (Don’t get me wrong: We’re still doing pretty good!) There are culturally and economically important businesses and institutions out there that have never had a white man in charge. So, it was a very big deal when we had our first black president, a job so presumptively white and male that we built a gigantic white phallus in the capital city to honor the first guy to hold the job, but less so when it was (or will be) the first black woman to serve as deputy undersecretary of commerce for this, that, or the other.
Harris never held the ridiculous title “first lady,” which my iPhone wants to capitalize, damn its digital eyes, though she was adjacent to the ridiculous title “second gentleman,” which is what people have been calling her husband while she is vice president. I know I have beat this drum until the skin is loose, but: This is a republic, and we do not have aristocratic titles or quasi-aristocratic titles, nor do we have political positions that are acquired by means of marriage—at least, that’s how it is supposed to be. For all of the silly Republican efforts to characterize Harris’ political career as founded on her long-ago relationship with San Francisco political boss Willie Brown, she is, for better and for worse, her own woman, not an Eva Perón carried to power by her husband or an Indira Gandhi whose father was the first leader of her country in independence. Female leaders have been a mixed bag, of course: Margaret Thatcher was terrific, Golda Meir heroic, Gandhi a tyrant—and many of the ones who were carried to power by marriage turned out to be what their husbands were, i.e., corrupt petty criminals. Women do represent about half of the world’s population if not half of its political leaders, so we would expect them to cover the range in full.
I don’t like the idea that having a president from a particular demographic group puts a kind of national imprimatur on that group, and I object for two reasons: 1) I am an old-fashioned romantic individualist who believes that what’s important about people is who they are rather than who they are as a member of some group into which they were born; 2) it further entrenches the position of the presidency as a kind of magical cultural totem, the national idol figure in which the demos worships itself. That being said, I won’t rain on all the parades that will commence if Kamala Harris should become, as a matter of politics and the executive branch, at least, the actual first lady in the only meaningful sense of those two words.
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