I’m reluctant to write about Kamala Harris’s smile because I’m going to get all gushy and mushy about it, and the Harris lovefest is a jammed jamboree without need of another journalist. She’s enjoying more than a routine political honeymoon; she’s in the priciest suite on the poshest cruise ship sailing through a tropical paradise where coconuts tumble juicily from their trees into her aloe-moistened hands.
But I can’t stop noticing and basking in her happy face. Actually, happy doesn’t do it justice — it’s exuberant. Sometimes even ecstatic. When she made her surprise appearance onstage in Chicago during the prime-time portion of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, she beamed so brightly I reached for my sunglasses. When she high-fived her running mate’s wife, Gwen Walz, during a campaign rally in Rochester, Pa., the day before, she sparkled like a gemstone. Even when she talked about the economy — the economy! — in Raleigh, N.C., two days before that, she found places and pauses for her mouth to widen and her eyes to light up. Those smiles of hers communicate an elation that I immediately want to share, an optimism that I instantly want to embrace.
They also make me wonder if her poll numbers, a significant improvement on President Biden’s, are best explained not by wonky analyses of voting blocs or by the demographic differences between her and Biden but by simple, musty political truisms.
Which presidential candidate would I most want to have a beer with? Harris — hands down. She’s the fun to Donald Trump’s fear-mongering, the fizzy wine to his flat whine. She might even let me talk a bit, to judge by her stump speeches, reasonable in length and restrained in self-obsession. He’d just insist that I listen to a litany of the injustices done to him and nod and nod until I finally nodded off.
Which candidate projects, and thus inspires, more hope? Again, Harris, and again, it’s not even close. Trump may be promising to make America great again, but his descriptions of the country as a stinking, suppurating hellhole contradict that pledge. You can’t turn an abattoir into Arcadia with all the tariffs, mass deportations and drill-baby-drilling in the world.
Trump may belong, formally, to the party of Ronald Reagan. But in her buoyancy and bonhomie, Harris is the Reaganesque one.
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