Philosopher Iskra Filever writes Aug. 24, 2024:
…when circumstances change, so does our behavior. The very most humorous comedian is likely to appear subdued if put on trial, and a person who scores high on social anxiety may be relaxed and confident in the company of intimate friends. Biden’s decision to step down and endorse Harris changed the circumstances, and the new situation is eliciting different behavior from Harris. The old Harris was Vice President. A Vice President’s job is to play second fiddle, do no harm, and make sure not to draw attention away from the president. The Harris In a New Key is a presidential nominee. A top-of-the-ticket nominee, unlike a VP, is allowed and indeed encouraged to remain in the limelight and go full throttle on the political highway.
In addition, and relatedly, people like winners. (Perhaps, we have evolved to.) Years ago, when Barack Obama was competing for the Democratic nomination with Hillary Clinton, a Clinton supporter said to me after the first primary, “Guess who won!” “I don’t know,” I answered. “Was it Clinton?” “Barack Obama,” he replied, and went on, “And this victory makes him interesting.” While Obama was the same person he had been the day before, I knew what my interlocutor meant: Something had changed. It was as though new victory light was shining on him while the light illuminating Clinton was getting dimmer. People wanted to see more of him and less of her. He had become more interesting.
I would conjecture that Biden’s endorsement of Harris had an effect parallel to that of Obama’s first primary victory: Harris became more attractive and better able to command attention. There is a halo around a person likely to be coronated.
…Young people created their own version of candidate Harris, a version tailor-made to suit their needs.
It is notoriously difficult for politicians to relate to younger voters or young people in general, though (often awkward) attempts continue…
Fortunately for Harris, however, she didn’t have to find a way to appeal to the younger crowd, because they rebranded her. They didn’t simply meet her half-way but walked the entire distance. Popstar Charlie XCX declared on social media that Harris is “brat.” “Brat,” kind young people explained later, meant that her vibes are summery, chartreuse-colored; that she is not too prim and proper; is perhaps a tad “messy” and “volatile” but in what psychologists call ego-syntonic way – she is comfortable and mildly amused by her own messiness and maybe, of that of life.
The “Kamala is brat” meme was precisely what the internet had been craving. It was a boon to the Harris campaign. All that the campaign needed to do at that point was run with it, and they did.
What made this re-branding possible?
I will mention two things. One is that Harris, as a person of mixed race, has what in a white-majority country may be seen as a “coolness” factor. She looks different and therefore, non-boring. Boringness may seem like a virtue to those who prioritize stability but not to those who look for excitement, which is most young people. (Whether Harris is actually different in non-superficial ways from any average candidate is a separate question.)
The second point is that Harris has been a low-profile Vice President and had, for this reason, up until quite recently, remained mostly unknown. Before the Biden endorsement, many knew what her laughter sounds like but not much else. She was a blank canvas. This made it possible for re-branders to project onto her whatever qualities they wished to see. Like many a lover who becomes enamored with an object for the first time, they chose to project something of themselves.
Robert Caro wrote in his 2012 book, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, about when JFK was assassinated, LBJ’s behavior dramatically changed:
…very little conversation, “no lost motion; it wasn’t necessary for us to talk.” To Marie Fehmer, her boss was “a changed man, transformed.” At first she couldn’t understand why he looked so different from the Lyndon Johnson for whom she had been working, but she came to realize, she says, that the very movements of his body were different; that instead of the awkward, almost lunging, strides and “flailing” movements of his arms that had previously often characterized Johnson under tension, now his stride was shorter, measured, and his arms were staying by his sides, hardly moving at all; that “there was no flailing,” that “only his head moved. It wasn’t just that there was no flailing emotionally. There was no flailing physically either. It was as if he was actively controlling his body.” Not only his movements but his voice was transformed, she says. It had none of the impatience in it that was often — usually — present, none of the anger and rage into which impatience so often morphed, none of any of the emotions with which it was generally filled. “His voice was not low so much as it was level — it didn’t fluctuate in tone. He was keeping it under control, calm.”
It was an iron control, a discipline that, during those three days, never slipped. “I’ve never seen him as controlled, as self – disciplined, as careful and as moderate as he’s been this week,” Bill Moyers told Time ’s Loye Miller. “He’s remained calmer … he’s been more careful to sort out and reason his feelings and his thoughts, and he’s been good to work with. You know very well how he used to thrash around and blow his top so often. It seemed like he had a clock inside him with an alarm that told him at least once an hour that it was time to go chew somebody out. But he hasn’t lost his temper once since two PM last Friday.”
“It is remarkable, really,” Miller reported to Time ’s editors in New York. “Some of us who have seen Lyndon at his most cantankerous cantankerous in times of lesser stress were wondering what sort of tantrums he must be having behind the office doors as the immense pressures of his new job and necessity for seizing it quickly bore down on him. But … my every inquiry brings the reply” that there were no tantrums — none of the cursing, none of the glass – throwing, none of the vicious rages. And the replies Miller received were accurate. There was never a crack in the calmness, the aura of command, the sense of purpose. The few reporters who were allowed to spend time in 274 during those days saw it for themselves, and those of them who had known Johnson for years were startled by what they saw now. Hurrying from 274 to Time ’s offices to describe Johnson in a wire to New York, John Steele used adjectives like “direct, calm, deliberate,” and nouns like “composure and sense of being collected.” Hugh Sidey felt he was showing more of such qualities than he had ever demonstrated before. “There were questions, decisions to be made, just flooding in on him one after the other,” he says. “He just handled them, one after the other,” without a pause. Business in 274 “seems to be progressing matter – of – factly,” another reporter wrote, “and actually quite well compared to the tumultuous office atmosphere which has often surrounded Johnson in the past.”
