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.
Forward with the anocracy!