The Happy Surprise of Kamala Harris
Hi!
I like to think I know a little bit about politics. In the weeks after his disastrous debate performance, I had expected President Biden to eventually retire his presidential campaign and pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. I figured that Biden would wait until after the Republican National Convention to make that announcement, thereby allowing the Republicans to waste a week making attacks on a presidential nominee who would not be on ballots in November. Just based on my feel for history and for the personalities in the moment, I figured all that would happen.
But I was surprised by how surprised I was when Biden actually announced that he was standing down his campaign for a second term. Even though I was certain it was going to happen, the enormity of that letter took me by surprise. After spending his whole life in pursuit of the presidency, giving up a potential second term had to have been one of the hardest things Joe Biden had ever done. It was a sacrifice, and he made it because he thought it was the right thing to do for the country—such a rare, commendable decision from an elected leader.
And then I was immediately surprised again by how quickly Kamala Harris lined up her party behind her candidacy for president. As the endorsements rolled in, and then the donations from ordinary Americans started avalanching in right after, Harris was in full control of the moment. There were a million ways that a candidate could have screwed up that rollout—had anything leaked in the days before Biden announced, for instance, it would have created the perception of Harris being too openly ambitious, or somehow dirty-dealing. But Harris handled it all flawlessly. I saw not a single misstep in that first week.
Even more surprising for me was Harris’s first speech as a presidential candidate. She had completely risen to meet the moment. Harris has always been a good public speaker, of course, but there’s some ineffable quality that a good presidential candidate has—they’re able to absorb the hopes and dreams and aspirations of a room full of thousands of people and then reflect the very best of those hopes and dreams and aspirations right back at the people. I watched Barack Obama learn how to do that in the first few months of his 2008 presidential campaign. But Harris had it right from her very first speech in Wisconsin. It turned on like a light switch, and she’s been operating at that very high level ever since.
There are lots of things that can go wrong from here, of course. Harris has traditionally not been very good at interviews—she responds like a lawyer, being too cagey and trying to turn questions back on her interlocutor—so I’m nervous about her first few big interviews on the world stage. She has a number of incredible options for vice president, but any choice carries with it its own risks. We’ve all seen vice presidents stumble and fall when they step into the spotlight, and with less than 100 days to go, this is a campaign that can’t afford any stumbles.
But for right now, I just want to say that while none of the news has factually surprised me, I have been surprised by how smoothly it has all gone. I’ve been delighted to watch the party adopt a new voice and a new strategy for dealing with the creeps and weirdos of MAGA world. And most of all, I’m surprised by how good I feel at this point in the handoff from Biden to Harris. I don’t know if I expected to feel positive—even hopeful—at the prospect of a Harris presidency. But I am excited—and more than a little scared, but mostly excited—by this new candidate and the possibilities that she presents.
Don’t get me wrong: Joe Biden has easily been the best president of my lifetime, and I would have happily voted for him again. But watching Biden willingly hand the party over to a new generation, and then watching that generation take the reins with vigor, humor, and charm, has been downright inspirational. It’s exciting to feel like good things are possible again, and it’s amazing what a difference a month can make in changing the national mood.
I’ve Been Writing
I wrote two issues of The Pitch, which is the weekly middle-out economics newsletter that’s ordinarily written by my boss, Civic Ventures President Zach Silk. Zach took a much-deserved vacation earlier this month, and I stepped in with an essay about how far away from the mainstream the Supreme Court has strayed and an essay about the Biden Administration’s new overtime rules.
For Civic Ventures, I also narrated a video about why Red Lobster went into bankruptcy. (A lot of media outlets reported that the chain sold too much shrimp for too low a price. It’s a great, funny story, but it’s not true.)
For the Seattle Times, I wrote about local author Cherie Priest’s new novel, The Drowning House, which takes place on a remote Washington state island whose best-known geographic feature is Mystery Bay. The island sounds too good to be true, but it is very real.
If you’re in the north Seattle area, you might consider schlepping up to Edmonds to attend the first Writers-in-Conversation event at the Cascadia Art Museum. Event curator Michael McGregor will be interviewing great Spokane novelist Sharma Shields about what it means to be a writer in and from the Northwest. I wrote a preview of the event in the Times.
I also wrote about a wonderful new bookstore up in Shoreline called Ridgecrest Books. Everything about this store, from the thoughtful design to the excellent selection of books, is extremely well-considered.
And I picked some of the month’s most exciting new paperback books.
I’ve Been Reading
The Ghost of Us is a supernatural-themed young adult queer romance by Seattle author James L. Sutter, who has also helped create some very popular role-playing games including Pathfinder. It’s a surprisingly sweet story, and a gentle enough romance that those of you who are feeling overwhelmed by Everything Going On might find some worthwhile refuge in its pages.
I guess I was in a sapphic romance mood this month. C.L. Polk’s Even Though I Knew the End is an urban fantasy novella about a Chicago detective who sold her soul to a demon. Just as the payment comes due, though, she’s fallen in love with a woman and she doesn’t want to leave.
André Gide’s Marshlands is a novel about a man who is writing a book called Marshlands, except he’s not so much writing the book as he is telling people at parties that he’s writing the book. And as the idea of Marshlands keeps changing, the writer’s life changes to more closely resemble the plot of the book that he is (or isn’t) writing. It’s a fun metatextual experiment of a novel that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, which I read right after Marshlands, similarly blends fiction with pandemic memoir, confusing the line between novel and tell-all. They made for an interesting back-to-back reading experience.
Jeff Jarvis’s Magazine is part of the Object Lessons series of books, which promise short, pithy investigations into the stories behind everyday objects. This one is ostensibly an ode to the role that magazines play in our everyday lives, but I enjoyed it most because Jarvis begins the book with a memoir of his time creating Entertainment Weekly, which was by far my all-time favorite magazine. The highs and lows of working on a magazine like EW have to be read to be believed.
I listened to Gretchen Whitmer’s new memoir, True Gretch, and it is one hundred percent intended to lay the groundwork for her national ambitions. But while most of those sorts of books are pretty dull—think of The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama’s bland second memoir—True Gretch is fun, brief, and funny. (The audiobook runs less than four hours, which is a genuine blessing.) I recommend the audio version because it includes a few snippets of some of her speeches, which adds a little more life to the mostly safe political prose.
L. M. Chilton’s novel Swiped is a thriller about an older single woman who reluctantly gets on a dating app. She slowly realizes that all of the men she meets through the app wind up murdered within a day or two after their first date. It’s a light, funny mystery that blends romantic comedy and serial killer fiction into an enjoyable beach read.
The Summer That Wasn’t
I don’t know if I have too much else to say this month. I’m working on a couple of comics projects that are taking up a lot of my time, and my day job has been incredibly busy lately. I’ve been enjoying the summer, but unlike those more locked-down pandemic years, I don’t feel quite as physically in tune with the season as I have been in the past. I haven’t been waking up with the sun this year, and I haven’t noticed the comings and goings of various wildflowers on my walks as the summer days pass. I keep looking up from my laptop to find that whole weeks have drained away and now we’re already rounding the corner into August.
I’m not complaining, though. Some years you’re in sync with everything around you and some years you’re just shoveling your way out from under everything. I’m still getting out and walking in the sunshine, and I’m still taking some time to go to the movies and soak in some air-conditioned blockbuster gaudiness. Hopefully in a month or two I’ll be able to catch a breath and watch the autumn roll in. If that sounds like your kind of thing, I hope the same for you, too.
See you next month,
Paul