Back in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said when she debated Donald Trump, the year’s Republican nominee for president, he made her “skin crawl.”
Clinton said it was the way he lurked behind her, “stalking” her around the stage as she spoke, according to her 2017 memoir, What Happened. Feeling the heat in the back of her neck, she asked herself whether she should confront him, or ignore him and keep smiling.
She decided not to lash out, aided “by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard,” she wrote.
In the tell-all, Clinton said she had second thoughts about how she handled Trump’s behavior and thought confronting him would have been the better option.
“It certainly would have been better TV,” she said. “Maybe I have over-learned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world,” she said.
This is the conflict Vice President Kamala Harris is about to inherit. In the blink of an eye, Harris went from propping up an ailing President Joe Biden to becoming the Democratic Party’s front-runner, raising over $100 million in donations in just a couple of days, delivering fiery campaign speeches, and provoking her now-familiar opponent: Trump.
Her new standing, as you might expect, makes her the prime target for Trump’s vicious attack lines: To name just a few, he’s called her “nasty,” “crazy,” “incompetent,” and “dumb as a rock.” He’s also mispronounced her name and mocked her laugh. Keep in mind, she’s not the Democratic nominee for president yet, and it’s only been two days since Biden announced he wouldn’t seek reelection.
The question on everyone’s mind, then, is this: Is Harris—or any woman, much less a woman of color, for that matter—prepared to take on Trump, with all of the vitriol it incites?
According to Barbara Perry, a renowned presidential historian who has authored multiple books about the presidency, Harris is not only ready for it: She’s the only one who could do it.
Harris is the “perfect candidate”
With Kamala Harris, “you can’t get more of a contrast from Donald Trump,” Perry told Fortune.
“She’s a woman of color with interesting heritage, with her dad coming from Jamaica and her mother coming from India, and her pulling herself up by her own bootstraps. That’s the American Dream story,” she said.
Plus, with Harris—a former prosecutor who focused on sexual assault and fraud cases going against Trump’s “misogyny,” Perry said, “you’ve got the perfect person to run against him.”
She believes Harris can capture two niche coalitions of voters: the conservative never-Trumpers who didn’t want to vote for an elderly man, and the young leftists who want a progressive candidate. That’s because Harris is uniquely positioned to be both a tough-on-crime, sobered prosecutor—which would appeal to conservative voters—and a progressive, champion of the left, which would appeal to young voters.
Harris also checks certain boxes that previous presidents have, given her experience in both the judicial and executive branch, and on the local, state and national levels. Harris previously served as the district attorney of San Francisco before becoming the attorney general of California; she won a senate seat in 2017 in a convincing fashion, capturing over 60% of the vote.
“I always like to see a candidate have local, state, and federal experience because we’re coming back to the time when we were taking them out of [the] Senate, up until the Reagan years, when we tended to take governors,” Perry said. “She's got way more experience than many presidents coming into office, and certainly way more than Donald Trump ever had.”
How Harris distinguishes herself from Hillary Clinton
Harris could win if she touches on the kind of “Iron Lady” character of other female leaders, such as Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s former Prime Minister, or Golda Meir, the former Prime Minister of Israel who led the country through war in the early 1970s.
Those women—who were brought to serve in leadership positions in times of conflict, a la the glass cliff—maintained their status by exuding self confidence and strength. Harris, meanwhile, can cultivate a sense of stability through authenticity—something Clinton tried, but always failed to achieve, Perry argued.
“I came to meet [Clinton] a couple times and see, I think, her genuine side, which was really attractive and really compelling,” she added. “But on the presidential trail, what people said was she wasn't authentic. She could never stick to one persona.”
Harris, in contrast, “seems comfortable in her own skin,” Perry said, which she believes comes from having a loving relationship with her husband, Doug Ermhoff, and by having undergone strenuous circumstances in her political career. Harris had to face “bloodbath” primary elections in her time as California—where it can be incredibly competitive to run as a Democrat—so to get to the top, as attorney general and then senator, “is no tea party.”
Harris does have to “watch out for her laugh”
The reality of the political situation is that with television and social media, everything is visual, Perry said. Biden just dropped out of the race, essentially because of a catastrophic debate night that was reminiscent of former President Nixon’s loss to former President John F. Kennedy in 1960, which was blamed on Nixon’s sickly appearance on TV. Trump just had an uptick in morale and fundraising because of the visual of him narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, then raising his fist in defiance.
Perry mentioned how Franklin Roosevelt was elected for a fourth term in 1944, despite dying of congestive heart failure four months into office, because there was no TV or screens for people to see how sick he was.
“It makes you feel superficial, but it's okay to say, in a visual world, how one presents oneself is important,” Perry said.
With that in mind, Perry thinks Harris should be very attuned to her affect, and how her mannerisms are perceived on camera—especially as a woman. Particularly, it is easier for a woman who often laughs to be seen as silly, or less serious, than a man —something Perry says is already playing out for Harris (Trump’s new nickname for her is “Laughing Kamala.”).
To avoid further critiques in a still often-sexist world, Harris “needs to be careful about her laugh,” Perry said. While she thinks the jokes about Harris’ laugh, and the comparisons to Clinton’s similar laugh, are unfair—“that’s just the way these women laugh”—she said that for any woman to survive a brutal election cycle, they need to do their best to avoid the inevitable teasing.
“If people pick at you on something you can tone down, then better to do that,” Perry said. “It doesn't cause you to lose your principles or not be yourself.”
