AP

By Lisa Van Dusen

July 24, 2024

As a notorious fan of Venn diagrams, Kamala Harris has surely contemplated the Venn overlap that has framed her friendship with Joe Biden.

An 81-year-old white man born into the small-town dream incubator of postwar America and a 59-year-old Black-South Asian woman born into the immigrant dream incubator of American academia, Biden and Harris share a family background of aspirations embarked upon in good faith; some thwarted, some fulfilled.

They both had careers in law before running for office. They both espouse a set of large- and small-D democratic beliefs, within an anti-doctrine of pragmatism, socioeconomic fairness, pluralism and compassion. Their approach to politics is about those values, not about ideology or means-to-an-end tactical warfare.

But the two most important elements in the Biden-Harris Venn overlap may be struggle and temperament.

For a man whose career has reached the pinnacle of American political success, Joe Biden has struggled enough for 10 presidents. The stutter he learned to control as a teenager, the loss of his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash; his 1988 near-death experience by aneurysm; the loss of his son beau to cancer; the personal trials and political targeting of his son Hunter.

Kamala Harris has spent a career as a non-white woman whose competence as a lawyer and public prosecutor propelled her up through the ranks of a white-dominated, male-dominated professional culture. While only she knows what the misogyny/racism highlight reel of that journey looks like, it’s probably safe to assume it’s been quite a trip. Anyone — Donald Trump, aspirational usurpers, the usual anti-democracy propaganda suspects — who tries to paint Harris as a lightweight because of her disposition would do well to remember what it has taken for her to be where, and who, she is.

You don’t spend your legal career as a public prosecutor and state attorney general of California without being a serious person.

Both Biden and Harris seem to have transmuted their struggles into hope and optimism. Joe Biden may be the best-known idealist of his political generation, and Kamala Harris’s apparent absence of personal and political guile has made her trademark belly laugh a meme, and Make America Laugh Again, or #MALA, the new MAGA. In an era when so much of what’s wrong with politics is expressed through vendettas, score-settling, narcissistic compensation and the most corrupt innovations in power consolidation of the past half-century, Biden and Harris stand out as happy warriors.

At a time when proxy-outsourced, tactically weaponized hatred has become a political commodity, Harris has taken Barack Obama’s “no-drama” approach and made it an inherited core competency. It’s hard to be a chaos-fomenting hater when you’re laughing, dancing or quoting a coconut homily.

• Also from Lisa Van Dusen: ‘Biden’s Parting Gift to Democrats’

For two people whose other significant shared experience is that they have both been degradation targets of America’s most malignant, outcome-corrupting narrative warfare machine — Biden over several presidential cycles, then more recently as president, and Harris subjected over her term as vice president to similar, classic take-downs — that approach to life and politics represents a triumph of character over lack of character.

Biden and Harris are both serious people. You do not move through life with the emotional travelog of a Joe Biden and not take life and politics seriously. You don’t spend your legal career as a public prosecutor and state attorney general of California without being a serious person.

‘Cackling Kamala’, is probably not the most sophisticated attack Harris will face between now and the Democratic convention in Chicago on August 19th.

And the only truly serious, sane response to a political context that includes Donald Trump, a farcically corrupt Supreme Court, a daily deluge of intelligence insulting propaganda and a strategic terrain defined by opinion polls that seem to reflect an incomprehensible suicide pact between voters and aspiring autocrats, is to laugh. As Harris herself has said of the focus on her laugh by political opponents, there is a message about women, authenticity and identity in the controversy.

So, Trump’s pricelessly telling nickname, “Cackling Kamala”, is probably not the most sophisticated attack Harris will face between now and the Democratic convention in Chicago on August 19th. In the first 48 hours of her campaign, she has already faced racist, sexist swipes so unsubtle they make dog whistle seem artful.

Based on every single plot twist in America’s political warfare evolution over the past quarter century, it’s all-but certain that an incrimination narrative designed to repurpose Harris’s strengths as weaknesses, to hit her with a tactically timed, seemingly self-inflicted bombshell to rationalize a spiral is now being storyboarded and scripted in the bat#$%*-crazy lab where these things are concocted. America has lived through this before, over and over again, since the turn of the millennium, most notably, but not exclusively, in 2008.

But whatever you may have heard about Kamala Harris’s inexperience and political un-testedness, she has been running for office for more than 20 years, winning race after race – for San Francisco district attorney in 2003 and 2007, for California attorney general in 2010 and 2014, for the U.S. Senate in 2016, and in her failed 2020 primary campaign that qualifies as the character building loss, followed by victory as Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick in the general.

No wonder she’s laughing.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.