Nate Silver Reviews Kamala Harris’s DNC Speech: She Smiles More Than Hillary Clinton, Doesn’t Rub Our Faces In Her Womanness

The art of showing and not telling

Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention has received rave reviews, even from those who were once skeptical of her political talents. Harris is the second woman to head a major party presidential ticket and both faced Donald Trump, toxic masculinity made putrid flesh. So, it’s understandable that pundits would compare Harris’s remarks to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 speech.

---

---

In his Friday newsletter, Nate Silver declared that Harris “is approximately 1000x better at the stagecraft of politics than Hillary Clinton ever was.” That seems pretty subjective, but it’s hard to argue with the data analyst who proves his point with randomly selected screenshots from their speeches.

Behold the weirdness

“From Clinton,” Silver writes, “there was a lot of this.”

That’s right. Clinton was coming for our souls! No amount of power could slake her thirst.

“Whereas from Harris,” Silver writes, “we got a mix of this:”

Yes, Harris apparently smiled more than Clinton. It’s a tiresome observation at this point, especially since it’s based on a fallacy. Clinton didn’t scowl her way through her presidential campaign. She smiled quite often. She even smiled at times during her speech, but I’m not going to comb through video for exculpatory screenshots because that’s just weird.

Silver does acknowledge that he’s treading in deeply sexist waters, but he reminds us, “Gender is not my beat.” I don’t think you need an advanced degree in women’s studies to avoid making gendered assumptions about politicians.

Silver argues that Harris projected more warmth in her speech, “even when in kicking-ass-and-taking-names mode” than Clinton, who he believes was too cold while also too self-congratulatory.

Clinton was acting like she was accepting an award, that the hard work had already been done, mission accomplished. The dominant color, including Clinton’s dress, was white, as though in a coronation. All of this was quite explicit: that it was Clinton’s turn — finally a woman’s turn! — after Obama had beaten her out of the 2008 nomination. Because boy, had she earned it.

I mean, she did earn the nomination. It’s not easy running for president, especially when men insist you don’t smile enough while also describing your laugh as a “cackle.”The “as though in a coronation” link brings up a Wikipedia page featuring a photo of Queen Elizabeth II from her actual coronation in 1953. The Queen was wearing a flowing white gown (not off the rack) and bejeweled crown, while holding a scepter. Clinton was wearing a white suit without a crown or scepter in sight. Her dress was meant to invoke the suffragists — heroes of American democracy, not symbols of the stodgy British monarchy. The “coronation” charges against Clinton and Harris, as well, are annoying because neither woman inherited the Democratic nomination, unlike Trump’s business “empire.”

Queen Elizabeth never publicly fought for power. Instead, she assumed it as her birthright after her father’s premature death. Matthew Yglesias suggested that Harris “benefits from the fact that she never really overtly sought the 2024 nomination. It fell to her as a responsibility that she picked up rather than a prize she competed for.” However, Harris did actually run for president and, like Clinton, she served faithfully in the administration of the man who defeated her in the primary. Nonetheless, Clinton was accused of feeling “entitled” to the presidency.

Never let them see you sweat or remind them that you’re a woman

Silver appreciated that Harris didn’t overtly mention her own race or gender in her acceptance speech, and he wasn’t the only white male pundit who noticed. Never Trump conservative Bill Kristol observed that Harris only spoke the words “race” and “gender” once (“regardless of party, race or gender”).

Political analyst David Rothkopf posted on social media, “Very powerful and striking that at no point did Kamala Harris speak of breaking glass ceilings or becoming the first woman president. She just spoke of being the president this country needs right now.”

A good number of white men — and not just conservatives — resent references to breaking the “glass ceiling” or any “racial barriers.” These terms suggest that there were qualified women or Black people prior to that moment who were structurally held back. They prefer the implication that women/minorities are the ones who are finally “ready,” not the system itself.

The Guardian’s Emily Jashinsky — who’s not a white male — wrote that “in her acceptance speech, Harris chose not to play [the gender] card” and instead focused on her identity as an American.

A source familiar with the Harris campaign’s strategy told Good Morning America: “I think her historic identity is an example of showing, not telling. For the voters who her identity is especially important to, it is obvious.”

This puts Harris at a distinct advantage over Clinton. Harris can borrow from Barack Obama and lean into her very American story without specifically calling out her race or gender. Clinton’s many achievements as a woman are a uniquely American story, as well, but if she can’t literally wear the colors of her struggle, she’s left as a well-off, powerful white person, a former First Lady at that. A gender-blind view of Clinton’s life would depict her as someone who grew up comfortably middle class and went on to attend Yale Law school. Conversely, Bill Clinton had a more humble background as the “man from Hope.”

Americans (well, at least the Supreme Court) elected George W. Bush eight years after his father left office, but the wife of a former president returning to the White House as commander in chief was dismissed as a “dynasty.”

Harris’s acceptance speech contains a lot of showing but not telling: She describes her mother as “a brilliant, five-foot-tall brown woman with an accent” and her father as a “student from Jamaica.” She mentions growing up in “a home filled with laughter and music: Aretha, Coltrane and Miles.” The subtext is clear for those who understand and easy to ignore for those who don’t.

Obama didn’t directly mention his race, either, during his 2008 acceptance speech. Instead, he spoke about how his parents “who weren’t well-off or well-known” had “shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.” In his 2024 DNC speech, Obama said, “This convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible.” Conceding that names like “Barack” and “Kamala” are “funny” sounding is not just self-deprecating. It embraces the implicit “otherness” projected upon them — white folks eat that up.

Clinton, however, read directly from the text. She told Americans what this moment meant and why specifically we should celebrate it.

Tonight, we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for President. Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come. Happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between.

Happy for boys and men, too – because when any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone. When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit. So let’s keep going, until every one of the 161 million women and girls across America has the opportunity she deserves. Because even more important than the history we make tonight, is the history we will write together in the years ahead.

Kamala Harris is more like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton in the ways that the American electorate appreciates. In her latest campaign ad, running in seven swing states and Nebraska, she refers to “middle-class families like the one I grew up in.”

People like Silver have rejected so-called “social justice liberalism” as incompatible with classical liberalism’s focus on the individual, yet they have nothing but disdain for Hillary Clinton’s triumphs as an individual woman. They still won’t stop complaining about “I’m with her” (an unofficial slogan that Bernie Sanders reportedly refused to say when filming an unaired campaign ad for Clinton).

Beyond avoiding specific references to race or gender, Harris invokes similar themes as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and perhaps that allows white men to close their eyes and believe we all share the same dream and experiences. It’s irritating, but it still might make all the difference.

I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber for $80 a year or just $8 a month, if you’re not already. This helps sustain the newsletter and keeps all the content free for everyone.

Follow Stephen Robinson on Bluesky and Threads.

Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more fun content.