In a recent article for The Atlantic, Tom Nichols claims that the Kamala Harris campaign is focused far more on personality than policy—and that this is a good thing. Nichols says that Harris should ignore the pleas of those who want her to clearly explain what exactly she would do as president and instead keep drawing the contrast between her joyful, “normal” persona and Trump’s dark, mean, “weird” one. This is because, Nichols says, Americans just don’t care about a president’s policies, i.e., what they do with their power, but are more interested in who they are. 

“I wish that Americans cared more about policy, but they don’t,” he writes. Harris and Walz “are presenting themselves as normal, cheerful people, politicians who everyone might not agree with but who won’t make America dread turning on the television.” This is good, Nichols says, and “allowing anyone to drag Harris into the thickets of policy just to satisfy the demands of some journalists” would “constitute political malpractice”:

Harris and Walz are supposed to sit for an interview and explain their plans for … what, exactly? Federal burden-sharing with the states for highway repair? Any adviser worth their salt would block the gates of the Naval Observatory rather than let Harris and Walz distract the public from the Trump and Vance tire fires by wonking out about school lunches or Ukrainian aid.

Yeah, who cares about such trivial, boring, “wonky” stuff as “whether poor children get to eat lunch” or “how the next president is going to deal with one of the most serious crises in the world today”? Leave that to the politics nerds! Everyday people care about things like whether Kamala Harris has “#BratEnergy” or whether Tim Walz exudes “Midwestern dad vibes.” It therefore doesn’t matter that Harris lacks a policy page on her website, has been deliberately sketchy on the details of what she’d do as president, and has shown “a stark difference from Mr. Biden’s approach in the summer of 2020, when to make peace with Senator Bernie Sanders’s defeated campaign, his team organized a series of groups to write proposals on criminal justice, education, the economy, the environment, health care and immigration policy.” Harris has, for example, “mentioned climate change only in passing, and offered no specifics on how she would curb dangerous levels of warming,” and “hasn’t said whether she still supports the Green New Deal.” Harris may be more of a “vibes president,” inhabiting the role of “America’s favorite aunt—whip-smart and a little bit sassy, cool with just the right amount of approachable whimsy mixed in.” Anand Giridharadas writes that the Harris campaign has, in a short amount of time, signaled the ascendance of “a new political style at the top of the Democratic Party… a new approach that elevates attention over restraint” and “storytelling over self-explanatory policy mindedness.” 

There are definitely fans of the Harris-Walz campaign out there who have embraced them fully as characters in the national drama, protagonists rather than policymakers. In its most extreme form, this tendency manifests itself as actual fan fiction, as in this online post from someone who enjoyed conjuring an elaborate imagined scenario involving all the principals in the presidential campaign: 

"Tim Walz is my dad; Kamala's my fun aunt who lives next door. They just found out I'm being bullied by the shittiest kid in my class, JD. When they try to talk to his dad, Don, it becomes clear he's the real problem. They go back to their car; Kamala pulls out her cop badge, Tim grabs his old baseball bat. They walk back to Don's porch. As Tim reaches for the doorbell they look at each other and smile. This is going to be fun."

That’s an extreme and unrepresentative example, of course. More common is a mundane brand of discourse that emphasizes personality and the “horse race”/sports team dynamic of politics over questions of what is called “policy.” (“Policy” makes it sound like it’s for those dull, unpopular “wonks,” but what the term refers to is “everything the president actually uses their power for.”) I confess that I bristle every time I read headlines like

• JD Vance and Tim Walz Find Common Ground: Diet Mountain Dew (New York Times) 
• How Simpsons “Superfan” Kamala Harris Stunned Crowds at Comic-Con (Vanity Fair) 
• Kamala Harris and Tim Walz talk Springsteen, Prince and vinyl in new interview (San Francisco Chronicle) 
• Tim Walz’s ‘White Guy Tacos’ Quip Gets MAGA All Hot and Bothered (The Daily Beast) 
• Yes, JD Vance's Beard Matters. Here's Why. (Politico) 
• Just How Lincoln-y Is JD Vance's Beard? (Slate)
• Vance Unlikely to Upend Race, but Beard Could Be Factor, Historians Say (Newsweek) 
• Who will portray Tim Walz and J.D. Vance on 'SNL'? (Boston Globe) 
• Kamala Harris’s Tan Suit Surprise (New York Times)
• Did Kamala Harris Just Reclaim the Tan Suit? (The Cut)
• Why Kamala Harris’s Mom Was More 'Brat' Than She Is (New York Times)

I confess, I hate this stuff. Just can’t stand it. Even reading it feels like it’s causing a part of my brain to rot. It makes me feel like I’m being distracted with “bread and circuses” from anything that actually matters. I feel like I’m being asked to treat politics as indistinguishable from a television show, with the fact that it has actual consequences for human lives being treated as irrelevant or trivial. 

JD Vance’s beard? Are you kidding me? Who cares? How about the fact that he appears to admire fascist purges of leftists, like when Pinochet threw people out of helicopters in Chile? What about that? Would the New York Times run “Why Hitler’s Mustache Matters” in 1928? (Don’t answer that, I’ve looked at their coverage of Hitler’s rise to power, and it was just about that bad.) As for Kamala Harris: we have spent the last two years in a proxy war against a nuclear-armed power (Russia), which is constantly at risk of escalating. The administration she serves in is arming and funding a major crime against humanity (Israel’s assault on Gaza) which has revolted the world. Inequality in this country is out of control, and we have a cruel immigration system, a cruel prison system, a cruel healthcare system, and plenty of other preventable injustices that affect our lives and the lives of our neighbors, friends, coworkers, and family members every day. A colossal climate crisis is bearing down on us and will cause untold human misery unless radical steps are taken swiftly to address it. The task for voters when selecting a head of state is to ask what they are going to do about these issues. That’s the whole reason they are there. We are not selecting a homecoming queen and king. We are allocating an immense amount of power, and the discussions we have should be about what that power will be used for.

I recently opened a 1972 issue of Jet magazine and found an interesting ad. At the time, Richard Nixon was trying to appeal to Black voters, and so his campaign took out an ad in a magazine with a Black readership. The ad is very interesting, because of its intense policy focus:   

I happen to think this is an extremely effective ad. One would think that the architect of the “Southern Strategy” would have a tough time crafting an effective message for a Black audience, but this is a good ad, because it says: my opponent takes you for granted. I, on the other hand, have delivered real, meaningful changes that you can actually measure and that will improve the lives of those in your community. It’s rather extraordinary; Nixon even bragged about the food stamp program! Notice that there is no emphasis on Nixon’s personality or likability (he was not likable). It’s entirely about what Nixon had done and why people should want him to do more of it. Nixon won the 1972 election in a landslide. He did not, however, succeed in winning the Black vote overall, because Black voters are able to see through bullshit. But he did increase his percentage of Black votes from 1968 to 1972. This suggests that “Here’s what I’ll do for you” is a sound message. 

“Policy” is not peripheral. In fact, it’s everything. In Tom Nichols’s formulation, where we treat politics as a personality contest, why should we even care about the election? I mean, sure, Donald Trump has darker “vibes” while Harris brings the “joy,” but if it’s just about vibes, we might as well be choosing Sexiest Person Of The Year. The only reason elections matter is that they have consequences for people in the real world, consequences like whether poor children are going to eat or starve. 

Nichols says that it’s a myth that Americans care about policy. But perhaps the opposite is true. I think the very reason that so many Americans are disillusioned with politics is that they don’t see how it affects them. If you went around this country and you asked everyone you saw how much attention to politics they pay, and why they don’t pay more attention, I guarantee you you’ll get many variations on an answer roughly like: None of these politicians ever actually do anything for us, they just care about themselves, they don’t care about us, look at my community, what have the politicians ever done for us? We learn from the New York Times that “the internet has been busy dream-casting… the “S.N.L.” election ticket,” picking the celebrities who should play the Saturday Night Live parodies of our foremost political figures. I guess this is fun, but I find it somewhat less fun when I remember J.D. Vance and the fascist manifesto or read the reports coming from doctors who have returned from Gaza. 

I recently watched the sermon of Palestinian Christian pastor Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac at the Riverside Church. Isaac was speaking at the same church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous address condemning the Vietnam War and calling on his fellow Americans to stop a hideous injustice. Isaac explained what is being done to the people of Palestine, plus the U.S. complicity and support for Palestinian suffering, and called on Americans to break their silence and stop their government from continuing to enable mass murder. Isaac’s speech, with its deliberate echoes of the Vietnam era, caused me to think of a useful little moral aid I call the “Vietnam Test.” In order to properly understand our times, we should imagine how we would react to certain acts if they had been done at the height of the horrific Vietnam War, one of the worst crimes ever committed by the United States government, which rightly inspired massive domestic opposition. How, for instance, would we feel about condemnations of student protesters? How would we feel if the Democratic presidential candidate was completely silent when it came to explaining what they would do about the war? How would we feel if the foremost representative of the “left” wing of the Democratic Party declined to criticize Lyndon Johnson? What obligations would we have to act? How would we feel if there were more coverage of what color the Democrat’s suits were than what they intended to do about the war? I believe the war on Gaza is morally comparable to the war that was waged against Vietnam and that Americans have just as much of an obligation to try to end it. Once you start thinking clearly about the morality of the situation, things like Barack Obama’s cheerful annual playlist releases can come to look grotesque rather than endearing. 

Staying focused on the issues makes political sense (you’re telling voters why it actually matters for you to win the election) and moral sense (politics determines whether people will suffer unnecessarily). I don’t think politics should be parasocial. We shouldn’t relate to elected officials like they’re sports stars or our favorite podcasters. The media is always going to to spit out endless personality-focused stories—they’re out for clicks and profit, not to inform you in any meaningful sense—but we need to remember that these politicians are public servants who are there to carry out a job, and our discussions should be about what kind of job they’re going to do, not what suit they’re going to wear while they do it or what playlist they’re going to have on. I realize I sound like a bit of a killjoy saying this, and I understand that you’ve got to inspire people as well, that you need to engage people, sometimes with fun TikTok videos and such.

 There’s nothing wrong with telling a good story people can relate to or having an engaging speaking style—as we know from people like Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who all excel at this—but there’s got to be some substance (read: policy!) behind it. Bernie Sanders, the most popular left of center presidential candidate in recent memory, always focused on policy and fighting for working people. Just check out some of his campaign videos. An admittedly “grumpy” man, Sanders nonetheless performed well with youth in 2020, showing that you don’t have to conform to an idealized version of “likable” to do well in politics. The question is whether these things are going to drown out the substantive discussions that should form the core of all political discourse. It’s less fun and entertaining to talk about school lunches, food stamps, the war in Ukraine, and the atrocities in Gaza. But politics is serious stuff. It determines who lives and who dies. If it goes wrong, people literally get thrown out of helicopters. We have to consistently stay focused on what matters, and not let ourselves get distracted by trivia and drama.