How intelligent is a female candidate allowed to be to run for U.S. president? That question kept running through my mind as I watched Elizabeth Warren chat with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night.
Ms. Warren and her fellow female front-runner, Kamala Harris, are obviously smart, but they have different styles of showing it. Ms. Warren, a former educator, is about bringing everyone along. “Let’s be clear,” she says over and over. Her message is more important than the fact that she’s the person delivering it. She breaks her answers into steps; you can practically hear the numbered headings and lettered subheadings in her sentences. She keeps her eyes wide open and her voice evenly pitched. She doesn’t go after anyone.
Even her personal stories are delivered at the level of just enough. At the Democrats’ debate last week in Houston, Tex., when she mentioned that being a waitress helped pay for her college, and her Aunt Bea helped her be a working mother, she was revealing a little bit about herself – but it was much more about showing ordinary Americans that she’s one of them. She’s like an ideal social worker, relatable but not judgmental, warm without making anyone feel sorry for anyone. She’s good-hearted but brisk, all about energy, good ideas, and keeping things moving forward.
Ms. Harris, on the other hand, does not shy away from detailing her impressive credentials, and reminding us of the obstacles she had to overcome to achieve them. To be the first woman, the first woman of colour, to run the law in the U.S.’s most populous state required finesse and compromises – and she conveys that anyone who doesn’t get that is naïve.
On stage in Houston, she was ready to dominate. She spoke directly to Donald Trump (“And now, Mr. President, you can go back to watching Fox News"). She called Biden “Joe,” deliberately levelling their playing field – he may have been vice-president, but she’s his colleague. She narrows her eyes, she furrows her brow, and she will, when necessary, raise her voice. She sets us straight, even when she’s being compassionate: “I’ve seen more autopsy photos than I’d care to tell you,” she said about gun control.
The reactions both receive on social media are very much in line with the ways each displays her intelligence. Ms. Warren elicits a more gentle response. Mr. Colbert joshed about her “plan for when we need more than plans plan,” and a Twitter wag wrote, “I always wondered what [Harry Potter sidekick] Hermione Granger would sound like with an American accent.”
People are notably harder on Ms. Harris. They don’t like the way she laughs at her own jokes, or her “attempts to be cool.” Someone compared her to “an angry drunk college student who gets too close to your face as she rambles.” Someone else accused her of revelling in “the gloriousness of me.”
Even the New York Times revealed a bias, unconscious or not, in its profile of Ms. Harris of Monday, Sept. 16. “Early On in Her Political Career, Ms. Harris Showed a Knack for the Jugular,” the headline read, followed by a long story about every fight she won to get where she is.
But here’s the thing: The events detailed in the piece don’t seem particularly jugular-y to me – just the normal fights all politicians go through. However, the piece does make sure to mention that in the 1990s Ms. Harris dated then-mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown, and describes her introduction into “San Francisco’s social elite” as “studied.” I really tripped on this phrase, describing how Ms. Harris beat the former district attorney, Terence Hallinan: “Eight days later, Ms. Harris took his job away.”
Whaaa? Took his job away? Why not, “defeated him fair and square in a public election”?
I wish I could pinpoint the year that Americans became skeptical of intelligence in their political leaders. (When Nixon resigned?) But somehow we’ve arrived at a place where thoughtful competence is considered elitist – especially from a woman, still – while a fake billionaire who can’t tell the truth or even spell is lauded for his everyman qualities. In a country and a world desperately in need of intelligent solutions – to the economy, to foreign policy, to technology, and especially to the life-or-death climate crisis –these two eminently credible candidates should not have to couch their brainpower in folksiness.
Because you just know that both Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren, in addition to everything else they’re doing, are enduring hours of media training so that they don’t come off as “too intelligent” – i.e., harsh or intimidating or scary. You know they’re patiently listening to feedback about the volume and pitch of their speaking voices, whether they should crack more or fewer jokes, whether it “looks okay” if they interrupt a fellow debater or talk over a moderator.
You know someone is warning Ms. Harris that she doesn’t want to come off “like Obama, but meaner.” You know someone is urging Ms. Warren to be “like Hillary, but nicer.” That they have to waste even one brain cell trying to play down their intelligence, to package and present it as palatable, makes my own brain ache.
Johanna Schneller