Kamala, You Are New, But Age-Old and Ageless Knowledge Can Help You
When Joe Biden decided not to run for a second term, Vice President Harris became the first Black and the first South Asian woman to be the presumptive Democratic nominee. Soon afterwards, a virtual roll call vote heard 99 percent of participating delegates make that nomination official. And in the days since, Ms. Harris has rapidly gained momentum.
Ironically, Kamala Harris’ candidacy would be even more energized by appreciating twelve universal truths regarding political leadership. The most powerful force in political contests is human nature.
1. Think people, not just as voters: what are people? people contain a bunch of illogicalities and naïve cravings as well as a multitude of untested deductions. People have biases which are sometimes set early in life. Human beings are not two-dimensional storybook characters, they are complex. They witness a candidate’s performances, look for patterns, condense that into symbols, jump to metaphor and build narratives. They are seeking to make meaning. This is not a paint-by-the-numbers exercise. Those who are seeking the presidency must have an appetite for ingesting how people transform the world into their world. Then presidential candidates can pass that input through their own sensibility and in doing so, personally represent their vision for America, not only policy-by-policy but as a general philosophy.
2. Remember to listen to everyday people who are not fanatical either for you or against you. There is mundane eloquence in the vast middle: In my 30 years of talking with people I often hear singular insights that you, Kamala, would be wise to hear and show you understand. For example, when talking to a group of middle-age women in Kansas City about what their life is like, one woman said “Life is tough, nowadays. Things are always advancing, getting better, sometimes for the worse.” Similarly, when talking in 1993 about the Japanese luxury car invasion a twentysomething young lady in Los Angeles who was from Detroit and many in her family worked in the American car industry, said she was against a car tariff on luxury Japanese cars because “America is a good idea. The idea is freedom. Tariffs are a bad idea.” And one more example. When in 2016, asking a group of middle-aged Americans in New York City who represented a mix of Democratic and Republican voters if the U.S. needs a bigger defense budget, most answered “Yes.” I asked why. Many answers revolved around the thought “Because we are losing words.” This was explained by noting people don’t speak much with people anymore. Even over the dinner table, people often speak in platitudes while others are glued to social media on their iPhones. And this kind of insight about we’re losing words brings up another point — polling is a binary yes-no language game. Meaning is absent. Kamala, get out of your cocoon and devote time to hear how people design their narratives.
3. After the nominating convention, be capacious: Kamala, your current circumstance is unusual. You did not have to go through primaries. In primaries the Oval Office-seekers are playing to the already-committed and so stake out policy positions tending toward the extreme. But after the Democratic Convention you will go immediately into the general election arena. There you have to walk that delicate balance between being authentic and capacious. You have to design a space wherein various types of people can experience you as familiar, yet feel newly aroused by your candidacy.
4. Don’t be “too” anything: ancillary to being capacious, those seeking to occupy the Oval Office must not, for example, seem too smart (remember Senator Paul Simon with bowtie and horn-rimmed glasses) or too hungry for the presidency (remember after Ronald Reagan was shot, Secretary of State Al Haig said “I’m in control here”). Kamala, don’t make your Blackness a major issue of your campaign, even while sexist and racist attacks are flung.
5. As a presidential candidate you will meet up with paradoxes: These seeming contradictions can help you. To win the presidency a candidate has to reflect and integrate the diversity and contradictions of America. For examples of paradoxical popularity think Mick Jagger: child-like and devilish. Walter Cronkite: grave and grandfatherly. Greta Garbo: chaste and seductive. Elvis Presley: sacred and profane.
6. Facts are puny in the face of belief: Fact-checking is fine, but facts will not carry you to Pennsylvania Avenue. Albert Einstein was not only a great scientist focused on the workings of the Cosmos, he was evidently a pretty good cognitive scientist. He noted, the idiom “Seeing is Believing” is not true. The valid expression of human nature is “Believing is seeing.” Present day neuroscientists agree that emotions rule the roost. Emotions shade one’s perceptions and beliefs. The issue with facts is not truth, but trust. Who knows what the future will bring. World events will arise that are not present on election day. People have to trust the president and that trust must be built on you, Kamala, making decisions that merge assessing the current situation with past promises you made to the American people.
7. A presidential candidate’s time perspective is critical: people gravitate more to potential leaders who are oriented to the future rather than to the past. The MAGA rallies are mostly populated by people who want to resurrect the past and who operate in the defensive mode. Both their vision and cognition are cramped by anger and consequentially this results in a loss of imagination. Brain chemistry can sometimes help one to believe a lie. Without imagination people are stuck in the past. Kamala, you are different. You can be a personification of a kind of transitional phase — from conflict to conversation, from defense to offense, from retribution to consideration.
8. Remember the primal design of a leader embodies three aspects of Being: be FAMILIAR, be DOMINANT but also APPEASSING, and be INSPIRING. Excite people by making them feel understood and therefore making them feel less alone. This, in turn, will set a context for people to begin to realize what is latent in them but not yet realized. The result will be the feeling that possibilities exist.
9. Context matters: “The Boss” (AKA: Bruce Springsteen) said it right. “It’s the way you meld with the times and how you see yourself in those times, how you contextualize your work and your idea, but also how you experience yourself as a person and as a citizen. And how the times resonate through you and around your work. If all this fits, those are the opportunities for a very heightened kind of communication.”
10. Presidential contests should not just be a fight: sure, a fight can imply energy, passion and commitment. However, to be a leader and not just a winner you need to have a quiet center. Presidential contests should be an enlightened debate about what it means to be a human being. More than a victory where the losers are vanquished, and resentments and retribution are enacted, people want to have a sense of vitality, want respect and dignity and long for a belief that life is more than a constant battle, that a good life inherently generates a feeling that betterment is possible, for we people. And we all are people.
11. Be strategic, but bold. Be deadly serious, but joyful. And…
12. Be yourself: Beneath all the masks, behind all the performances, a harmonizing idea of self must emerge for all to see. The true artistry is to play many roles and still play yourself. The guiding principle is “E pluribus unum” — out of many, one.
