To Beat Trump, Harris Should Talk About Harris
It is a way to share who they are, reminding us of who we are, and why we must choose to act now—a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now. And this year, the outcome of the election could well depend on whether Kamala Harris can tell us this story.
Marshall Ganz
As the Democratic National Convention in Chicago concludes today and Election Day is less than three months away, Vice President Kamala Harris might take a note from previous Democratic presidential nominees who made a simple, but major choice that may have cost them the election: They didn’t tell their own stories.
Remember when John Kerry ran for President in 2004? Kerry could never effectively tell his own story — the lived experiences that moved him to make the choices he had made, including his opposition to the war in which he had been a warrior. Instead, the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth told their version of his story for him. Nor could Hillary Clinton in 2016 tell her own story, so her opponents claimed authorship and told their version of her story as well.
Kerry and Clinton were both well qualified candidates to win the White House for the Democrats and entered the race as committed effective public leaders. They showed us what they had done — but could not show us why. So, this left us wondering who the person actually was who did all this, what values motivated their choices. Where did these values come? Why did they care enough to risk failure? Where did they get the hope to risk it? And when they did fail, why didn’t they give up? And, since this is about leadership, it’s not only about them. Did they bring alive values we share, build a common ground among us, and turn our fears into sources of hope? Could we trust them? Could we trust ourselves? Could we trust each other?
Although eminently qualified for the positions they sought, both people lost their bids for political leadership. Not because of who they were, but in large part because we didn’t know who they were and who we were for them.
As we quickly approach the pivotal November election, as Kamala Harris introduces herself to the American public, the most important contribution to winning that Harris alone can make is not a new policy proposal, not another online meme, and not more scary rhetoric of the undeniable danger of a second Trump presidency. What she needs to do — and could do — is to share her own story, allow us to see who she is, remind us of who we are with each other, and show us why we can invest her with the awesome power of the American presidency.
What could this have to do with storytelling? What could it have to do with leadership?
Storytelling in the service of leadership — what I call “public narrative” — is not, as one of my students put it, how to apply a gloss from the outside. It is how to bring out the glow from the inside. It is not packaging a person’s appearance as a brand the way the professional message merchants who run today’s campaigns do. It is a practice a person can learn, one into which we are introduced as children: we feel the experience of being confronted with disruption, of having to choose how to respond (or not), and of experiencing the outcome.
The story teaches a “moral,” a lesson. Because we can identify empathically with the protagonist, the moral it teaches is to the heart. So, we begin to learn who a person is, what values drive their choices, and whether they have grown the character to wisely use the authority they are asking us to give them. It is a way to share who they are, reminding us of who we are, and why we must choose to act now — a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now. And this year, the outcome of the election could well depend on whether Kamala Harris can tell us this story.
In the summer of 2007, at the first Camp Obama, in Burbank, Calif., my colleagues and I introduced the practice of public narrative. We had learned to share this practice rooted in decades of social movement organizing, learning from this experience, and learning to teach from it as leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
When people arrived at Camp Obama, they expected to learn how to tell Obama’s story. He was already pretty good at that, we responded. What the people volunteering in the Obama campaign could learn was how to tell their own stories, why they were there, why they gave up precious hours to be there, why they chose to support him in the first place. It turned out to be an opportunity to turn all the slogans, ads, soundbites and tweets into real, relational, lived experience, which even the best AI cannot fully fake — because it is felt, not just heard.
I began this essay by asking into what adversity Kerry and Clinton had faced, how they had overcome it, what they may have learned from it, what we could learn from it and — most importantly — what we can learn from it about them. Equipping ourselves to deal with adversity, even learn from it — rather than allowing ourselves to be crushed by it — is a critical challenge for all of us. How to deal with suffering is the key question to which most of our faith traditions respond. Sharing moments in which we faced adversity is not telling sob stories but can be a bridge to the experience of others, an empathetic experience, an experience of choices in which values are real.
Adversity is a reality and can become contaminative (we will always be victims) or redemptive (we can find the courage to learn from it). On the other hand, it can crush us as we become consumed with blaming someone else for it, or so fearful we may strive to avoid it at all costs — leaving us dependent on a savior leader who can protect us.
The experiences Harris has lived, adversity she has overcome, and how she did, can teach us much about how we can deal with adversity, without being defined by it — whether it be managing diverse identities and distinct cultures, growing up as the child of immigrants and navigating one’s private and public life, or confronting the challenges of caring so much about justice and injustice, or becoming No. 2 when you’re used to being No. 1.
More than telling us she “knows Donald Trump’s type” from years of prosecutorial experience, Harris needs to tell us why she stepped out of the role of an assertive and skilled prosecutor to accept the responsibility for the well-being of an entire country. When your opposite is a crook, the prosecution narrative is very appealing. But Harris is not running for district attorney; she is running for president. A president doesn’t only correct past wrongs. A president — at least the president we need — must enable us to work together in building a secure, just and hopeful future.
Leadership does matter. Focusing only on policy differences, or the weirdness of the opposition, misses the significance of morally, politically and performatively credible leadership. What we need is not domination or manipulation, but leadership.
The fact we cannot forget the image of President Joe Biden’s face has nothing to do with policy, but it had everything to do with his effort to demonstrate his motivation and capacity to lead. While Biden certainly has been a person of courage and integrity — his choices meeting life’s many challenges and tragedies are evident — the face we saw in the final months of his campaign showed neither, which is why he had to make the brave decision to step aside.
Policy professionals, especially Democratic ones, frequently make the mistake of thinking that people decide to how and whether to vote based on policy issues. Most people are moved by a felt understanding of what is at stake in terms of their own lives, those of their families and the lives of others for whom they care: security, respect and efficacy to begin with.
And stories stick because they instruct the heart, not merely the head. A storyteller’s capacity to communicate or recreate present-tense emotional experience instructs. The resumes, the CVs, the lists of great deeds, the descriptions of policy — they all speak to the head. They inform but do not move. Stories, on the other hand, communicate a far deeper truth, a felt truth, about both the storyteller and ourselves. And, as St. Augustine observed, “It is one thing to ‘know’ the good, and quite another to ‘love’ it. It is the love that can move us to pursue possibly risky action to achieve real change.”
Can a person who is asking us for our trust exhibit the integrity it merits, the courage it demands, the efficacy it requires? A person who can effectively prosecute crooks matters, especially when the opponent is undoubtedly a criminal, but that alone is not enough to be a president. And relying on fear of Trump — with its reactive, risk-averse defensiveness — is not enough, either. Harris and her team must overcome the fear of allowing voters to see the sources of her caring, her vulnerabilities and her courage—to see her—rather than leaving the “person” space blank so others can fill it in based on their agenda, not her own.
The stakes are too high in this election for Kamala Harris to leave the telling of her story to the opposition, and after the exhilaration of these few weeks have gone and the memes have dissolved as they always do, what will last is how Harris tells the American public who she is and why she is the one who can bring us together to fight for a secure, just and hopeful future we can envision.
Disclosure: Views expressed are those of the writer. As a 501©3 nonprofit, In These Times does not support or oppose any candidate for public office.
Marshall Ganz is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal.
