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On a bright Sunday in January 2019, Kamala Harris introduced herself to Americans with an asterisk.
She had no choice, as she launched her Democratic presidential primary campaign from her hometown of Oakland, California, but to acknowledge her past life as a prosecutor. Deputy district attorney in Alameda County, district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California—29 years of public service, and 27 of them had been spent in a courtroom. This was her story, and yet not five minutes into her announcement, she was already catching herself as she told it. “Now—now I knew that our criminal-justice system was deeply flawed,” she emphasized, “but …”
Trust me, she seemed to be insisting: I know how it looks.
So it would go for the next 11 months, a once-promising campaign barreling toward spectacular collapse as Harris pinballed between embracing her law-enforcement background and laboring to distract from it. Rather than defend her record against intermittent criticism from the left, she seemed to withdraw into a muddled caricature of 2020 progressive politics—suddenly calling to “eliminate” private health insurance, say, and then scrambling to revise her position in the fallout. By the end, no one seemed to have lost more confidence in the instincts of Kamala Harris than Kamala Harris herself.
Five and a half years later, Harris is again running for president—but this time as a prosecutor, full stop. In her announcement speech on Monday in Wilmington, Delaware, the day after President Joe Biden had dropped his bid for the Democratic nomination and endorsed his vice president to succeed him, Harris heralded her law-enforcement experience without caveat. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Harris fought a smile as her campaign headquarters erupted in applause.
The enthusiasm seemed only to build as Harris proceeded to tick off her accomplishments as a local prosecutor, a district attorney, and an attorney general. Within hours, Harris had locked in all the Democratic delegates needed to become the party’s nominee; the next morning, her campaign announced that, in the little more than 24 hours since Biden had withdrawn from the race, Harris had raised more than $100 million.
After years of struggling to find her political voice, Harris seems to have finally taken command of her own story. “I was a courtroom prosecutor,” she proudly said to open her next stump speech, in Milwaukee. Just as in Wilmington, she spoke with the confidence of a politician who knows that what she is saying is not only true but precisely what her audience wants to hear. Four years after the fevered height of “Defund the police,” “Kamala is a cop” has a different ring to it—and with the Republican nominee a convicted felon, Harris’s appeal, her allies believe, is now the visceral stuff of bumper stickers: Vote for the prosecutor, not the felon.
Harris’s decision to reclaim her record has seemed to satisfy the many Democrats who have long urged her advisers to “let Kamala be Kamala.” But she still has only three months to rewrite the story of a vice presidency defined by historically low approval ratings. And making her law-enforcement background a key feature of her candidacy will bring renewed Republican attacks on its complicated details.
Of the various factors behind Harris’s sudden acclaim, one might be that her career has finally assumed the tidier logic of narrative. In my time covering her vice presidency, I’ve learned that this, more than anything else, is what otherwise sympathetic voters have consistently clamored for when it comes to Harris: some way to make sense of the seemingly disjointed triumphs and valleys of her tenure in national politics. The voter could be a lifelong Democrat or a Republican disdainful of Trump, but the story was more or less the same. In 2018, they’d been impressed—so impressed, they’d reiterate—by the Senate newcomer’s questioning of Trump’s Cabinet and Supreme Court picks. But then they’d watched her presidential campaign flame out before the first primary vote; then they’d seen her get all tangled up in the Lester Holt interview as vice president; and then, well, they weren’t particularly sure of anything she’d done in office since, but the occasional clips they saw online suggested that things weren’t going well. In retrospect, their initial excitement about Harris had come to feel like something born out of a fever dream.
This confusion helps explain Harris’s historically low favorability ratings as vice president. It is also a key source of exasperation for Harris’s team: Through the latter half of her vice presidency, Harris has cut a more accomplished profile as she’s represented the U.S. abroad and spearheaded the administration’s response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Yet a combination of poor stewardship by Biden and inconsistent media attention, her allies argue, has kept those early days of disaster at the forefront of the popular concept of her. Embracing her prosecutorial background anew, then, could prove to be the reset that Harris has been looking for.
“Prosecutor had a ‘cop’ connotation to it when she initially ran,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me. “It does not now. It has a connotation of standing up, taking on powerful interests—being strong, being effective—so it’s a very different frame.” She went on: “I just think it’s the right person at the right time with the right profile.” To the extent that the “cop connotation” still exists for some, it might actually work in Harris’s favor: A recent Gallup poll showed that 58 percent of Americans believe the U.S. criminal-justice system is “not tough enough” on crime—a significant change from 2020, when only 41 percent, the poll’s record low, said the same.
For the Harris campaign, this has translated into an opportunity to reach more moderate voters, or at least reclaim those whose support for Harris might have fallen off since the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. “What was considered baggage for her in the last election is now one of her greatest assets going into this one,” Ashley Etienne, the vice president’s former communications director, told me. “As a prosecutor, she can kind of co-opt the Republican message on law and order—not crime, but law and order.”
Which is to say that, much like in 2020, the political environment appears to be dictating Harris’s presentation of her record. Yet unlike in 2020, that environment happens to align with an authentic expression of her worldview. (The Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
Over the past three weeks, Harris’s friends and advisers have insisted to me that the hard-nosed prosecutor has always been there; people just haven’t cared to pay attention. But there are some problems with this argument. Despite her extensive record on border-security issues as California’s attorney general, Harris often seemed disengaged on even her narrowly defined assignment in the Biden administration’s immigration strategy. In 2021, when Democrats began negotiating criminal-justice-reform legislation, Harris was virtually absent, even though she had been expected to play a central role in those efforts.
When I interviewed David Axelrod, the former senior strategist for Barack Obama, last fall, he wondered why Harris had not already, as vice president, embraced her law-enforcement expertise as a key part of her brand. “She has an opportunity to talk about the crime issue that’s clearly out there, particularly around the urban areas, and talk about it from the standpoint of someone who’s been a prosecutor, an attorney general, and I haven’t seen that much of that,” he said. “Maybe she or they see some risk in that, I don’t know, but I see opportunity.”
Before Election Day, Harris’s law-and-order presentation will need to overcome her party’s larger polling deficit on issues of crime and safety. “By effectively bypassing the primary process in 2024, Harris did not have to ‘play to the base,’ so to speak, this time, but crime is also much more salient these days—and not in Democrats’ favor,” the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told me. Trump’s co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita recently told The Bulwark that Republicans are looking to spotlight elements of Harris’s record as a prosecutor, including her 2004 decision not to seek the death penalty against a man who had murdered a San Francisco police officer. (The murderer was sentenced to life in prison.) The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have already begun recirculating posts and clips featuring moments from Harris’s 2020 campaign: her support for a Minnesota bail fund amid the George Floyd protests, her vacillation on defunding the police, her raising her hand on the debate stage in support of decriminalizing border crossings.
At the same time, Republicans seem to be ready to paint Harris, when it comes to low-level offenders, as too tough on crime. When I spoke recently with Shermichael Singleton, a Republican strategist, he noted in particular Harris’s aggressive prosecution of marijuana offenses, and her championing of a truancy law as attorney general, which resulted in the incarceration of some parents. (Harris expressed remorse about the truancy law during her 2020 campaign.) As my colleague Tim Alberta has reported, Trump allies plan to use this record to accuse Harris of “over-incarcerating young men of color,” who have been drifting away from the Democratic Party. “Younger Black men, Black men without a college degree, younger Latino men, younger Latino men with or without a college degree—I’m not convinced yet that these numbers move more in her corner,” Singleton said.
For now, the frenzied and unfocused nature of Republicans’ attacks on Harris has allowed her the first word on her candidacy. Over the past few days, many Harris allies have told me they believe that her most urgent task is this: defining her candidacy and her vision for the country before the Trump campaign, Fox News, and the like can fill the void. On that front, Harris seems to have succeeded so far. Her Monday announcement was portrayed across much of the media as a politician introducing herself “on her own terms,” as a New York Times headline put it.
But this narrative, tidy as it might be, implies that, until now, Harris has been operating on something other than her own terms. That’s understandable enough when you’re vice president. Yet at some point, Harris will be forced to reckon with the unanswered questions from her previous campaign for president: why, at the first blush of criticism, she seemed to cede her convictions to the loudest voices in her party—and whether, the next time prosecutors fall out of fashion, Americans should expect her to do the same.
Over the past several years, thanks in large part to social media, therapy lingo has seeped into the vernacular and is now a normal part of everyday speech. Selfish people are “narcissists.” Ungenerous behavior is a “red flag.” Calming down is “self-regulation.” Pathologizing others tends to be a way of enforcing unwritten social codes. Pathologizing yourself can be a way to exempt your own behavior from judgment (you’re not being mean; you’re drawing boundaries).
Therapy-speak has taken over a group of Millennials living in the midwestern college town of X, the setting of Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare. The novel lives up to its name in a variety of ways, none of which make for a very pleasant reading experience—though that’s never seemed to be Butler’s goal. Over the course of her two earlier novels she established herself as the Millennial skewerer in chief: She’s here to chronicle and cackle at all the ways members of her generation have learned to psychologically chase their own tail. For more than 300 pages, character after character implodes in a mess of overthinking and a tendency to assume that they possess unique insight into human behavior.
Banal Nightmare is primarily about Margaret “Moddie” Yance, an unemployed, perennially agitated 30-something who clings to the periphery of every social group she encounters and alternately berates and celebrates herself for each decision she makes. She’s recently left her long-term boyfriend, Nick, “a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist,” in Chicago and moved back home to her childhood town of X, where she hopes to “recover from a stressful decade of living in the city.” X is supposed to be like rehab for Moddie, a place where she can find herself again. Instead, she smokes weed on her couch while she watches bad network procedural dramas, humiliates herself at lame parties, and ties herself into emotional knots like a nihilistic Looney Tunes character. In one relatable moment, Butler writes: “Sometimes she felt she would give anything to leave her own mind for just one second.”
Butler’s characters have always been remarkably, hilariously alienating. The protagonist of Jillian, Butler’s first novel, scrabbles around her disappointing life as a gastroenterologist’s assistant, scanning images of diseased anuses and sweatily lusting after a colleague’s seemingly more fulfilling life. Millie, the protagonist of The New Me, is physically repulsive—her face smells like a bagel, and her underwear has holes in it from her crotch scratching. At the furniture showroom where she temps, she continually fails to make friends or climb the corporate ladder, mostly because she lacks social awareness and the good sense to lie low. In Butler’s novels, self-improvement is always just out of reach.
In our digital world, transformation feels tantalizingly close everywhere we look. Instagram is a sea of before-and-after split screens: a curvier body on the left and a leaner one on the right, a dilapidated house on one side and a crisp paint job with fresh furniture on the other. But people aren’t just sitting back and observing these metamorphoses. Everyday speech, on social media and in person, has adopted an overly simplistic vocabulary of emotional growth and well-being.
Of course, a greater openness to talking about mental health has its benefits. Plenty of people who may not have otherwise sought out therapy might find relief, and some form of clarity, in social-media accounts that promote self-care or from online counselors such as the “Millennial therapist” Dr. Sara Kuburic. At the same time, some of these figures have helped usher in a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health, with advice that is liberally sprinkled with jargon. Millions of viewers can scroll past therapy-coded guidance on how to “make space” for “uncomfortable truths” or “forgive your past self.” It can sometimes feel like everyone—influencers, friends in your group chat, your sister who lives in Portland—has adopted this type of language in their daily life and appointed themselves behavioral experts.
Likewise, the characters in Banal Nightmare—not just Moddie but also her childhood friends and their extended circle—are each sure that they alone possess the power to accurately read social dynamics, and so they peck at one another, interpreting every facial expression and utterance as evidence of psychological fault. As Butler examines her characters’ dogged (mis)interpretations, she casts each one as a little Freud in the making, and turns their world into a mirror of ours.
Kim, a college administrator and a vague enemy of Moddie’s, is the kind of woman who thinks everyone comes to her with their problems. “She was good at listening and good at understanding things from multiple angles,” Butler writes, “probably because her mother was a therapist.” Kim then proceeds to use her so-called expertise to write a series of emails to friends in which she explains that they are “slightly patronizing” and have “undercut” her, so she’d like “some kind of reparations” and hopes “this falls on open ears.” (Spoiler: It does not.)
Couples fight via diagnosis, each member thinking they’ve hit the bull’s-eye on their partner’s deficiencies and using psycho-jargon as a cover for their own flaws. “It’s pretty egotistical, if you think about it,” says one friend, Craig, to his longtime girlfriend, Pam. “Not everything in my life is about you, and when you make my problems about you, I think it makes it really difficult for you to empathize with me and give me the patience and support I clearly need.” Bobby puts it more bluntly when he talks about Kim, his wife: “She’s a fucking psycho, and any time I disagree with her, she says I’m gaslighting her.”
At the center of things is Moddie. She feels sure that NPR’s dulcet tones “had something to do with the coddling infantilization of her generation who, though well into their thirties, seemed to need constant affirmation and authoritative direction to make it through the week.” Moddie is clearly self-aware, but she also feels trapped. A trip to Target for a sweat suit is, she claims, “triggering.” While she’s driving down a broad midwestern highway, “a car passed her on the right going much too fast, and she verbalized a lengthy fantasy about the driver’s personal inadequacies.” Moddie wants to get out of her own mind, but she also can’t quite get a handle on whether or not her grievances are sincere. Nobody can.
But what keeps Banal Nightmare nailed to reality is the fact that, underneath all of this emotional turmoil, we eventually learn that Moddie has suffered real, serious harm—dare I call it a trauma. She just might, as she says at one point, have PTSD. She probably was gaslighted by her ex. Her former friend group really may warrant the label toxic. The story comes in dribs and drabs, and then in a big rush. It’s met with the same language her friends apply to everything else. But it also elicits something else: real sympathy, from some of Moddie’s friends and perhaps from readers too, who can see that all this therapy-speak is drowning out the signal in the noise.
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President Joe Biden made his prime-time debut as a short-timer last night in an 11-minute address from the Resolute desk. He made the right call to leave the presidential race, and gave a good speech: gracious, high-minded, and moving at the end.
“Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy,” Biden said. “That includes personal ambition.”
Oh yes, about that. Let’s acknowledge—and the president did not—that, until a few days ago, he was waging an exasperating battle on behalf of personal ambition: his own. And he seemed quite determined to keep the job he’d spent much of his life gunning for. He fretted, fumed, and stalled.
Eventually he came around. Or at least had nowhere to go and spun a new and noble story. “This sacred task of perfecting our union is not about me,” Biden said last night. “It’s about you.” It’s also about polls, fundraising, and fleeing supporters, all of which fueled the anguish of this saga and the outcome. No one should understate the power of the great big “me” in the middle of this story.
“The truth, the sacred cause of this country, is larger than any one of us,” Biden added last night. The truth is also pretty simple sometimes. Although Biden did not want to abandon his campaign, a large majority of Democrats thought he should. This had to be difficult to accept. No doubt it still is. Biden looked wistful and tired as he spoke.
Reaction to the speech was warm, fawning at times, and a bit eulogistic. Biden was praised for his patriotic act. “‘The sacred cause of this country is larger than any of us,’” former President Barack Obama wrote on X. “Joe Biden has stayed true to these words again and again.” The actor and director Rob Reiner gushed over “one of our greatest Presidents,” exactly one week after publicly pleading with Biden to leave: “The handwriting is on the wall in bold capital letters,” he’d said.
This praise parade began within minutes of Biden’s exit announcement on Sunday. Breathless statements rolled in from big-name Democrats about how selfless, statesmanlike, and heroic Biden was for finally submitting to reality. Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer all released communiqués hailing Biden as “a genuine public servant” (Obama), “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” (Pelosi), and someone who “put his country, his party, and our future first” (Schumer).
They all conveniently left out the words “kicking and screaming,” “took him long enough,” and “after stewing and dillydallying for nearly a month.”
In fact, to varying degrees, each of these leaders had been running out of patience with Biden, and was convinced he would lose to former President Donald Trump and possibly cost Democrats the House and Senate. According to various reports, they all worked behind the scenes to nudge Biden along to his eventual decision, which dragged on like a prolonged lobotomy of a wounded psyche.
All’s well that ends well, you could say. In fact, this all could have ended a lot better. Or, certainly, sooner: three weeks, if not three years, sooner. In the end, Biden’s drawn-out hemming and hawing after his debate disaster on June 27 left Democrats in a hell of a bind.
Prominent Democrats have quickly rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris, which, if nothing else, should spare the party a divisive battle for the nomination. But this rushed “process” is no substitute for an actual primary with a full field of candidates. That would have produced a better-vetted, better-known, and better-prepared nominee. Harris is off to a good start, but remains unproven. She will have her moments and make her mistakes, some of which could have been ironed out months ago.
As it stands, Biden left time for only a late scramble. And little room to heal the rifts that have arisen from this awkward affair. If Harris loses to Trump, Biden will come in for a healthy dose of the blame.
I don’t mean to kick the president while he’s in retreat. Biden should be given space to process this ordeal, mourn the end of his long career, and enjoy the over-the-top tributes (even the ones from the busybody backstabbers in his party). He should have plenty of time for valedictories. They will be well deserved.
But the full story of Biden’s legacy and his performance through this chapter will be incomplete until a big cliff-hanger is resolved—in November.
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The June 27th debate was barely off the air when my phone began buzzing with messages from anxious Democrats I know: “He needs to pull out. Will he pull out?” President Joe Biden eventually did the patriotic thing and ended his campaign. But in the three weeks in between—as the text threads moved from “if” to “when” to “who”—I was shocked at the certainty with which people dismissed the idea of Biden being replaced by his obvious successor: Vice President Kamala Harris.
Let me be specific. It was not “people” dismissing her; it was men. I have many male friends, and they frequently include me in barstool-punditry sessions where they pontificate, often with wisdom and insight, on the issues of the day. Usually I enjoy this, but over the past few days, I’ve found myself more and more irritated.
I’ve had men I know (and love) explain to me the many reasons Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, J. B. Pritzker and—as if to prove that it’s not a “woman thing”—Gretchen Whitmer would all be better and more exciting candidates. I’ve been told about Harris’s mediocre polling (yes, I know about it), reminded of her awkward 2020 presidential bid (yes, I remember). My male friends bring up “likability,” and her made–for–Fox News–fodder role as border czar. I get it: Asking whether someone can actually win is one of the most basic questions in politics. But when I push back on their trepidation, many give me some version of: “I have no issue with her; I’m just worried about how she will play with white midwestern male voters.”
I have been haunted by this unnamed white midwestern male voter for longer than I can remember. He turns up anytime a woman runs for anything, tucks his polo shirt into his jeans, and starts listing all the ways the candidate just doesn’t share his values. If only I could find him and talk with him! If only we could grab one of those proverbial beers. I would explain that although he matters and is important, now is not the time to make things about himself. Now he has to do what I and so many women and people of color have done in this country for generations: hold our nose and vote for a politician who might not totally get us, but whom we have to trust to do their best by us anyway.
I lived through the roller coaster of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. I watched Elizabeth Warren supporters campaign while Bernie bros told them they were wasting their time. Then the Supreme Court took away the right to choose that I had thought belonged to all American citizens. Now I’ve run out of patience. My friends’ barstool logic is not only maddening; it’s dangerous.
It is not that I don’t understand the electoral map, or that I’m dismissing the importance of the white male swing voter. Of course he’s important, and of course there’s a very good chance that, after leaving a diner and speaking to a reporter about what really matters to voters like him … he’s going to vote for Donald Trump. But the Harris candidacy is no longer hypothetical. She is almost certain to be running against Trump, and our democracy hangs in the balance. What do my male friends gain from fretting so much over this particular voter now? I’m beginning to think that they bring him up because they don’t want to admit to their own biases—that he’s a cover for their own hovering doubts about a female candidate, and an excuse for why they’re not getting more enthusiastic about Harris.
Such doubts may reflect a deep desire to defeat Trump. But these men—and the women who secretly or not so secretly agree with them—can’t afford them any longer. The only way to beat Trump is to support Harris. And all sorts of other voters are already doing so. In that spirit, I thought I would provide nervous Democrats with a list of them.
Black voters, and especially Black women, have saved the Democratic Party time and again. Yet non-Black voters continually dismiss the power and potential of this community, which includes supporters, donors, and many swing-state residents. Some people have questioned Harris’s appeal among Black voters. She is half South Asian, and married to a white man, and was a prosecutor whose work, Republicans will point out, resulted in the incarceration of young Black men. But if the past few days are any indication, many Black voters aren’t just enthusiastic about her; they’re gleeful. Harris has long been vocal about issues that affect Black women, such as their disproportionately high mortality rates during childbirth. And she’s a graduate of a historically Black university, where she was a member of a Black sorority.
On the night Biden endorsed Harris, the group Win With Black Women mobilized more than 44,000 women to join a Zoom call; they donated more than $1 million in three hours and some stayed on past 1 a.m. One friend told me she “couldn’t log off, because I didn’t want to miss a word.” The next night, a similar call for Black men was organized.
If Harris wins, she will be the first Asian American president. Her mother was an immigrant from India; the now viral “coconut tree” meme came from one of her mother’s favorite expressions. South Asian Americans are not only the largest Asian American group in America; they are the most politically engaged on many issues. Many live in swing-state cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta. And, despite the high profiles of conservatives such as Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal (and now Usha Vance), most South Asian Americans are Democrats. Tech investors and entrepreneurs such as Nihal Mehta are already lining up behind Harris.
The vice president has the potential to excite women of all races. Anyone who says that they don’t think America is “ready to vote for a woman” has not been paying attention. In 2016, many felt that voting for a woman was a way to shatter glass ceilings and celebrate “girl power.” This time is different. It is not about a milestone. It is about our bodily autonomy and right to control our own health care. Which is why, over the past two years, women have come out even in the most conservative states to vote against ballot measures limiting their reproductive rights. No man can campaign as passionately on this issue as a woman can.
Harris has already gone on a “Fight for Reproductive Freedom” tour in battleground states. And who can forget her exchange with Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings? Harris, like many senators, tried to get him to say what he thought about Roe v. Wade. When he wouldn’t, she asked him something different: whether he could “think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” He could not. When comparing her with the retrograde MAGA president who put American women in this predicament in the first place, people wouldn’t need to even like Kamala Harris all that much to confidently vote for her.
Perhaps one of the most surprising things about her candidacy is how quickly she’s been embraced by young people on the internet. At nearly 60, Harris would hardly be considered young in any other context. But after watching last month’s Showdown at the Geriatric Corral between a septuagenarian and an octogenarian, Harris seems positively sprightly. Not only can she walk (in heels!) with a spring in her step, but she can dance, and have that dance go viral on TikTok and Instagram. As the artist Charli XCX has already proclaimed to her youthful followers: Kamala is brat. If you don’t know what that means, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that young people are meme-ing and tweeting and engaging with this candidate. Celebrities such as Cardi B, who had previously said they’d sit the election out, are now endorsing Harris. (Or “Momala,” as her 20-something stepkids call her.) For the cynics who say “Young people don’t vote,” I won’t refute that. But … they might. And in the run-up to November, their excitement will influence the culture. I am old enough to remember when everyone was behind a seasoned political figure named Hillary Clinton until it became clear that all the cool kids were supporting a young senator from Chicago who’d made a speech at a political convention.
On Monday, in her first speech since Biden dropped out, Harris asked: “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear, and hate?” It’s a pressing question. And the kind that reminds us that another broad voter group might be moved to support Harris: people who want to feel optimistic about America again.
Harris is kind of a goofball. She’s earnest when you wouldn’t expect earnestness. She tells awkward stories. She laughs often and loudly. She is not at all cool. And people seem to like it? Many of these things worked against her back in 2020, but now it’s like seeing an ex at a high-school reunion: Suddenly the old flaws look different. Is it us? Are we lonely and desperate now? Probably.
The point is that for some time now, the only place for laughter in politics has been at a Trump political rally, in response to one of his cruel jokes. Politics has been about mass death and mass deportations. Harris takes these things seriously, but she can also provoke joy, which this country desperately needs. At that event Monday night, Harris told Biden—with warmth and sincerity—that she loved him. And then she spoke with a smile on her face about the future prospects for our country. Listening, I felt transported to a time before Trump came down the gilded escalator and turned the conversation from hope to carnage. We live in an era of cynicism, but Americans are still attracted to joy. We might find that even our white midwestern male voters want more of that.
Well, that was a nice idea in theory. Paris held the first-ever Olympics opening ceremony to take place outside a stadium—and on one of the loveliest settings in the world, the Seine. Athletes paraded not by foot but by boat, waving flags from sleek cruising pontoons, as pageantry unfolded on bridges and riverbanks. The aquatic format promised to do more than just showcase the architectural beauty of Paris or convey the magic of strolling across the Pont Neuf with fresh bread in hand. It promised to offer the world—our ever more jaded, content-drowned world—something new to look at.
Unfortunately, that new thing was a mess. Some will blame the rain, which soaked the festivities for hours, adding an air of tragedy as athletes waved flags from within their ponchos. But even on a sunnier day, the ceremony would have served as an example of how not to stage a spectacle for live TV. The energy was low, the pacing bizarre, and the execution patchy. Paris tried to project itself as a modern, inclusive hub of excitement—but it mostly just seemed exhausted.
Olympics opening ceremonies are inevitably ridiculous affairs, usually in a fun way. The host nation must welcome the global community while cobbling all of the signifiers of its own identity into some sort of romping medley that also, ideally, expands that country’s image in helpful ways. London offered the Queen and James Bond, and also a tribute to the National Health Service. Rio hosted a rumbling dance party as well as a briefing on Brazil’s Indigenous history. Most important, both of those cities gave us good TV.
Beforehand, the event’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, announced his intentions to play with Gallic clichés. Key words—liberté, synchronicité, and so on—announced thematic chapters, but a narrative hardly cohered. Congratulations if you had the following on your bingo card: mimes, Louis Vuitton, parkour, Les Misérables, the cancan, lasers shooting out of the Eiffel Tower, allusions to ménages à trois. But credit where it’s due—I really did not foresee the Minions stealing the Mona Lisa and bringing it aboard a Jules Verne–style submarine. On reflection, that was the most educational part of the show: learning that a Frenchman co-directed Despicable Me.
Dan Mullan / Reuters
One problem with this French fever dream is that much of it was prerecorded. Every few minutes, the telecast would cut to slick cinematography of a masked, hooded individual—that’s what the NBC broadcasters kept calling her, “the Individual”—sneaking the Olympic torch around. She went to the Louvre, where the paintings came to life. She went to a movie screening, where a Lumière-brothers film … came to life. These segments hit with all the force of a cruise-ship commercial, while distracting from the novelty of having a ceremony on water in the first place.
The live components of the show weren’t much more vibrant. A bridge was converted into a runway on which fashion models and drag queens strutted with the gusto and precision of a forced march. Platforms over the river itself featured extreme-sports performers doing tricks that the TV cameras seemed suspiciously afraid of showing in close-up. Lady Gaga put on a feather-laden cabaret performance that was perfectly fine, save for the fact that “perfectly fine” shouldn’t be anywhere near the name Lady Gaga.(As it turns out, that performance was prerecorded too.)
One of the only showstopping moments made clear that the weird vibes of the ceremony could largely be blamed on the detail work. At one point, the camera cut to a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette and holding her own babbling, chopped-off head. The heavy-metal band Gojira broke into riffage, and flames fired. This was righteous. But then, not much happened. Viewers were left to grow bored with static, wide shots of the performance. Eventually, a fake boat wheeled into view, looking quite a bit like a prop from a high-school play.
The best bits took place firmly on land. The pop star Aya Nakamura danced with the French Republican Guard in a flashy meeting of old and new cultural regimes. Once the sun set, “the Individual” emerged in real life to ride a cool-looking mechanical horse down the Seine. (It must be said that this journey was interminable.) The Olympic cauldron was cool too: It resembled a hot-air balloon, and it rose into the air when lit. To finish things off, Celine Dion made her seemingly unlikely return to singing, heaving with emotion from a deck of the Eiffel.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that carefully composed, largely stable images were the highlights of a show that tried to reinvent the Olympic ceremony in fluid directions. My favorite moment was when the pianist Alexandre Kantorow played Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau from a bridge as rain puddled on his instrument. He looked sad and soaked but also unbothered, lost in music. He made me remember the word I’d been trying to think of, for one of those ineffable French feelings: malaise.
