It’s relatively rare to see a politician really taken by surprise. They’re generally prepared for what’s coming and ready with their response, be it a pivot to one level of slickness or another, vagueness, defensiveness, or lashing out. But it looked like, for one brief moment, Sen. Kamala Harris was surprised by a question at her town hall at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire, on Tuesday morning.
Would Harris, the questioner wanted to know, recognize a third gender option on federal IDs? And there it was, that flash of surprise. Not alarm or distress, mind you, just the sense that this was not where Harris had expected an LGBTQ question to go. It was over in a split second. Her answer: “Sure.” And then, having given a direct but barebones answer to the question, she pivoted ever so slightly to talk about LGBTQ issues more generally.
That wasn’t the first moment Tuesday morning that Harris had to adapt. Her event had been moved from a room in the college’s recreation center to a smaller room in its student center. Arriving a little while after the doors were scheduled to open, I saw a woman in a Kamala Harris T-shirt leaving, muttering to herself, “So disappointing.” The room had filled up quickly, she explained, and she had been relegated to an overflow room to watch on a screen. “I can do that at home,” she said. She should have stayed, though, because Harris visited the overflow room first, speaking to that crowd without a stage and through a microphone that kept cutting out—until she adapted again, ditched the microphone, and spoke unamplified, her voice remarkably up to the task.
If, like me, you’ve mostly seen Harris questioning people during Senate committee hearings, the thing that might be most striking is her sense of humor on the stump. It’s not that she’s a comedian up there, but she cracks jokes and exaggerates expressions for effect at about the rate one of your wittier friends would do at dinner—it’s a relaxed and confident effect, a woman at ease in front of a crowd without needing to try too hard.
Harris’ stump speech itself opens and closes on similar notes: “Our democracy is working. It is being challenged,” she told the crowd in the overflow room. “We are still standing. We are here … what we are proving is we are still a democracy.” In the main room, she closed her opening remarks by saying that “this is a fight born out of optimism … this is a fight born out of love of country.” But there’s not an especially strong through line in her remarks—she addressed gun violence, climate change, Russian election interference, and other issues, sometimes with just a brief pause before shifting topics rather than a carefully crafted segue. Each bit works, but you don’t get the sort of rhetorical build of an Obama stump speech, for instance. Then again, that’s a high standard as political rhetoric goes.
During questions, Harris confidently offered responses on Social Security—“We should lift the cap” and reject the idea of paying for Republican tax cuts with Social Security cuts—and health care—“To be clear, I’m supporting a number of measures, but my preference is Medicare for All”—and her passions outside of family and work—cooking and music. When she learned that the student asking about the Green New Deal was a business major, a subject he described as unrelated to his question, Harris didn’t lose a beat in making the case that business and the environment are connected, because we have to push back on the idea that the economy and the environment are necessarily in conflict and because the Green New Deal itself is about jobs. If she doesn’t have an Elizabeth Warren level of policy detail, Harris is still unquestionably confident and fluent on a range of issues. And being able to think on your feet is a welcome trait in a politician.