Maybe it was Harris’s mention of the tropical plant — an out-of-nowhere reference to a mostly White audience, but perfectly normal in, yes, the context of her Indian heritage. Maybe it was the gleeful cackle juxtaposed with the heartfelt counsel that came right after. But for whatever reason, the GOP’s salvo backfired. The RNC wanted people to think the coconut tree incident was cringe. Instead, it was camp — just odd enough to bend the line between irony and earnestness, so that those who latched on to it weren’t sure whether they were laughing at Harris or laughing with her.
Voters tend to believe that politicians as high-profile as Harris are constitutionally incapable of being genuine. Everything they say is either the sanitized product of focus-grouping and message-testing — or a giant mistake. But the coconut tree clip showed the second most powerful person in the country, against all odds, being herself. And that self, it turns out, is kind of wacky. So the tree grew, until X, Instagram and TikTok were teeming with coconut memes.
Other efforts by conservatives to mock Harris have turned out similarly fruitless — or fruitful, depending on whom you ask. Take the nearly four-minute supercut of the vice president exhorting Americans over and over to strive toward “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” She’s milking a line less powerful than she seems to think it is. But her delivery is so fervent every time that it’s funny, so few ended up focusing on how it was also canned. Better yet, listen to her profoundly off-key rendition of the “Wheels on the Bus,” prompted merely by approaching such a vehicle.
Perhaps best of all, to the terminally online, is her public fondness for, of all things, the Venn diagram: “I love Venn diagrams,” she once said at an event. “It’s just something about those three circles and the analysis about where there is the intersection, right?” Well, yes, that is indeed a description of a Venn diagram — the equivalent of saying, “I love pizza. It’s just something about that crust and the sauce on top of which there is the cheese.” You can hardly imagine seasoned campaign operatives instructing a candidate to take to the stump and proclaim her ardent admiration for set theory. But that’s the point: There’s something surprisingly pure about all these episodes, and this is what has made them great rather than groan-inducing … at least so far.
The so-called coconut-pilling of the populace was, until recently, organic. No one (well, no one we know of) paid a TikTok user to produce a remix of Harris’s goofiest moments to tracks from Charli XCX’s blockbuster album “Brat.” Now, Democratic surrogates are proclaiming their own coconut-pilledness and posting pictures of themselves climbing palms. The campaign itself, on a Twitter account rebranded from President Biden to Harris, has traded out Dark Brandon for “kamala hq” on a lime-green “brat” background. Who can blame them? The content is that good. But there’s risk in trying to force something whose appeal comes precisely from the reality that it is unforced. You might lose the magic.
The precise problem with Harris’s campaign during the 2020 presidential primary was that she was not herself, and people could tell. She came of age politically as a prosecutor. The summer of protests after the murder of George Floyd was the worst possible time to be a prosecutor — so her advisers told her to be someone else. She came across as unfocused and, worse, a faker. Harris is still vulnerable to falling into the mode of trained professional rather than real person. But the coconut tree, the singing, the reverence for intersecting circles, the extensive description of the proper way to season a Thanksgiving turkey. … Those moments are silly, and strange, and sometimes even awkward. But they’re nothing if not real.
Look more closely, and the point about the coconut tree that started it all is real, too. The speech, delivered at a White House event about educational and economic opportunities for Hispanic Americans, was that we don’t “live in a silo” — that every immigrant is part of a longer story that defines who they are, and collectively who this country is. That point, coming from a woman who herself is the daughter of immigrants, is the opposite of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s idea of the nation as born fully formed, as the domain of White, landed men, and never really changing.
So, okay, Harris for America, go ahead and produce neon-green T-shirts emblazoned with the candidate’s name in Charli XCX-inspired font. Far be it from me to stay the merch machines that are currently churning out baseball caps embroidered with coconut emojis, or to dissuade D.C. bars from mixing up Piña Kamala happy-hour specials. But, please, don’t put Harris onstage and tell her to repeat lines that were funny in the first place because few saw them coming. More memes, and persuasive ones, will come if you let the candidate be herself — unburdened by what has been.
First appeared on www.washingtonpost.com