In the spring of 2023, the Republican National Committee made a terrible mistake when it shared a clip, already circulating on social media, of Kamala Harris relaying a memory of her mother: “She would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’”
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A wacky laugh flies from her throat, followed by a sudden midsentence intensity: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
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.
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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.
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Voters tend to believe that politicians as high-profile as Kamala 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.
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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.”
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Kamala Harris 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.
