For all its artificial levity and mirthless joy, the Harris campaign cannot abide self-deprecation.
For decades, the Al Smith charity dinner in New York City has served as a modest but welcome firebreak in American presidential politics. The white-tie event benefiting Catholic Charities is a moment when the candidates step away from the existential hyperbole that typifies campaign trail rhetoric, taking themselves and their cause just a touch less seriously. For one night, the stakes are low. Self-effacing humor and good-natured ribbing are on full display. No one pays any penalty for abandoning the oppressive earnestness partisans crave. We all get a chance to breathe.
We will be denied that reprieve this year. Kamala Harris’s campaign just doesn’t have the time for such frivolities.
Over the weekend, anonymous Harris staffers informed reporters that their principal would beg off the Al Smith dinner, citing their intention to deploy Harris to the battleground states instead. “Her team told organizers that she would be willing to attend as president if she’s elected, the official said,” the Associated Press reported. We’re left to wonder whether that is intended as a generous dispensation or a threat.
The AP did its best to backfill the Democratic candidate’s snubbing with a rationale. Cardinal Timothy Dolan “plays a prominent role” in this Catholic event, and he has been “highly critical of Democrats,” the report noted. But that obscures the simplest explanation for the Harris campaign’s maneuver. Nothing so humanizes the candidates in the homestretch of the campaign as this event, and the Harris campaign cannot afford to provide persuadable voters with evidence of Donald Trump’s humanity.
Sure, there’s risk in allowing Harris to navigate even a scripted event like this. An ill-timed laugh, an unflattering reaction shot, or even a middling set might reflect poorly on Harris. Given the dinner’s efforts to transcend petty politics and speak to universal human truths, this dinner has always produced moments that have the potential to reach voters with diverse media diets. A bad performance might create impressions in those voters’ minds that the campaign cannot erase.
But Harris’s handlers are likely less worried about that than they are Trump’s practiced comic timing and his demonstrable ability to thoroughly roast his targets. The contrast with Harris’s self-seriousness — her lacquered-on smile and paroxysms of awkward laughter notwithstanding — may not be favorable. There are simply more risks than rewards available to Harris in an event in which she is required to let her hair down.
That may be a savvy calculation for the Harris campaign to make, but the Al Smith dinner isn’t for the candidates. It’s for us. The gala provides spectators with a fleeting reminder that the pretentious and overwrought rhetoric of the campaign trail is as much a performance as the dinner itself. The severe demeanor the candidates assume for the benefit of their humorless activists is dispensed with, and we get to enjoy a break from the exhausting solemnity of it all.
The Harris campaign has denied us that cathartic release. Maybe her campaign will be better off for it, but everyone else is free to resent their unrelenting torment. For all its artificial levity and mirthless joy, the Harris campaign cannot abide self-deprecation. These are serious days, after all. It’s no time for jokes.