Before this week’s presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris holed up. Hunkered down. Studied. Practiced. Her advisers made no secret of that. I read dozens of articles about it.
Donald Trump? He reportedly did some preparation. Nothing too arduous. Or at least that was the message put out by his people, who know that he sees himself, and likes to be seen, as someone nimble enough to wing it, a peacock unmoved and unbound by the conventions that lesser birds obey.
Hurray for him. Actually, hurray for her. Harris had the better night by far, and it was partly because she did her homework, as I observed in an analysis of the debate published just a few hours afterward.
But what I didn’t take proper note of — and what all of us scribes and pundits too infrequently acknowledge — is what that says about a person. How important a barometer of her professionalism and character it is.
In fact, we often dismiss or even degrade all the cramming that candidates do by branding their performances “rehearsed,” as if anything that isn’t spontaneous isn’t sincere. As if real talent requires no tending. As if careful planning is inferior, even antithetical, to true inspiration.
Wrong. It reflects contenders’ respect for the positions or promotions they’re seeking. It communicates their lack of pure entitlement. It affirms a crucial ration of humility and an equally important measure of discipline: They accept the need both to work for what they want and to polish themselves in the service of it.
Besides, such polishing bears fruit. Harris frolicked in an orchard of it during the debate, dominating Trump by dint of juicy anecdotes, ripe details, plum facts.
When she mentioned how many high-ranking alumni of his administration had denounced him, she gave example after example. When she called out his inconstancy on abortion rights, she named the flips and nailed the flops. When she questioned his diplomatic dalliance with the Taliban, she made an episodic narrative of it.
And she was able to provoke him into rages, time and again, because she’d gathered the receipts and plotted their presentation. “Rehearsed” is indeed one word for that. “Smart” is another.
Foolish is what Trump did: take the stage in Philadelphia with a surplus of smugness and a deficit of knowledge. He has been a presidential candidate, a presidential critic or the actual president for the past nine years, but when he and Harris discussed how health care might be improved, he said he hadn’t figured it out yet: “I have concepts of a plan.” I guess those are like my inklings of the novel that I’ll apparently never get around to writing. The difference is that I’m not asking for the National Book Award, while he’s demanding the helm of the most powerful nation on Earth.
Trump seems to think that there’s some ingenious scheme or meaningful valor in improvisation, when there’s really just laziness, arrogance and a likely path to humiliation, which was his richly deserved destination on Tuesday night. Because he had not matched Harris’s preparation, he could not rival her cool. Because he couldn’t prosecute her with the volume of evidence that she toted into their confrontation, he resorted to schoolyard jeers.
Harris, he sputtered, is the worst vice president ever! And Joe Biden is the worst president! “And you know what?” Trump said. “I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her.” I half expected his next sentence to be a proclamation that she has cooties. It would have been no less puerile than most of the rest of his babble.
Someone who approaches a pivotal moment in an agonizingly close election with such a cocksure and cavalier attitude won’t tackle the presidency with any more gravity and dignity. Someone who treats that critical juncture as an opportunity demanding a muscular effort has much greater promise. Whatever Harris’s mix of strengths and weaknesses, she’s a serious person. Trump is a frivolous and contemptuous one.
For the Love of Sentences
In The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz identified an unglamorous occupation: “Geology suffers from a reputation as irredeemably stodgy, with all the tedious field work of paleontology and none of the velociraptors.” (Thanks to Pat Vaughan of Port Townsend, Wash., and Ann Madonia Casey of Fairview, Texas, for nominating this.)
In The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan defined Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as “a famously regular guy — America’s dad — who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.” (Michael Beebe, Buffalo, N.Y.)
In The Bulwark, Tim Miller described a post-debate indignity. “There is no job in politics less fun than being the spin-room representative for a loser,” he wrote. “You stand underneath a placard with your name, but you raise it only to half-mast in the hopes that the media jackals find some other prey first.” (Barbara Jusiak, Orange County, California)
In The Times, David Brooks wondered about his own trade’s complicity in the “dopamine for profit” ways of modern commerce: “We journalists go into this business to inform and provoke, but many outlets have found they can generate clicks by telling partisan viewers how right they are about everything. Minute after minute they’re rubbing their audience’s pleasure centers, which feels like a somewhat older profession.” (Al Argue, Sherwood Park, Alberta, and Nan Valrance, Apex, N.C.)
Also in The Times, B.D. McClay noted that if celebrities were as persuasive as the Democrats hankering for Taylor Swift to endorse Harris assumed, “a substantial percentage of the population would be steadfast vegan Scientologists by now.” (Mark Rosen, New Paltz, N.Y.)
And Robert D. McFadden packed a smorgasbord of savory detail into the first sentence of a renowned and beloved actor’s obituary: “James Earl Jones, a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader, died on Monday at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y.” (Lois Valerio, Laguna Niguel, Calif. )
In The Washington Post, Monica Hesse parsed JD Vance’s insistence that parents are intrinsically more invested in a society’s health than childless people are: “If it took having your own children to care about quality education, clean air and safe cities, then I have bad news: Parenthood didn’t make you less of a narcissist; it merely widened your umbrella of narcissism just enough to keep your own genetic offspring dry,” she wrote. (Susan Milord, Rome, Italy, and Tim Carey, Madison, Wis., among many others)
Also in The Post, Michael Lewis scored a hole in one with this father-son contrast: “Robert Mark liked suits and bow ties and his white beard as tightly and neatly groomed as an Augusta green. Chris wore a wrinkled uniform of flannel and jeans and a careless stubble that was closer to the Augusta rough.” (Mark Spaner, Canton, Ohio)
Casey Cep recounted the dynamic public-service career of Ronald E. Walters, pausing at one juncture: “Walters was principal deputy undersecretary for memorial affairs — an incomprehensible collection of nouns parading as adjectives, but Walters was all verb.” (Al Magary, San Francisco, and Susan Erhart, Kaysville, Utah)
And Ron Charles had a field day with the vacuous grandiosity of Trump’s latest literary ware: “He claims that ‘Save America’ ‘is a MUST HAVE on U.S. History,’ but the tone is so onanist that the book should really be left alone to enjoy itself in private.” Charles also noted that many of the volume’s hundreds of photos “were drawn from the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, a federally funded oxymoron.” (Dan Moser, Lincoln, Neb., and Madeline Bauer, Victorville, Calif., among many others)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Reading
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Too many literary novels start at a crawl, trusting that readers who’ve turned to fiction over TikTok are a patient lot. “The Sellout,” Paul Beatty’s acclaimed satire about race in contemporary America, bursts out of the gate — not so much plot-wise, though it fulfills its obligations on that score, as energy-wise, voice-wise. The writing is intensely vivid and wickedly propulsive. Reviewing “The Sellout” in The Times upon its publication in 2015, Dwight Garner singled out “the most caustic and the most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I’ve read in at least a decade.” I’ll say. I had trouble getting through those pages only because I kept rewinding (I was listening to the audio version) to savor the best paragraphs a second or even third time.
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Over the past two decades, I’ve had two “pinch me” friendships with extraordinary women whom I’d adored from afar and never expected to meet, let alone share drinks, meals and laughs with. One was Nora Ephron, who died in 2012. The other is Ina Garten, who’s the subject of an excellent profile by Molly Fischer that was published by The New Yorker last week. It’s a testament to Fischer’s sharp eye, solid judgment and exhaustive reporting that she captures perfectly what those of us who know Garten love about her while also telling us much we didn’t know. And Fischer widens her lens to take in the rise of foodie-ism, the culture of the Hamptons, the tricks of retail and the challenges and balms of marriage. It’s a brain-tickling, heartwarming article.
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Similarly, Jeff Gordinier and George McCalman pivot from a mouthwatering rice dish to centuries of changing (and unchanging) race relations in Charleston, S.C., in a recent tour de force in Food & Wine. I was reminded of how entwined a city’s food and its fortunes can be — and how much of a place’s history is written in its cooking.
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Before I end this gastronomic tangent: I’ll miss Pete Wells’s restaurant reviews in The Times but immensely enjoyed the recent debut of Melissa Clark as one of our interim restaurant critics. Her joy at the table and extraordinary knowledge of cooking come through delectably in her appraisal of Lola’s.
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Finally, something for the birds. Or, rather, about the birds. On planes. I’m not kidding. I’ll say no more so that an element of surprise amplifies your amusement at this post by the enterprising air travel blogger Gary Leff. It’s a hoot — or perhaps a squawk. (Thanks to Ray Smith of Lutz, Fla., for flagging it.)
On a Personal Note
Delta wants to know what I thought of my flight. Honda wants to know what I thought of my oil change. The company that inspects my HVAC system twice yearly wants to know what I thought of … the air filter replacements? The technician’s demeanor? I’m not sure because I’ve read only the subject lines of the emails, which keep coming, imploring me to reflect on the experience and charting some strange new territory where customer service and stalking overlap. It may be time for a restraining order. Or, minimally, a different kind of filter, the one that consigns certain senders’ electronic missives to the Spam or Trash folders.
More and more, the payment for a product or service isn’t the end of a commercial transaction. It triggers a homework assignment — an email or a text message asking for a review, a rating, the completion of a questionnaire, the drafting of an analytical essay. OK, I made up that last part, but these appeals, in their insistence and dubious earnestness, feel almost that onerous.
I’d be fine with them, even grateful, if the overall quality of customer service were rising in relationship to the multiplying requests for feedback, feedback, feedback. It’s not. If anything, the opposite is true.
The emails from Honda inquiring about the magnitude of enjoyment I derived from someone’s rummaging under my hood — sorry, that sounded dirty — contradict the apparent impossibility of ever getting anyone at the Honda service center to pick up the phone or return a call. Twice I had questions about whether my car was eligible for the appointment that I was about to schedule online — which, by the way, seemed to be the only way to schedule it — and twice I could not, despite repeated efforts, get an actual, live human to answer those questions. At one point, in desperation, I interacted with Honda’s digital assistant, which I assume is a bot and which repeatedly spat out the phone number that I’d already been calling in vain, then promised that someone would get in touch with me.
No one ever did. But Honda expects me to answer its entreaties. I’ve had romantic relationships less emotionally lopsided.
I understand and sympathize with small businesses’ pleas that pleased customers consider a Google or Yelp rating and review. I’ve given such ratings and reviews. Superior work warrants recognition, and the more information out there about customers’ experiences, the smarter our decisions about how to spend our money.
But many companies’ communiqués strike me as performative — meaningless obeisance to a new digital protocol of politeness. Besides, it’s an automated, inexpensive cinch for businesses to send out emails that pantomime deep concern but really amount to marketing lard, clogging our inboxes.
I could use less clogging, more coddling. Couldn’t we all?
The post Kamala Harris Is Serious. Donald Trump Is Not. appeared first on New York Times.
