Monday, August 26, 2024
8:25 pm (Paris)
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Sylvie Kauffmann
Columnist
Despite being a feminist and Black, the Democratic candidate has taken a low-key approach to gender and ethnicity issues and has avoided emphasizing these two aspects that could make her the first woman of color in the White House.
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But why a tan suit? Even more so than in Europe, the clothing choices of female politicians in the US are always the subject of much commentary. Kamala Harris couldn’t escape the norm on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday, August 19. She opted for a pantsuit, the color of which was much debated. New York Times fashion columnist Vanessa Friedman was puzzled. Three days later, Friedman wrote about the navy blue Chloé suit (the tan suit was from the same designer) the candidate chose for her closing speech on August 22: “Kamala Harris, outfitting a new era.”
Some subtext is needed to understand how a classic suit can embody a new era. In the US, women who rise to the heights of politics like to celebrate this feat by dressing in white, the color of the suffragists. In 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton chose a white suit to deliver her own speech at the Democratic convention. In Chicago this week, she was again in white, as were several other female speakers and many female delegates.
Why did Harris break with this tradition? Precisely because she’s grown beyond that stage. Not once in her speech on Thursday did she mention that, if elected on November 5, she would be the first woman president of the US. No one is unaware of it – yet it’s no longer a campaign pitch. Harris is redefining feminism and femininity in politics.
It’s the end of a long road that began when Democrat Geraldine Ferraro ran for the vice presidency on the ticket led by Walter Mondale in 1984. The duo was defeated by Ronald Reagan and his vice president, George H.W. Bush. After a long interlude, in 2008, Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for the White House, chose a woman as his running mate: Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and star of the populist Tea Party movement. A counter-intuitive choice: The ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden won.
Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state and the former first lady, made it through the Democratic primaries to become the presidential candidate in 2016, then won the popular vote against Donald Trump but not the Electoral College, another failure. Four years later, in 2020, California Senator Harris was the first woman to be elected vice president, alongside Biden.
Disciplined, she loyally played her role as vice president in the shadow of the man in the top job. So much so that in early 2024, when the possibility arose of the octogenarian Biden withdrawing from the presidential race for a second term, pro-Democrats reluctantly accepted the idea of Harris as an alternative because “the Democratic Party is never going to push aside a woman, let alone a Black one.” These were supposedly the only assets of this vice president, who had not been able to make her mark.
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