Before Joe Biden ceded the 2024 Democratic presidential path to his Vice President Kamala Harris, arguments between Biden and the Republican nominee Donald Trump would often devolve into dubious boasts about their respective athletic abilities.
As if Americans didn’t already find these two candidates unappealing enough — and polls paint both as deeply unpopular — the idea that Trump and Biden, at their advanced ages, would waste time talking about who had a better golf swing or who could take the other out back and land a punch was a sore reminder that their alpha male swordsmanship sometimes had little to do with the needs and priorities of the American people.
Athletic skills and mindset are valuable in politics really only when used as a metaphor, since the skills, drive and competitive edge needed to succeed in sport bear a resemblance to what’s needed in the electoral game.
So it is little surprise then that Republican pundit and former Reagan administration figure Peggy Noonan, a metaphor maker, chooses the term “athlete” to describe the elevated Harris, and the enormous surge of momentum that has accompanied her ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket.
(The “athlete” descriptor may arise in mind naturally for other reasons too, as even Harris’s walk is undeniably more jaunty than the Biden shuffle or the heavy Trump gait, and her relative youth suggests the word as well.)
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Noonan confesses an earlier error in judgement when she underestimated the electoral prowess of Harris. Now after Harris’s momentous start, Noonan concedes that the VP will likely give Trump serious competition and that Harris has “demonstrated talent and hinted she may be a real political athlete.”
This is significant especially coming from a conservative who recently labeled the Republican National Convention a “Trumpian triumph.”
From @WSJopinion: Republican National Convention Is a Trumpian Triumph by @Peggynoonannyc https://t.co/gRbZOSLTOE
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 19, 2024
Athlete isn’t a common political term, but it does properly capture certain aspects of Harris — especially vis-a-vis the old men — and the fast start of her fledgling campaign, which has “hit the ground running” and shown an agility in fundraising and attention-grabbing that exceeds all expectations.
That attention-grabbing aspect is especially challenging news for a Trump campaign that — whatever else might be said about it — has utterly dominated the attention economy for eight years running.
From Trump’s disruptive 2016 campaign to his twice-impeached pandemic-plagued presidency to his criminal convictions and pending criminal charges, no political figure has even remotely challenged Trump in his bid to stay at the top of the news. Harris is doing that now, as Noonan acknowledges.
Like many, even among Democrats who were shouting for Newsom or Shapiro, Noonan had previously assessed Harris as a bantamweight — to press the athlete metaphor again — but after watching her land punches in these early rounds and seeing the crowd buying tickets, in essence, for the new Democratic ticket, Noonan now sees Harris transformed into a heavyweight. And one, she says, who can beat Trump.