Kamala must ‘man up’ for her debate in opposition to Trump 

When Vice President Harris steps onto the debate stage next week in Philadelphia with former President Trump, “Kamala Aunty,” her honorific in her South Asian subculture, should step apart. She must turn into “Boss” Kamala as an alternative.  

Harris is getting into a treacherous interval for her presidential candidacy, with her honeymoon drawing to an in depth. She is not going to have the consolation of the teleprompter for the talk.  

How she performs shall be essential, with elections nearly two months away. Trump and his supporters will look to skewer her for her new-age word salads of previous to painting her as incompetent. She can’t let her guard down, particularly given the excessive stakes in Pennsylvania and different swing states. 

Put merely, Harris have to be as plainspoken as “the Boss,” rockstar legend Bruce Springsteen, who has eviscerated Trump in a number of interviews, calling him a “great embarrassment.” Whereas the “Kamala Aunty” picture has helped her cement her standing amongst South Asians and millennials by way of memes and swag, like T-shirts touting “Kamala Aunty for the People” and “Vote for Kamala Aunty,” it gained’t assist venture power and dominance in opposition to a seasoned and relentless streetfighter like Trump. 

Harris should discover her inside boss. She should deploy the identical new oratory swagger she unleashed throughout her Democratic Nationwide Conference acceptance speech and her Labor Day speech to the Worldwide Brotherhood of Electrical Staff Native Union 5 on Pittsburgh’s South Facet.  

As a former journalist, I’ve been teaching tech executives — principally male — for years now on being efficient communicators. After learning hours of Harris’s speeches, together with on the DNC, it’s clear that she has undergone a much-needed rhetorical and strategic retooling in current months. 

First, as an alternative of flowery, circuitous language, like a couple of “coconut tree” and the way younger individuals “exist within the context of all by which you reside and what got here earlier than you,” she’s attending to the purpose like a boss with declarative sentences.

“We’re not going again to when Donald Trump tried to chop Social Safety and Medicare,” she mentioned in her acceptance speech. “We’re not going again to when he tried to eliminate the Inexpensive Care Act, when insurance coverage firms might deny individuals with pre-existing situations. We’re not going to let him eradicate the Division of Schooling that funds our public colleges. We’re not going to let him finish applications like Head Begin that present preschool and baby look after our youngsters. America, we aren’t going again.” 

Harris can also be doing a a lot better job of delivering her factors with even intonation, which comes throughout as extra “masculine” — one thing voters associate with strong leadership — than her earlier upticks on the finish of sentences. She solely had one slip-up towards the top of her DNC speech, when she was making an attempt to make a degree concerning the “promise of America,” code-switching to her earlier sing-song up-speak.

She made the same switch towards the top of her Labor Day speech when speaking concerning the “alternative economic system.” Harris should work together with her crew to remain persistently even-toned and “muscular,” in order that she is snug at any time when she speaks. 

Most significantly, each of those current speeches present that Harris has mastered the artwork of narrative and storytelling.  

In her DNC speech, she drew a transparent through-line between her immigrant and working-class origins and the affect of her mom, who she says taught her to battle injustice. It’s a story that resonates with many key voting blocs, together with working girls, minorities and immigrants; it humanizes her, reinforces her political values and underscores her dedication to justice. At her Labor Day speech in Detroit on Monday, Harris shared stories of attending civil rights marches “in a stroller” together with her mother and father and studying classes from these experiences about power in numbers. She should proceed these evocative narratives into the talk and her media interviews — and with consistency. 

Many media pundits described her DNC oratory as “bracing” and “hawkish” as she declared that the world’s dictators are “rooting for Trump.” As she prepares to face off with the previous president — a grasp of political theater — Harris’s skill to take care of this muscular picture shall be essential to withstanding his makes an attempt to smear her in debate speaking factors and advert buys main into Nov. 5.

Harris should not succumb to the weak trendline of the final decade, whereby there has been a push for feminine leaders to embrace so-called “feminist foreign policy,” which the United Nations describes as a recalibration to advance gender equality and ladies’s rights. 

Within the warmth-competence matrix that psychologists say hamstrings feminine leaders and create a perilous gender labyrinth, skilled girls are considered as both “heat” or “competent,” however hardly ever each, making a psychological “likability lure.” Harris is clearly making a deliberate sacrifice of heat and shifting to competence, partly on account of a newly practiced stern demeanor that corrals her infectious smile and hearty snigger. Even the masculine trend selections of her tonal pantsuits, together with the all-Navy DNC speech outfit, venture authority and decisiveness. 

In her determination to do her massive interview post-convention with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, slightly than run solo, Harris performed into the warmth-competence matrix, to combined outcomes. In essence, she tacitly conceded she may need assistance projecting competence on her personal — one thing the media immediately picked up on. 

As Harris prepares for her debate with Trump and continues to marketing campaign throughout the nation, these shifts in her type — declarative sentences, even tonality, clear storytelling and hawkish coverage positions — shall be her best belongings. Whether or not or not her new method will finally safe her a victory stays to be seen, however one factor appears clear: It’s solely with this constant shift that she is going to be capable to keep her hard-earned edge within the polls and turn into the “Boss” on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Chitra Ragavan is an executive leadership coach and strategic adviser to CEOs and thought leaders. A former nationwide correspondent for NPR and U.S. Information & World Report, Ragavan has served beforehand as a senior advisor to the CEO at Palantir and a C-suite govt at expertise corporations.