The Meaning — and Power — of Kamala Harris’s Smile. (Frank Bruni column, The New York Times)

Nice column by Frank Bruni.  People love optimistic candidates and presidents -- we need more JFKs and FDRs.  Enough sourpuss kvetchy Trump grumps, please.  From The New York Times:

The Meaning — and Power — of Kamala Harris’s Smile

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

I’m reluctant to write about Kamala Harris’s smile because I’m going to get all gushy and mushy about it, and the Harris lovefest is a jammed jamboree without need of another journalist. She’s enjoying more than a routine political honeymoon; she’s in the priciest suite on the poshest cruise ship sailing through a tropical paradise where coconuts tumble juicily from their trees into her aloe-moistened hands.

But I can’t stop noticing and basking in her happy face. Actually, happy doesn’t do it justice — it’s exuberant. Sometimes even ecstatic. When she made her surprise appearance onstage in Chicago during the prime-time portion of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, she beamed so brightly I reached for my sunglasses. When she high-fived her running mate’s wife, Gwen Walz, during a campaign rally in Rochester, Pa., the day before, she sparkled like a gemstone. Even when she talked about the economy — the economy! — in Raleigh, N.C., two days before that, she found places and pauses for her mouth to widen and her eyes to light up. Those smiles of hers communicate an elation that I immediately want to share, an optimism that I instantly want to embrace.

They also make me wonder if her poll numbers, a significant improvement on President Biden’s, are best explained not by wonky analyses of voting blocs or by the demographic differences between her and Biden but by simple, musty political truisms.

Which presidential candidate would I most want to have a beer with? Harris — hands down. She’s the fun to Donald Trump’s fear-mongering, the fizzy wine to his flat whine. She might even let me talk a bit, to judge by her stump speeches, reasonable in length and restrained in self-obsession. He’d just insist that I listen to a litany of the injustices done to him and nod and nod until I finally nodded off.

Which candidate projects, and thus inspires, more hope? Again, Harris, and again, it’s not even close. Trump may be promising to make America great again, but his descriptions of the country as a stinking, suppurating hellhole contradict that pledge. You can’t turn an abattoir into Arcadia with all the tariffs, mass deportations and drill-baby-drilling in the world.

Trump may belong, formally, to the party of Ronald Reagan. But in her buoyancy and bonhomie, Harris is the Reaganesque one.

I’m not vouching for her presidential mettle (though her acquaintance with decency, regard for democracy and baseline stability are ample grounds to cheer for her in a contest against Trump). I’m not sweeping aside legitimate questions about her significantly changed positions on many issues and the mystery of her true ideological orientation (though Trump fares worse under such scrutiny). And I’m not equating a smile with a credential or a plan. Smiles come as easily to fools as to sages.

I’m just positing that one of the main reasons that Harris is doing so much better than many people expected is that she’s spreading good feeling in an age of ill will.

That matters substantively, because a country can’t come together and seriously tackle its problems when it’s in a stubborn funk. But it matters just as much tactically, because it gives people who have been turned off a reason to tune in.

For a while, politicians seemed to be forgetting that. Ron DeSantis tried to wrest the Republican presidential nomination from Trump not by being sunnier but by being gloomier: His brand and his bid were built around naming and neutering enemies. He replaced a wish list with a hit list.

And while Biden never stopped insisting — and, to my eyes and ears, believing — that America could achieve whatever we set our minds to, he sang that song in a weakening voice. And between the verses and choruses was a bridge about America on the brink and Trump as an agent of the apocalypse. Biden was in part trying to beat darkness with darkness. Americans craved light.

Harris seems to recognize that. Her vibe-centric campaign isn’t merely an evasion of specifics; it’s a sating of voters’ specific hunger. It acknowledges and addresses how many of them want “an opportunity to feel something more than contemplate something, ebullience over dread,” as my Times Opinion colleague Charles M. Blow wrote in a column published on Wednesday.

But she’ll need extraordinary discipline not to be provoked into the gloating, goading and mockery on display during my least favorite parts of the convention so far: “Lock him up” and former President Barack Obama’s “crowd sizes” hand gesture. Democrats, cede the crudeness and lewdness to Trump and his Republican supplicants. They’re peerless at it.

The best moments have been the ones of unfettered jubilation, such as that surprise appearance of Harris’s that I mentioned before. It made you want to be her friend. It made you want to stand at her side. She didn’t say much, but her vocabulary — “optimism,” “hope,” “faith,” all in one sentence — came straight from Reagan’s dictionary.

And her smile was incandescent.