Harris’ Improvised Candidacy: Something New Under the Sun

Most commentators gave President Biden top honors in his skirmish with Republican hecklers during the 2023 State of the Union address. “In a setting not known for improvisation,” remarked the Times, Biden responded “with sharp retorts and even a sense of humor.”

Many of the same commentators agreed that Biden and his team had meticulously prepared the groundwork for this improvisation in advance. Biden knew how the Republicans would jump when he reported their plan to subject Medicare and Social Security to five-year sunset votes.

Sure enough, the Republicans jumped bigly. No, they heckled, we didn’t say we don’t support Medicare and Social Security. To that very qualified yes Biden responded categorically that he was happy to learn of their Damascene conversion. He would expect their support of the social safety net. The Republicans heckled back more loudly. Marjorie Taylor Green in white fur made a bullhorn of her cupped hands: “liar!” Biden walked off with a bit more vigor in his step—a key issue for a man at 80 who would be 86 after a second term.

Improvisation is often defined as something composed in the moment of its presentation. I add a crucial factor: it’s the appearance of impromptu composition that matters. If Biden and his handlers cooked up that rhetorical trap beforehand, no matter. What matters is the Republicans didn’t see it coming. South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson was reprimanded for interrupting President Obama in a 2009 joint session. But freestyle audience-participation is not normal behavior: it was something new under the sun.

A New Improvisation

Biden’s State of the Union improvising is nothing to his sudden withdrawal from the presidential campaign precipitated by his poor performance at the June 28th debate and slippage in the polls. An 81-year-old running for president was unprecedented. But Biden’s weekslong hesitance to acknowledge the age problem was largely politics-as-usual. Who acknowledges diminished cognitive skills? Not the Kid from Scranton. Who relinquishes the reins of power? Not Fighting Joe. Many commentators pointed to his inner circle of handlers, concerned not to give up their own power. Resigning, Joe cut through all that normative red tape.

And so the Democratic Party embraces the moment and decides the only way forward is by means of a grand improvisation. The Atlantic calls the sea change “surreal and unprecedented.” Former President Obama points to our “navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead.” Three weeks of handwringing preceded it: was such a change of horses mid-stream even possible?

Apparently it is. Biden’s withdrawal was key. In doing so, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of the ticket and many if not most Democratic leaders enthusiastically followed suit. Biden’s $90 million war chest was transferred at least temporarily into the “Harris for President” campaign. In 48 hours another $100 million dollars from enthusiastic donors soon joined it.

Improvisation always presents itself as a pushback against the normative. Renewed energy and enthusiasm often follow.

Presto-chango: the shift from an aging pol struggling to articulate his party’s platform to a vibrant woman whose first speech did exactly that worked like magic. “This election,” she argued, “will present a clear choice between two different visions,” Harris said. “Donald Trump wants to take our country back to a time before many of us had full freedoms and equal rights. I believe in a future that strengthens our democracy, protects reproductive freedom, and ensures every person has the opportunity to not just get by but to get ahead.”

Dueling Improvisations

The new presidential race confronts us, then, with two distinctly different improvisations.

One is led by a 78-year-old. While his own diminished cognitive skills were much in evidence during his 92-minute speech at the Republican National Convention, his skills as an improviser are nothing to be sniffed at. The central trope and figure of improvisation—you've never seen anything like this before—is hard at work whenever Trump goes off script, off prompter, makes things up, lies, breaks the decorous rules as when he makes fun of a disabled journalist, or when he invites supporters to attack journalists. I’ll pay for the attorneys, he promises. All these are sins against now largely normative Woke culture, and hence pure manna to his base. Tweeter Trump is off script far more often than he is on.

From the beginning of Trump’s campaign, many political commentators pointed to his improvising. He’s so improvisational, they said and then dismissed it: it’s so unpresidential. As if that explained it away, proof that he couldn’t win. But unpresidential was just what his base was longing for. They were tired of Hillary Clinton’s polished white papers, the well-honed rhetoric of the coastal elites. Hillary’s lies were slick. If Trump’s lies were rough, and readily seen through, all the better. Well-schooled in his dogwhistles, his base could see when Trump’s tongue was firmly planted in his cheek.

Does he read white papers on NATO? No, his gut knows more than many brains. Trump’s improvising depends on what neuroscientists now call Hot Cognition, the intuitive, instinctive brain that lives and reacts in the here and now.

Cold Cognition, not Trump’s long suit, is the reasoning pre-frontal cortex that works predictively, experiencing the present through the lens of the past.

Hot Cognition sets us running when a tiger appears, even before we think TIGER, or RUN! Cold Cognition knows better: there were no tigers around here yesterday. Darwin Award in hand, Cold Cognition makes us into a nice snack for the tiger. We long for Hot Cognition’s direct experience of the present moment, which Cold Cognition, with all its rationality and reasoning, gives us no access to.

That’s what improv delivers—direct experience of the present moment. Shaped by the embodied emotions that guide our intuitions, Hot Cognition is the brain’s supercomputer, giving us answers sometimes before we know the question. But Hot Cognition is subject to cognitive biases, just as Cold Cognition is, as Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman has shown (Thinking Fast and Slow).

Besides their inherent biases, Hot and Cold Cognition constantly battle for control over our attention. The brain behaves as two separate and different minds, each enacting a different way of attending to the world, top-down or bottom-up. Neuroscience now confirms an idea often attributed to Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift … and the rational mind [is] a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Einstein’s remark emphasizes the need for science-driven and rule-bound society to recover Hot Cognition, the intuitive mind. But unspoken is his real goal: that our two forms of mental life, evolved independently, should work together.

While many saw Trump’s pumped fist after the assassination attempt as an example of his fighting spirit, it was also pure call and response: Yes, and…

Fire an AK-15 at me and I’ll know just what my base needs to see and hear.

His rhetorical skills, honed on the tropes of victimhood, understood instinctively the powerful opportunity of the moment. “The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face,” writes Tim O’Hagan of the London Review, “immediately became the image he had waited for all his life.” And the next day there it was on T-shirts at the convention. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chanted the delegates, punching the air.

The Republican campaign presents this paradox: it acts in the moment to return America to an imagined American paradise. The new Democratic ticket presents the opposite paradox: it deploys the well-earned, evidence-based reasoning skills of a former prosecutor to project a renewed future, an approach sure to appeal to younger voters. “We’re not going back,” she declared, and the crowd picked up the chant.

The improvisation of Kamala Harris’s candidacy thus interweaves Hot and Cold Cognition. A campaign on a 15-week, not 3-year schedule calls for an unprecedented, norm-breaking political operation and demands improvisation moment by moment. But at its front stands a former prosecutor well-schooled in both evidence-based, reasoned narrative and quick response.

The excitement in America is palpable. Einstein, watching somewhere, is smiling.

Freedom

The new presidential candidate’s first campaign video proposes that

“in this election we each face a question.

There are some people, who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate.

We choose something different. We choose freedom.

The freedom not just to get by but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty. Where we can all afford healthcare. Where no one is above the law.

We believe in the promise of America.

And we are ready to fight for it. Because when we fight, we win.”

Throwing the normative rulebook under the bus, improv has always flirted with chaos. Out of chaos improvisers have usually shaped a renewed, less rigid culture.

Free, at least for a moment, of that rule book, improv shows that it has always been about freedom.