Kamala Harris’ Tan Suit Surprise...

In her choice of a tan suit, many observers concluded that Kamala Harris was subtly poking fun at past conservative horror over Barack Obama wearing one during his presidency.

When Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, took the stage Monday night on Day 1 of the Democratic National Convention, it was surprising for two reasons.

First, that she had popped up to speak at all, rather than simply waiting her official turn to accept her party’s official nomination Thursday and taking her seat as the guest of honor alongside her vice presidential pick, Gov. Tim Walz, and their families.

And second, that she had popped up to speak (albeit briefly, and in praise of President Joe Biden) while wearing a tan suit.

A tan suit!

After all, there are few garments less likely to show up at the public performances that are the major party presidential conventions. The usual dress code is one of straightforward red, white and blue: suits and ties, dresses, skirt suits. The point is patriotism in the most obvious sense.

The last time a tan suit made political waves, it was also late August, and the person wearing it was President Barack Obama. The occasion was a news conference on Iraq and Syria, but the response from a large swath of the watching public was shock! horror! at the outfit. Peter King, the Republican member of Congress from New York, said he thought “the suit was a metaphor for his lack of seriousness.” Lou Dobbs of Fox called it “unpresidential.” It was such a sticky topic that jokes about the choice became part of Obama’s repertoire. They also became part of the late-night arsenal.

None of which could have escaped Harris, for whom every detail of the most important convention of her political life will have been choreographed. If she was picking up the tan suit baton and running with it, there was most likely a reason.

Not surprisingly, commentators on social media jumped on the choice — the general interpretation being that Harris was subtly poking fun at past conservative horror over the tan suit. That she was using an otherwise conservative-seeming pantsuit to quietly underscore the brat side of her character.

“The troll game is strong,” one user posted on Threads.

“I yelled and then had to explain to my kid why the tan suit was an expert level choice for her,” another wrote.

The suggestion that the suit, which came from the French label Chloé, designed by Chemena Kamali, whose gown Harris wore to the state dinner for Kenya, was a dig at her opponents may or may not be true, but it bolsters the narrative around Harris’ personality, her facility with memes and her general pop culture cred. It also serves to connect her historic candidacy — the first Black woman to become a major party nominee for president, the first woman of South Asian descent — to that of Obama, another historic figure.

And it worked as a sort of curtain-raiser and tone-setter for the convention. Harris needs to pace herself — to build to the moment of her acceptance speech — and wearing a tan suit was both a fairly innocuous opening choice and a sartorial next-stage moment; a break with the conventions of conventions. A choice that said something about a focus on individual stories, rather than group flag think.

Harris was not the only speaker on Day 1 to take a personal approach to image-making. Hillary Clinton’s cream tweed jacket and white trousers spoke directly to her own historic acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in 2016, when she wore a white pantsuit as a nod to the suffragist movement and started a movement. Jill Biden last wore her gunmetal blue sequin Ralph Lauren dress in 2022 for a White House event named in honor of her husband’s favorite line from poet Seamus Heaney, one he has repeated multiple times throughout his presidency: “when hope and history rhyme.”

Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota and the co-chair of the convention, who will become the first female Native American governor if Harris and Walz win the election, wore a dress and jacket by Jamie Okuma, an Indigenous designer. And Jasmine Crockett, the representative from Texas who got into a verbal spat over appearance with Marjorie Taylor Greene during a committee meeting, showed up in an unapologetic black pantsuit piped in white, with a big brooch on the lapel.

None of the looks were standard political costumery. All of them acted as a frame and form of self-expression for people involved. The result was a little chaotic and kind of fun; a departure from the norm — and a contrast from the red, white and blue dressing that had been the standard at the Republican convention in July. As for Harris, the tan suit served one final purpose. Every time the camera panned to her sitting in her box smiling and waving at the crowd and the speakers, it triggered another frenzy of speculation about the choice. It was simply one more tool to center her in the conversation as a strategist without having to say another word.

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In 2016, Obama Passed a Baton. He’ll Aim to Resurrect a Movement.

President Barack Obama takes the stage to address the Democratic National Convention. 

“Fair to say, this is not your typical election,” Barack Obama told a packed political convention about to make history by nominating a woman for president.

That was July 2016, as Obama was leaving the presidency, extolling the talents of Hillary Clinton, and warning of the dangers of Donald Trump, who was widely assumed by Democrats in the room to be easily beaten.

Anyone reading that speech today would realize instantly that Obama could give much of it, word for word, on Tuesday night in Chicago. The phrases will change, a reflection of the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris’ life story, and her experience in government, is dramatically different from Clinton’s. But his core message about Harris’ tenacity may well be drawn from what he said about Clinton.

There will doubtless be echoes of eight years ago, when Obama described the dangers posed by Trump, whom he called a peddler of “a deeply pessimistic vision of a country where we turn against each other, and turn away from the rest of the world.”

But Obama’s mission Tuesday evening will be far larger than what he sought to accomplish in 2016. Then, he was handing off a baton, with the strength of the presidency behind him. This time, it will be his job to resurrect, and then reassemble, the kind of movement that propelled him to the White House.

And after President Joe Biden’s farewell speech to the party Monday, it is Obama’s job to separate Harris from the Biden years, while making the case that she was central enough to the Biden administration to slip seamlessly into the job — essentially the argument he made about Clinton’s role in his own administration. And then he must seek to transfer to Harris the sense of endless horizons that surrounded his own first run for the presidency.

It will be a tricky combination, people close to Obama said, a transition moment that convention planners deliberately placed in the hands of the party’s greatest living orator.

“President Obama spoke as an incumbent in 2016 in favor of one of the most familiar brands in American politics,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist for his political campaigns and a senior adviser who sat just down the hall from the Oval Office, where Obama would sometimes come in, in his stocking feet, to mull the political quandaries of the moment.

“He will speak Tuesday as someone who also once was a turn-the-page candidate, just as the party is showing signs of renewed energy behind Kamala Harris,” Axelrod said. “It’s a very different scenario.”

The Democrats are betting that if anyone can pull it off, it will be the man who burst into the consciousness of many Americans at the 2004 convention in Boston. It was then, as a state senator in Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate, that he was selected to be the keynote speaker. He labored over the speech, he wrote later, drafting it longhand. The resulting speech left a bigger impression on his audience than the subsequent acceptance speech of the party’s nominee, Sen. John Kerry, who, like Clinton, later served as Obama’s secretary of state.

Obama’s line that evening, that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America,” promised a vision of national unity at a time that the seams were just being stretched. “There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America,” he added. “There’s the United States of America.”

Former aides to Obama say he is bound to return to that theme Tuesday night, as he makes the case for not fueling the societal divisions Trump has at once benefited from and fed. And his former aides expect him to draw heavily on his old critique of Trump — “does anyone really believe that a guy who’s spent his 70 years on this Earth showing no regard for working people is suddenly going to be your champion?” — updated with a few indictments and a conviction.

“Donald Trump calls our military a disaster,” Obama said in 2016, pressing his case. “Apparently, he doesn’t know the men and women who make up the strongest fighting force the world has ever known. He suggests America is weak. He must not hear the billions of men and women and children, from the Baltics to Burma, who still look to America to be the light of freedom and dignity and human rights.”

And, Obama said, Trump “cozies up” to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and “tells our NATO allies that stood by our side after 9/11 that they have to pay up if they want our protection.”

Axelrod noted that “so much has happened since 2016.”

“And what was then just speculation about Trump’s potential for excesses and trespasses,” he said, “are now a part of his history as president an aggrieved former president.”

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