Last week I watched a clip of one of Bob Newhart's appearances on the Johnny Carson show. Newhart (Illinois), Carson (Iowa) and Tim Walz (Nebraska-Minnesota) were midwesterners.
Newhart was explaining how Germans don't get American humor because they are a more literal people; Americans are more non-literal. He told a joke: A German man goes, "Why you call him Curly, he has no hair?" "And Tiny over there, he must weigh 350 lbs."
Kamala is American in her, sometimes, non-literalness. "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?", she relates her mother often saying to the kids. Now, I don't know what the hell that means, literally, and that is the point. You get the point from "context" (another Kamala meme): you hear a mother's voice and you get from her tone that it's reproachful, but the ambiguous word salad humorously softens it. In Bob Newhart's telling a German father would have said something like, "You are a nincompoop!" Communication, especially today, is as much by feel as by precise word meaning and declarative sentence.
Take "weird". Take "freedom". Take "happy". One word each. Means different things to different people. Enables the individual audience to project their own meaning. Contrast with "existential threat to democracy". Has a wordy, deadly serious, Germanic sound to it. "Weird" is a vibe. "Happy" is a vibe. "Freedom", Ah!, deep inhale, feels like fresh air and blue skies, liberating. In America's darkest time in the 20th century we chose a Democrat for president (again and again and again) whose theme song was "Happy Days Are Here Again". You look at pictures of these current two Democrats and you go "What?!" at the contrast in gender, melanin, even in apparent (but not real) age, and you can't help but smile.
The Walz pick is also an instance of Kamala's non-linear thinking, like her other memed Venn diagram, overlapping circles that display how things fit, not a straight-line "path". She and Walz could not be more different if you put their profiles in boxes. But Kamala doesn't think in boxes; Trump thinks in boxes, Vance thinks in boxes, Kamala saw her and Walz in two very different appearing circles but overlapping in mindset, values, style, and humor. "Thinking outside the box". Kamala did not see her choice as in a box labeled Minnesota and her runner-up in a box labeled Pennsylvania. Nor did she see Walz and Shapiro as numbers, Walz 10, Shapiro 19. Rightly or wrongly she did not see a "path to the presidency". She saw overlapping circles, with shared values and style and humor that she "felt" would augment her appeal throughout the North from Maine through the Northeast, through Pennsylvania on into the Midwest, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, the northern Midwest, Wisconsin, Minnesota, into the Rocky Mountain West, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, on in the Pacific West. Literally, linearly, numerically, she picked up no obvious Electoral College votes with the Walz pick. She went with personal feel and the feel that she had for the voters as people. Kamala was not indecisive in this pick; I do think that she was torn. I know that she listened to the logical, numerical, "path" arguments. In my personal decision-making construct, was this a difficult decision to make, was it a hard one, was it both? I would think that it was difficult for her, but not hard.
The Walz pick showed to me that Kamala is her own person, she knows who she is, is comfortable with who she is and went with who she felt was best for her personally and with the people. That is decisiveness.
