Kamala is Old School

One oddity of American political culture is that even in an age of diversity-uber-alles, our Presidential candidates tend to come with old-time cultural markers that Americans in, say, 1960 thought were keen.

For example, of the last 20 Presidents going back through Taft, three were non-golfers, Coolidge played for social reasons but didn’t like the game, and the other 16 were, at least at some point in their lives, fairly ardent golfers. (My best guess is that golf’s appeal is that it’s a white collar version of hunting: you wander around in a landscape taking aim with your club. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, preferred the real thing: violent aristocratic bloodsports like hunting and boxing.)

Or consider Kamala Harris: while she may seem diverse, perhaps her biggest enthusiasm in life is for being an Old Girl of her Paper Bag sorority. Nothing sets her heart aflutter more than the salmon pink and apple green colors of Alpha Kappa Alpha.

As I wrote in 2022:

VP Kamala Harris is the most loyal Greek ever. Her sorority means more to her than anything else. They should make a black woman reboot of Old School in which after the President dies, the Kamala character invites her old sorority sisters to move in to the White House with her.