When you ask Rep. Jim Clyburn for the one piece of advice he would give Vice President Kamala Harris in her quest to beat former President Donald Trump, the kingmaker from South Carolina brings up one word: authenticity.
“Just be yourself,” he told NOTUS on Thursday. “Just be authentic.”
NOTUS pressed Clyburn on what he meant by that and how exactly he would like for Harris to be authentic. He declined to get into specifics.
“I’m not going to get in the business of talking to a candidate through the media,” he said. “Anything I want to say to her about campaign strategies, I’m going to tell her, if and when I talk to her.”
But Clyburn wasn’t as bashful about why he thinks Harris can win. That answer also seemed to come down to another word: maturity.
“I’m a different person today than I was four years ago, and I’m sure that she is too,” he said. “So I don’t think it would be all that unusual for her to be a much more mature candidate. Most people I’ve talked to have said they’ve noticed a marked difference in the last year, year and a half.”
“I feel certain that she’s going to win this election because I think she’s much more mature than Donald Trump,” Clyburn said. “Trump may be older, but she’s more mature.”
With Harris already locking up the support of a majority of delegates for the Democratic nomination, Republicans have turned their attention to her with a number of bizarre attacks on her race and gender. Reps. Tim Burchett and Harriet Hageman have publicly called her a “DEI vice president” and “DEI hire,” respectively. Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, said she was a “childless cat lady” on live television.
Clyburn said those sorts of attacks were emblematic of what the Trump campaign has always been rooted in — and that neither Harris nor the Democratic Party should pay attention or respond to them.
“They’re going to run a very racist campaign,” Clyburn said. “That’s what Trump does.”
“This is the same man who called his Black female employee a dog,” he said, referring to a tweet in which Trump insulted Omarosa Manigault Newman, who was the only Black senior White House aide from his administration at the time.
But Clyburn is incredibly zen about the whole thing. He recounted his recent experience at an urgent care facility, where he took a COVID-19 test after he had spent time with President Joe Biden, who had just tested positive for COVID.
An attendant measured Clyburn’s heart rate and blood pressure, and according to Clyburn, the attendant told him he had “a runner’s heart.”
“Your blood pressure is perfect,” he said.
“You know why that’s true?” Clyburn continued. “It’s because I’m not worried about a damn thing. People ask me all the time, ‘How is it that at 84 years old, you seem so calm with all the stuff going on?’”
Still, Clyburn acknowledged there was one thing that concerned him: whether Democrats can capitalize on the energy fueling Harris’ campaign in the opening days.
“The only thing that bothers me in this whole campaign is whether or not we will do the things that are necessary to harness this energy that’s out there,” he said. “The energy’s there. If we’re going to harness this energy and direct it properly, it takes a good candidate.”
“She’s not going to have an easy time,” Clyburn added. “This is going to be a very hard campaign.”
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.