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Column: Being President Isn't Similar to Playing 'Top Chef'
In their relentless effort to make their candidate seem warm and relatable, the Kamala Harris partisans have touted her assorted cooking videos on YouTube. But that spin can be taken too far.
Indian-American TV host Padma Lakshmi penned an op-ed for The New York Times titled “As a Cook, Here’s What I See in Kamala Harris.” The Times Opinion page summed it up on Twitter: In cooking, Harris “displays the very qualities this country sorely needs — her care, and her ability to tell a new kind of story about what it means to be American.” She also wrote, “Food relays the complexity of people’s stories.”
What is all this supposed to mean? Democrats always think they have cornered the market on traits like “caring,” and “complexity,” and story-telling. But this is just another saccharine narrative, meant to sell Kamala as the opposite of their hate object Donald Trump. “Cooking well requires organization, attention to detail, patience — and the impulse to bring people together. In a divided country, these qualities can help Ms. Harris be a good, even a great, president.”
Neither The New York Times nor Lakshmi acknowledged she hosted a “massive Zoom call” with chefs on August 29 where she said, “we will hopefully raise a ton of money for the Harris-Walz campaign…let’s raise money, and let’s win this election.”
You could imagine Jay Leno writing about how Tim Walz fixing cars is like being president, or someone back in 2012 might have suggested Paul Ryan’s deer hunting said something about being president. Some of the qualities you need might translate, but the metaphors are seriously strained. Instead, it just feels like Padma is selling her pal Kamala and for a bonus, her new Hulu show Taste The Nation.
If Kamala’s cooking qualities naturally carried over to her political duties, wouldn’t she have a better record as vice president of uniting Americans? Instead, Democrats have spent their time in the White House bitterly dividing Americans. The supposedly caring/patient people didn’t typically bring people together. Usually they ripped apart the opposition as comparable to Jim Crow and Adolf Hitler.
Later in the piece, Lakshmi noted that Hillary Rodham Clinton sneered on the campaign trail in 1992 that “I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” but she decided to become a lawyer instead. Does that mean Hillary was not cut out for the presidency, because of her distaste for baking?
Lakshmi can only mourn: “Cooking was for a long time a trap for female political figures.” For Harris, who didn’t choose to marry until she was 50, cooking videos might take some of the career-woman edge off her image, and it can play up her exotic ethnic background.
I never miss a season of Top Chef, which Lakshmi hosted for 17 years. In her article, she wrote about judging the contestants’ mettle in the kitchen. “One chef, for instance, always splattered food and left jars knocked over — he was frazzled and out of his depth, displaying a lack of leadership potential.” You can’t “panic under pressure when the clock is ticking.”
This Top Chef metaphor doesn’t match this campaign. Harris is skipping the competition. She’s mostly staying out of the kitchen. The panic about her performance crumbling under pressure is never-ending, judging from how much she has been kept under wraps.
In the end, Lakshmi is just thrilled that someone who “looks like her” could be president. It doesn’t matter if it would go just as badly for America as it’s been going during Kamala's vice presidency.
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