Sen. Kamala Harris during a town hall in Detroit on May 6Paul Sancya/AP

Vice President Kamala Harris does not enjoy being compared to Barack Obama. It was an easy association to make fifteen years ago, when both were promising upstarts relatively new to the national stage. She supported and stumped for him early on during his first run for president, and their biographies are broadly adjacent; they’re biracial Democratic politicians with megawatt smiles who came of age in the post-civil rights era. But that’s where any useful comparisons end, primarily for one reason: Harris hates giving flowery speeches.

She has emphasized this point repeatedly in interviews and profiles. “Policy has to be relevant,” Harris told the New York Times back in 2019, in the middle of her own run for president. “That’s my guiding principle: Is it relevant? Not, ‘Is it a beautiful sonnet?’”

As President Joe Biden fights persistent calls to drop out after a poor debate performance that made questions of his age undeniable, the potential of Vice President Harris as a candidate—or president if Biden steps down before the election—has gone from right-wing conspiracy to front-page possibility.

A slew of prominent Democrats, including longtime Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), Maxine Waters (D-Mo.), and, of course, Harris herself, have reiterated their support of his candidacy.

But in all the calls there has been a........

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