Hi, it's Alexa Yabel from New York Times cooking. We've got tons of easy weeknight recipes, and today I'm making my five-ingredient Creamy Miso pasta. You just take your starchy pasta water, whisk it together with a little bit of miso and butter until it's creamy. Add your noodles and a little bit of cheese. It's like a grown-up box of mac and cheese. That feels like a restaurant-quality dish. New York Times cooking has you covered with easy dishes for busy weeknights. You can find more at nytcooking. Com.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

My name is Tressy MacMillan-Cottam. I am a sociologist, a professor, and a columnist at the New York Times. I have been studying race, gender, class, and what it means for how we live our everyday lives for maybe say, 15 years or so now. I was expecting a very different DNC just a month or so ago, but now all of the drama about changing candidates seems to have settled down, and now I'm going into this convention thinking about how the presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris, will present her personal biography. The campaign so far has not wanted to play up the historic nature of her campaign, but I that we, the voting public, would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that not only is this a woman running for president at the top of a major party ticket, this is a Black woman, a woman of color, a Gen X woman of color, by the way. I'm very interested to hear how the Kamala Harris campaign understands the significance of her identity and biography relative to what voters expect from a presidential candidate. It is really interesting that the Harris campaign so far has really dialed back the significance of identity in this campaign message, and I think there's a couple of reasons for that.

One, let me start by saying, I think it is smart after eight years of feeling like the democratic process is crumbling around them, that politics have become a circus. I think that this campaign understands that As significant as this candidacy is, most voters right now are really craving a return to normalcy. They've got a challenge here this campaign. How do they sell a maverick historical candidate while promising a return to normalcy? So far, they are splitting the difference by saying, You know this campaign is significant. You know this candidate is unique. We don't need to say it. We will instead focus on policy and platform and message, and we will let everybody else talk about the self-evident, historic nature of the campaign. The American public has a historically-informed idea of what a president of the United States looks like, what they sound like, how they perform. Frankly, that means that for most Americans, the President, by default, is a white male. What someone like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and now Kamala Harris are doing is they are having to build in a new set of expectations with the American public about what leadership looks like.

The challenge there, of course, is that not necessarily that everyone has a knee-jerk negative reaction to that, but that for most people, we fill in the gaps of what we don't know with stereotypes. Those stereotypes usually are negative, even when they sound positive, in that they flatten how unique or particular person is. In the case of running for the presidency, stereotypes can be handy in that they can deliver a quick message to voters who are not paying a lot of attention to an election. I think that is something that the Trump campaign has been very good about, historically, about using those stereotypes to quickly encapsulate and characterize what their opponents are. But you see Trump really struggling here to box Kamala Harris in on the stereotypes that he thinks should work. Right? So these are things like, She's not very smart. You know why she hasn't done an interview? Because she's not smart. She's not intelligent. Which is, of course, linking ideas about racial inferiority and intelligence. Then with JD Vans, they have gone after her status as a woman without biological children.

We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies. If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttage, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

The intersections of her identity is actually making it tougher for Trump to figure out a line of attack because he has these broad stereotypes. But right now, they're very clunky and far too broad to capture what Kamala Harris actually is. He can't figure out how to get a more nuanced tool and does not account for the ways that we think about race and gender together. What does it mean for a Black woman to be making executive decisions on behalf of a multiracial, plural society society. It is challenging. It is also fascinating to watch this campaign assemble that in real-time. I keep coming back to the fact that this is a very short campaign cycle for them. They have not had a lot of time to build this new vocabulary for the American voter. That they are able to do so fairly nimbly so far is really quite remarkable. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank I have actually been very surprised by people's enthusiasm rallying around not just Harris, but a ticket that with Harrison Walls is really unique in the way that power there is being performed and played through these characters that we've really never seen before.

A white male candidate being the cheerleader and coach for a Black female presidential candidate. I think there's just a lot there to challenge the American public's imagination. In this moment, especially coming out of this long hangover of what Trump and Trump politics has done to us, if you had asked me three months ago, I would have said, No, there's no way we're ready to rally around this candidate. Today, if you ask me, I say it was actually a moot point. They've already rallied around this candidate. I have apparently come up with a tradition. I did not know that I was developing at the time. But for each of these historical candidacies, I have been in my home state of North Carolina. I watched Obama's speech at North Carolina Central University, which is my undergraduate alma mater, an historically Black college in Durham, North Carolina.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

Thanks to you, we reached a milestone. I watched Hillary Clinton's speech. I happened to be in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time. The first time in our nation's history that a woman will be a major party's nomination. I will now be back home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to watch Kamala Harris accept the nomination for President of the United States, and that feels exactly right to me. My drink of choice, it will always be a nice bourbon cocktail, and that means it'll probably be an old-fashioned while I watch history happen.

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