2024-08-21 08:05:02
Steve Kerr is an excellent public speaker. The most memorable line ever uttered at a sports team’s championship parade came from Kerr’s lips in 1997, when he explained that his game-winning shot in the NBA Finals had been the product of Michael Jordan not being comfortable in big moments and knowing he needed to pass the ball to a more confident shooter. After a double-teamed Jordan flicked a pass in his direction in the closing seconds of the decisive game, Kerr hit a title-winning midrange jumper. “So I thought to myself, Well, I guess I gotta bail Michael out again,” Kerr told a giggling crowd.
This week, the Democrats wanted some Steve Kerr. Why would they not? He’s not even two weeks removed from coaching the United States to a gold medal at the Paris Olympics, so his words carry a nice sheen of unifying patriotism right now. His four championships leading the Golden State Warriors have made him the most accomplished NBA head coach of his generation, and he proudly resides somewhere left of center. During Donald Trump’s presidential term, Kerr was one of a few hoops coaches—along with the San Antonio Spurs’ Gregg Popovich and NBA journeyman Stan Van Gundy—who became widely circulated voices in Democratic moderates’ resistance to Trump.
While Popovich called Trump “a soulless coward,” Kerr had the pleasure of leading the first championship team to publicly skip a White House visit during Trump’s administration. Trump later criticized Kerr by name during a broadside against the NBA over its capitalistic pursuits in China. All of this made Kerr one of the most attractive anti-Trump figures on the Democrats’ pop cultural bench. Kerr, the son of an assassinated American academic, also happens to be an eloquent gun-control advocate.
Kerr was back in Chicago on Monday night, speaking for the Democrats in the same arena where he once hit that title-clincher for the Bulls. That same “winning spirit” from those Bulls days was in the air on Monday, Kerr said, and if anyone didn’t understand it, all they needed to do was Google “Michael Jordan.” Kerr was funny and engaging, and he was not even close to the weirdest celebrity speaker at a political convention in recent times (or, given the recent Republican convention, in recent weeks).
Still, it was reasonable to wonder what the point was, as it related to Kamala Harris’ efforts to become president. As the political commentator Tim Miller said around the time Kerr was onstage, “I don’t understand how this is helping Kamala beat Donald Trump. It’s fine. It’s ok! It’s not harmful. It’s just fan service for political obsessives.” Indeed, that was mostly it. Political conventions are long, sordid affairs, and there aren’t enough consequential politicians to fill four nights of network air.
Kerr was a bit different from the night’s other speakers, though: Joe and Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton, a bunch of members of Congress, union leaders, and promising legislators from battleground states. Who were Democrats trying to capture by having him on the stage? Was it necessary to have the head coach of the Warriors and a former Bulls shooting guard hamming it up on the party’s biggest night? Well, yes.
The NBA teams Kerr is affiliated with make him a nice fit for this moment in Democratic politics. Sure, it’s a nice callback and a bit of local fan appreciation to have Kerr return to the building where he shot 48 percent from 3-point range over five seasons. But he is now even more of a Golden State Warrior than he ever was a Chicago Bull, making him a useful instrument for Harris. One of the vice president’s big intraparty fissures to address is the one between rich tech donors who dislike regulation and antitrust hawks who think that business titans have been allowed to run amok. At this very moment, some of Harris’ big Silicon Valley money guys want her to fire Federal Trade Commission boss Lina Khan, who has doggedly pursued antitrust actions against tech giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon.
One way for Harris to appease those donors would be to signal that she’ll disempower Khan in her administration. But do you know another way to appease those freakish donors? Remind them that most of them are Warriors fans who likely started watching basketball around the time Kerr and Steph Curry turned Golden State into a dynasty. (Kerr’s closing his speech with the hope that Dems will get to use Curry’s “night-night” celebration on Donald Trump in November might have been the coup de grâce for that crowd.) Harris wants money and cooperation from wealthy Bay Area types. Tapping Kerr for a good speech is not quite as valuable as pledging not to enforce any federal laws about mergers and acquisitions, but every little thing helps.
For reasons I cannot explain but which may have something to do with his youth in Lebanon, Kerr also has credibility with a certain type of foreign policy intellectual that may be useful to Harris’ campaign. During Barack Obama’s administration, one of the president’s advisers pitched him an idea that Kerr might help bring about a détente with North Korea by playing a pickup game with Kim Jong-un. Harris is still trying to establish some sort of voice on foreign policy, having not had much of a public one as vice president. There is a nonzero chance that a member of “the Blob,” the D.C. foreign affairs establishment, will now be more inclined to write a policy paper for Harris because she has Kerr’s unambiguous backing. What a joy.
Republicans have claimed the American flag in our national divorce, but Kerr, right now, is a good candidate to yank it back to the left. NBA fans on balance are a bit more liberal than those of other major sports leagues, and it is hard to fathom that many people who care what Kerr has to say were not already on his side. But in the immediate afterglow of leading Team USA to Olympic glory, Kerr appeals to fun notions of patriotism. He started his speech by talking about the American basketball teams as a reflection of the country, and hey, sure, that might play with a few people. The only members of the Democratic Party who quibbled with him were those of the Massachusetts delegation, slightly disappointed that Boston Celtics superstar Jayson Tatum hadn’t gotten a lot of playing time in Paris.
For all those reasons, Kerr is a nice bench player for Democratic outreach efforts. He would be a useful recruit for his own campaign, something a blogger can write with no fear of consequences because Kerr—unlike, say, Nick Saban in Alabama—would be running on friendly political terrain in either the Bay Area or Illinois. (He did play college ball at the University of Arizona and was drafted by the Phoenix Suns, if he really wanted to make a go in a swing state …) Political history may not record his speech as a memorable moment in Harris’ pursuit of the White House. But it was a more helpful allotment of a few minutes than it might have appeared to be. And it also gave the Democrats a chance to play the same intro music that the 1990s Bulls got when the announcer read their starting lineup. That’s a better hit of ’90s nostalgia than Democrats typically court.
