Last week, Kamala Harris strode onstage at the DNC in a tan Chloé suit, her pussy bow confidently draped and her front pleats tailored to perfection. Commentators suspected her ensemble was a playful nod to one of the weirder weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency: In 2014, he set off a bout of Republican pearl-clutching when he wore a light-brown suit during a live press conference about the ISIS situation in Syria. Long Island representative Peter King called the outfit “unpresidential” and claimed there was “no way any of us can excuse” the choice to wear something so breezy during a serious conference; Fox host Lou Dobbs said the suit was “shocking to a lot of people.”
Obama gamely folded the controversy — including the more nonpartisan opinion that the suit was just kind of ugly — into his joke repertoire. Though no one on Harris’s team has confirmed whether she was intentionally referencing it, he is going with yes. On Wednesday, ten years to the day after his infamous press conference, Obama tweeted side-by-side photos of himself in the tan suit and Harris’s DNC tan suit, with the caption “How it started. How it’s going. Ten years later, and it’s still a good look!” He added a link to the voting resource IWillVote.com.
Not to split hairs, but there is one minor flaw in Obama’s comparison: The suit Harris was wearing was not quite tan but — in another suspected wink-wink campaign moment — coconut brown. Perhaps Tucker Carlson wants to let him know?
