In a surprise announcement Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. This endorsement was soon joined by other Democratic leaders, and there is no doubt that Harris will be the party's next presidential candidate. Harris will no doubt inject more energy into a party that had been plagued by anxiety over sending the octogenarian Biden to face Trump. But who exactly is Kamala Harris? What would she do as the leader of the most powerful country in the history of the world? It's a question she herself seems hesitant to answer.
Harris' decision to run for president in 2020 made a lot of sense on paper. She was a young senator who had served as a tough-as-nails local prosecutor and as a big state attorney general. As the wife and daughter of highly educated Jamaican and Indian immigrants, she had the potential to reassemble the “Obama era coalition of ascent.” For a while, this potential seemed to be reflected in her a strong fundraiser and the media is buzzing around his candidacy.
The height of Harris' presidential campaign was a moment when he launched a surprise attack on Biden during a televised primary debate, targeting his decades-earlier opposition to desegregation busing and his friendly relations with segregationists in the Senate In a week, she was virtually tied with Biden for the nomination, suggesting that his campaign's success was right on the money. The high didn't last though, and he ended up dropping out of the race before a single ballot was cast in December 2019. What happened?
If you turn the clock back to the debate, you might get a sense of the problem. Shortly after his elimination of Biden, Harris was asked what he would do about school segregation. Would I advocate for the bus, which has always been the case? notoriously unpopular? It turned out that she thought it should only be an option for local governments. I wouldn't want the federal government to pick up on them to adopt it.
It was one of many moments in the campaign when Harris seemed to propose doing something bold only to draw criticism. Another came when CNN asked him if he would agree with the inmates voting. “I think we should have this conversation,” he told Don Lemon when he pressed her on whether even the Boston Marathon bomber should be allowed to vote. But that didn't last long. The next day, she clarified his position, saying that terrorists and murderers should not have the right to vote.
Or take your stand on health care. In 2017, Sen. Bernie Sanders convinced Harris to co-sponsor the single-payer legislation he had drafted, which would have eliminated private insurance entirely and put everyone on a public plan. Presumably that's why, two years later, Harris's hand raised during an NBC debate when the moderator asked if any of the candidates would be willing to abolish private insurance. A day later, she claimed that he had misheard the debate question, thinking he was asked if he would surrender her own private insurance
At one point, Harris' campaign was pitching it forgotten political proposals that someone created a Harris Policy Builder to make fun of them. Whatever else you might say about them, neither Sanders nor Biden, the two candidates who made it to the bottom of the 2020 primaries, could be accused of similar wrongdoing.
“This lack of core convictions followed Harris into the vice president's office.”
This lack of core convictions followed Harris into the vice president's office. In 2021, he taught a political science class at George Mason University. A student asked a question referring to “ethnic genocide and a displacement of people” in the Palestinian territories. Rather than endorsing the student's characterization, Harris responded, “And again, it's about the fact that your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed and must be 'to listen”. He continued: “And the point you're making about policies related to Middle East policy, foreign policy. We still have healthy debates in our country about what the right path is. And no one's voice should be to delete in this”. Can you figure out a real position on the issue from this? I can't either.
Harris' noncommittal word salad ended up angering Jewish leaders and organizations, forcing his office back down and apologize.
His tendency to get it wrong was also evident when Biden gave him a major challenge. Elaina Plott Calabro, journalist from The Atlantic, revealed that Harris spoke at a meeting offering some ideas to address the root causes of illegal immigration in the United States, which led to Biden offering him that portfolio. But after the meeting, he went to Biden's then-chief of staff, Ron Klain, and said: “I'm very happy to be committed to this, but I was just throwing stuff out there in the hope that someone else might take it up and not me, because it's a completely no-win issue.”
When she served as a prosecutor in California, Harris was forced by the nature of the job to make difficult decisions. Your decision to approve the sanctions for parents in truancy cases, for example, earned her derision from the left. But he was making a call between two difficult outcomes: punishing parents or allowing chronic school absenteeism, which would wreak havoc on children's lives. But as a senator and vice president, Harris has been much more risk-averse because in those roles you can afford to be.
Voters will be able to see, as they apparently did in the 2020 primaries, that Harris seems afraid to establish who he really is and what he stands for. I've been trying to think of a single instance where Harris, as a senator or vice president, fought on an issue for and against the influence of corporate media, major donors, or activists. I couldn't come up with one. Trying to please everyone ended up pleasing no one, and it wrecked his once-promising presidential campaign. Will likely do it again.
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