With a surprise Sunday announcement, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. That endorsement was soon joined by other Democratic leaders, and there is little question that Harris will be the party’s next presidential nominee. Harris will no doubt infuse more energy into a party that had been wracked with anxiety about sending the octogenarian Biden to face off against Trump. But who exactly is Kamala Harris? What would she do as leader of the most powerful country in the history of the world? It’s a question she herself seems hesitant to answer.
Harris’s decision to run for president in 2020 made a lot of sense on paper. She was a youngish senator who had served as a tough-as-nails local prosecutor and as the attorney general of a large state. As a woman and the daughter of highly educated Jamaican and Indian immigrants, she had the potential to reassemble the Obama-era “coalition of the ascendant.” For a while, this potential seemed to be reflected in her robust fundraising and the media buzz around her candidacy.
The height of Harris’s presidential campaign was a moment when she launched a surprise attack against Biden during a televised primary debate, targeting his opposition decades earlier to desegregation busing and his friendly relations with segregationists in the Senate. Within a week, she was virtually tied with Biden for the nomination, suggesting that her campaign hit was right on the money. Yet the high didn’t last, and she ended up dropping out of the race before a single vote was cast in December 2019. What happened?
If you turn back the clock to the debate, you might get a sense of the problem. Shortly after her takedown of Biden, Harris was asked what she would do about school segregation. Would she advocate for busing, which has always been notoriously unpopular? It turned out she thought it should just be an option for local governments. She would not have the federal government lean on them to adopt it.
It was one of many moments during the campaign when Harris seemed to propose doing something bold only to demur. Another came when she was asked by CNN if she would be OK with prisoners voting. “I think we should have that conversation,” she told Don Lemon when he pressed her if even the Boston Marathon Bomber should be allowed to vote. But that didn’t last long. The next day, she clarified her position, saying that terrorists and murderers shouldn’t have the right to vote.
Or take her stance on health care. In 2017, Sen. Bernie Sanders convinced Harris to co-sponsor the single-payer legislation he had crafted, which would have eliminated private insurance altogether and put everybody on a public plan instead. Presumably that’s why, two years later, Harris’s hand shot up during an NBC debate when the moderator asked whether any of the candidates would be willing to abolish private insurance. One day later, she claimed that she had misheard the debate question, thinking she was asked if she would give up her own private insurance.
At one point, Harris’s campaign was throwing out such forgettable policy proposals that someone created a Harris policy generator to make fun of them. Whatever else you can say about them, neither Sanders nor Biden, the two candidates who made it through to the end of the 2020 primary, could be accused of similar prevarications.
“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, she addressed a political-science class at George Mason University. One student asked a question in which she referred to the “ethnic genocide and a displacement of people” in the Palestinian territories. Rather than push back against—or endorse—the student’s characterization, Harris replied: “And again, this is about the fact that your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed, and it must be heard.” She went on: “And the point that you’re making about policies that relates to Middle East policy, foreign policy. We still have healthy debates in our country, about what is the right path. And nobody’s voice should be suppressed on that.” Can you make out an actual position on the issue from this? Neither can I.
Harris’s noncommittal word salad ended up angering Jewish leaders and organizations, forcing her office to backtrack and apologize.
Her tendency to equivocate was also evident when Biden tasked her with a major challenge. Elaina Plott Calabro, a reporter at The Atlantic, revealed that Harris spoke up in a meeting offering some ideas to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration to the United States, which led Biden to offer her that portfolio. But after the meeting, she went to Biden’s then-chief of staff, Ron Klain, and said: “I’m really happy to be engaged on this, but I was sort of throwing things out there in the hopes that someone else could take them on and not me, because it is just a completely no-win issue.”
When she served as a prosecutor in California, Harris was forced by the nature of the job to make tough decisions. Her decision to endorse penalties for parents in cases of truancy, for instance, earned her derision from the left. But she was making a call between two difficult outcomes: punishing parents or allowing for chronic truancy, which would wreak havoc on children’s lives. But as a senator and as vice president, Harris has been far 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 primary, that Harris seems afraid to establish who she really is and what she stands for. I’ve been trying to think of a single instance in which Harris, as a senator or as vice president, fought for an issue over and against blowback from corporate media, major donors, or activists. I couldn’t come up with one. Trying to please everyone ended up pleasing no one, and scuttled her once-promising presidential campaign. It is likely to do so again.