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Who is Kamala Harris?
Despite an uptick in interviews, several weeks on the stump, three years as vice president, months spent campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, four years as a senator and seven as California attorney general, many Americans still don’t think they know the “real” Kamala Harris.
As Maureen Dowd wrote recently in The New York Times, “Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.”
True, she did well during her debate against former President Donald Trump, but that performance required weeks of rehearsal and memorization, a giant assist from partisan moderators and – let’s be honest – an inexpert opponent.
Why is Harris so insecure? One possibility is that it is because she knows she is not qualified, and that she has landed on this lofty perch for all the wrong reasons. That she became V.P., because Joe Biden had promised to pick a woman of color, and not because of her accomplishments. And that she was tapped to be the 2024 nominee because Democrat pooh-bahs realized a diminished Biden could not beat Donald Trump and ran out of time to find someone better.
Another explanation is that Kamala Harris is pretending to be something she is not: a moderate politician. She may be struggling to mask her progressive beliefs, the ones she ran on unsuccessfully in 2019. Her father was a Marxist economist and her mother a liberal activist; both presumably had some influence on their daughter as she grew up in San Francisco.
Harris has said her core values have not changed, but that would suggest that her flip-flopping on important issues like fracking and Medicare-for-All are political gambits, meant to reassure critical centrist voters. After all, she didn’t hold leftist opinions in college; she held them just five years ago. To broaden her appeal, she may be lying about a great many things; that would make anyone uncomfortable.
A third possibility is that the vice president has no core beliefs, no central well of values that would inform her policies. The late President Reagan believed in small government and peace through strength; Donald Trump echoes those ideas and in addition believes in putting America first. The Times’ David Brooks suggests that Harris “needs to show the American people her strongest, most acute and controlling desire, the ruling passion of her soul.” It’s quite possible she doesn’t have one.
Her party is panicking as the inadequacies of their candidate become more obvious. Like sports fans tossing water bottles to a bedraggled marathoner, Democrats are bombarding Kamala with advice. Recent polls suggest she may lose to Donald Trump, they are desperate to help.
Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times, says Harris must “distance herself from Biden when she needs to…” and “make the case for herself more assertively.” Harris does not know how to make the case at all, much less “assertively.”
James Carville, the wily old Democrat kingmaker, says the VP “should scare the crap out of voters.” That’s hard to do that when you’re scared yourself.
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New York Times Opinion columnist and author Charles Blow hilariously opines that Harris doesn’t need to “pull back from conveying joy” but quotes a pollster as saying she must “layer specific issues like housing affordability and health care “under the overarch of joy.” Blow says, “The campaign doesn’t need a post-joy strategy, but it definitely needs an “in- addition-to-joy strategy.” Imagine an adult actually writing those words.
My favorite advice to Harris, though, comes from Jonathan Martin, who writes in Politico that Kamala “ought to consider preemptively naming Mitt Romney as her Secretary of State,” asking “what better way to convey to middle-of-the-road voters that you mean what you say about putting Republicans in your government?” That, despite Romney refusing to endorse Harris.
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Dowd is puzzled that Kamala, “Didn’t sit down with a yellow pad or laptop long ago and decide why she wanted to be president, what her top priorities would be and how she would get that stuff done. The Vision Thing.” Dowd must know there’s a good chance that Harris doesn’t have a vision.
Democrats are anxious but have only themselves to blame. After pushing Joe Biden out of the race and seeing their party rush to embrace the usurper, party leaders thought they had the Oval Office in the bag. Trump, after all, was a convicted felon who threatened democracy and wanted to ban abortions nationwide. That was their (dishonest) story and they were convinced it was enough to repeat the 2020 win.
Voters, though, wanted more. And especially… more from Kamala Harris. For a while, the excitement of the convention and her inaugural appearances masked frustration with her unrevealing campaign. But very soon her refusal to take interviews and shunning of non-scripted moments of any kind grew stale; while COVID made it easy for Joe Biden to hide in his basement, similarly avoiding scrutiny, Harris has no such excuse.
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Her admission to the hosts of the View that she would not change a single policy or action of Biden’s over the past three and a half years was the corker; even former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod called it the worst of all possible responses.
Given her vow that “We’re Not Going Back,” he is right. Sticking with the policies that have delivered so many failures over the past three years shows Harris is also not inclined to move forward.
