The only way Joe Biden wouldn’t be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States was if he withdrew himself from consideration. On Sunday, that finally happened. In the days since, a majority of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention have recommitted themselves to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris as Democratic nominee when the convention meets in late August.
Who is Harris, and what will her candidacy mean for Democrats and for the US?
Harris was a senator before being vice president, and before that she was attorney general of California. Her professional background is as a prosecutor. This is a fairly conventional resume for an American politician, and unlike Biden or Trump, she is at a more typical age for American presidents. She will be 60 years old on Election Day.
The vice president has no formal powers except to cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate. That means there is not much to be gleaned from Harris’ experience in her current office, where, like the vice presidents before her, she is little more than a cheerleader for the president.
Looking to the earlier part of her career, my National Review colleague Dan McLaughlin wrote, ‘Harris, raised in the progressive hothouse of the San Francisco Bay Area, is reflexive rather than considered because she has never really had to engage with opposing ideas, win the support of people who disagree with her, or pay a political price for disregarding their rights.’ As California attorney general, she used her law-enforcement powers to target conservative groups over abortion and climate issues.
As a senator, she was a party-line Democrat on policy issues. She distinguished herself as an especially illiberal Democrat by questioning a judicial nominee on his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organisation that once claimed John F. Kennedy as a member. Being an active Catholic does not disqualify one from the bench in a country with both religious liberty and a constitutional prohibition on religious tests for public office, and the Senate passed a resolution after her questioning to affirm that fact.
Her economic record in the Senate was based on big government and identity politics. She wanted the federal government to send people $2,000 per month for the entire pandemic emergency period, called for a $15 minimum wage, and supported a bill banning so-called price gouging. She wanted to mandate that the Federal Reserve interview racial-minority candidates and supported the creation of a new agency to assess legislation’s ‘climate equity’.
Harris was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 election, and she tried to tie Biden to the US history of racial segregation in a rather preposterous bit of identity politics (Harris’ parents are black and Indian, respectively). She consistently took far-left policy positions, with a penchant for promising unconstitutional actions to achieve her goals.
She promised an executive order to ban ‘assault weapons’, a nebulous category that would almost certainly include firearms protected by the Constitution’s right to keep and bear arms. Harris promised to rewrite immigration laws with executive orders, too, cutting Congress out of its constitutional role in that process. She threatened another executive action on prescription-drug prices by saying, ‘If Congress won’t act, I will.’ She also said she supported prohibiting private health insurance, which, no matter your position on how health care should be provided, would cause serious problems for the roughly 215 million Americans who currently have it. She later walked back that position.
Her platform proved unpopular even among Democrats, and Harris ended her campaign for president in December 2019, almost a year before the general election. Despite not contesting a single primary election, her campaign spent $40m. It was one of the most spectacular campaign flame-outs in American political history.
Biden promised during the campaign to select a woman as his running mate. When he won the Democratic nomination, he was pressured to select a black woman, especially given that black voters were his strongest bloc in the primary elections. Those identity-politics considerations narrowed the field quite dramatically, with Harris emerging as the pick.
As vice president, she has become something of a running joke in American politics, prone to vacuous turns of phrase. The Daily Show, a comedy program normally friendly to Democrats, postulated that Harris’ musings come from a ‘holistic thought advisor’ who arranges her words not as sentences, but as ‘idea voyages’. One example, that Harris actually said, has become a meme on Twitter: ‘We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen.’
Vice presidents, owing to their powerlessness, are often the subjects of amusement. They even get in on the fun themselves sometimes. John Nance Garner, vice president from 1933 to 1941, described the job as ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss’.
But Harris can’t be a joke anymore, as she might soon become president, whether or not she wins the election. Biden, whose health seems to be worsening, could resign or even die between now and January 20, when his term expires. That would elevate Harris to the presidency in the interim. Whether she would remain president would depend on whether she could defeat Donald Trump in November.
Polls so far show very little difference between Harris and Biden in the eyes of voters, with each having similarly low approval ratings and performing slightly behind Trump. Now that Harris will be campaigning as the presumptive nominee, she will have more of a chance to change voters’ perspectives. No major party has changed its presumptive nominee this late in the game before, and it remains to be seen how voters will respond to such a move.
The problem Harris solves for Democrats is that she is young enough that the American people think she is physically capable of doing the job. She does not represent a major change in policy views compared to Biden. If she wins, expect continuity between her presidency and Biden’s, with perhaps a tick leftward.
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