When Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s fictional Veep, Selina Meyer, ran for the U.S. presidency, the TV comedy’s writers settled on the most meaningless election slogan they could think of: “Continuity with Change.”
As yet more evidence that America’s politics are stranger than satire, continuity with change is the essence of Kamala Harris’s bid to become the 47th president of the United States.
From a Canadian perspective, the more traditional approach to trade and security that Harris represents would be welcomed in Ottawa.
Republican candidate Donald Trump has promised that “retribution” will be central to his presidency and he has no love for Justin Trudeau, whom he has called “a far-left lunatic.” Trudeau has in turn accused Trump of “inciting” the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The former president has mused about decoupling the U.S. from the global economy and imposing a universal baseline tariff of 10 per cent on all imports, which would be crippling for Canada.
Trump has also indicated he would revive his antipathy towards NATO and encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” with delinquent” nations — of which Canada must rank high on the list, given the Trudeau government has said it will not hit the defence spending target of two per cent of GDP for another eight years. Democrats and Republicans have suggested that this perceived shortfall will have trade implications when the U.S.-Canada-Mexico free-trade agreement comes up for automatic review in 2026.
That review will not be plain sailing even under a Harris administration but, unlike Trump, the vice-president is not on a mission to roll back trade liberalization. In the words of Trump’s former (and likely future) trade adviser, Peter Navarro, the U.S. has “no allies, only competitors who cheat and dump.”
The fact that Harris knows Canada well, having spent most of her teenage years in Montreal, where her mother worked as a breast cancer researcher, could yet prove to be auspicious.
But the question everyone is asking the morning after President Joe Biden announced he is stepping aside is: If she is chosen as the Democratic party candidate (and odds are she will be), can she win?
Expectations are not high; Harris has one of the lowest approval ratings of any vice-president.
The polls taken after Biden’s disastrous debate performance are inconclusive. In all likelihood, Americans need time to take another look at Harris before deciding whether she is an acceptable alternative to Trump.
What we do know is that she performs better than any other Democrat whose name is floated (bar, intriguingly, Michelle Obama in a Reuters/Ipsos poll, which suggested the former first lady would beat Trump resoundingly). Harris’s numbers tend to shadow those of Biden, with most polls giving Trump a slight edge.
The problem, as Veep showcased so brilliantly, is that, after the vice-president has inquired after the president’s health, there are not many ways to display his or her talents.
Harris’s tenure has not been quite as dysfunctional as Meyer’s but she has received some unflattering reviews and become an easy target for insulting memes online, particularly after her nonsensical musings on “the significance of the passage of time.”
She has also been hammered by Trump for presiding over “the worst border ever” in her role as what the Republicans call “the border czar.”
In her defence, enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border is the responsibility of the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, not the vice-president.
Biden asked Harris to lead diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration in Central America — essentially convincing U.S. companies to invest there.
The lazy stereotype is that Harris lucked into the veep job as the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) candidate.
There’s no doubt that Biden hoped her gender and ethnicity would help him with women, Blacks and South Asian voters. But she’s not the dummy that the online memes would have voters believe.
She served as a district attorney in San Francisco and was elected as attorney general in California, the second-largest justice department in America, before entering the Senate in 2017.
She is known for her progressive views on abortion, climate change, gun control and health care, but also had an image as a “tough on crime” prosecutor and attorney general in California, including urging criminal penalties for parents of truant children.
Her prosecutorial skills were apparent at the confirmation hearings of conservative Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, making him look like a guilty schoolboy who had just cut the cheese with her pointed questioning.
This is not to suggest Americans are about to be swept away by a wave of Harris-mania. But she drastically changes the calculus for Republicans. A recent ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll revealed 85 per cent of Americans thought Biden was too old to serve — no surprise there. But 60 per cent thought Trump was too old, too. Age is now a vulnerability for the former president, as a 60-year-old (in October) Black/South Asian woman presents him with an entirely different proposition.
Harris’s challenge is to prove she is not Selina Meyer and that she deserves her position as the highest-ranking female elected official in U.S. history.
There is no DEI policy that applies in the melee of a presidential race.
The odds are stacked against her but then, they always have been.
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