Democrats pulled off quite a trick in swapping Kamala Harris for Joe Biden as their presumptive candidate for U.S. president. The vice president is younger and more dynamic than the decaying president of the United States, and yet she’s somehow still not a better candidate — or person, for that matter — than the man she’s expected to replace on the ticket. Her main selling point is that at least she’s not Donald Trump, the deeply flawed Republican standard-bearer. Then again, Trump’s main virtue may be that at least he’s not Kamala Harris.
It’s fair to say that Harris starts with some vulnerabilities, among them her conduct as San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, and then as California attorney general.
In 2010, then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris was excoriated in a court decision because she “failed to disclose information that clearly should have been disclosed” to defence attorneys regarding misconduct at a crime lab relied on by her office. Ultimately, over 1,000 cases were dismissed “including many in which convictions had been obtained and sentences were being served” as The Washington Post summarized in 2019.
In 2014, after Harris had been elected as California Attorney General, her office argued in court filings that the state should not be forced to offer early release to some low-risk inmates in the state’s overcrowded prisons because that “would severely impact fire camp participation.” The state relied on prisoners as cheap labor to fight wildfires, and her office wanted to keep that labor pool available.
“A review of her career shows a distinct penchant for power seeking and an illiberal disposition in which no offense is small or harmless enough to warrant lenience from the state,” Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in 2019 during Harris’s go-nowhere grab for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Harris is also known as a difficult boss, to put it mildly. During her tenure, the office of the vice president has suffered “an extraordinarily high 91.5-per cent staff turnover rate” according to a recent report by Open The Books, a watchdog group.
“It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated,” one official told Politico in 2021.
Maybe low morale is why Harris’s staff don’t help her prepare for interviews and public events, so that she often comes across as if she has no clue about the issues at hand. Then again, that should be her own responsibility and she doesn’t seem to take it seriously.
In 2021, Harris gave a particularly cringe-worthy interview to NBC’s Lester Holt about her supposed role taking the lead on border policy for the Biden administration.
“This whole — this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border,” Harris huffed.
“You haven’t been to the border,” Holt told her.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris snapped back. “I don’t understand the point that you’re making.”
That was … strange. And Harris’s exchanges haven’t become less odd since. She’s famous for word-salad stylings about Venn diagrams and being “unburdened by what has been” that make her seem like a particularly glitchy AI, or like a student trying to BS her way through an unfinished verbal presentation. Her failings may even have delayed Joe Biden’s long-overdue exit from the presidential race.
“President Biden hesitated to drop his re-election campaign in part because he and his senior advisers worried that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t up to taking on Donald Trump, according to three Biden aides familiar with recent talks about his plans,” Axios’s Alex Thompson reported July 22.
Of course, Biden himself remains an anchor on Harris’s ambitions. The president is widely unpopular, with a 38.3 per cent approval rating that hasn’t recovered from the messy Afghanistan withdrawal, and has been pummelled since by cost-of-living concerns and worries over immigration. Harris’s own 37.8 per cent approval reflects the fact that she shares responsibility for the White House’s policies because she is a prominent part of it. Harris starts her own race for the presidency not as a fresh face, but as the half of the Biden-Harris team that can still climb stairs.
That said, Harris is by no means a sure loser. She is, after all, not Donald Trump, the former president and current Republican candidate reviled by as many Americans as despise President Joe Biden. In April, half of respondents told Pew Research pollsters their fervent desire was for both Biden and Trump to drop out of the race. Now that half of their wish has been granted, Harris could well benefit by simply being somebody else on the ballot.
Trump’s favorability rating, at 42.3 per cent, is almost as underwater as that of Harris’s approval numbers. He left the White House viewed by the public as substantially less ethical than his predecessors; it’s an image he reinforces with a constant stream of lies, exaggerations and half-truths. Staff turnover in the Trump administration was nearly identical to that in Harris’s office at 92 per cent, suggesting that they’re both absolutely charming people to be around. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have converted the once limited-government, free-market (if mostly in marketing terms) Republican Party into an illiberal, populist organization that has a difficult time presenting itself as a comprehensively less-intrusive alternative to the increasingly meddlesome Democratic Party.
As a result, Harris is performing slightly better than Biden in presidential preference polling. It’s early days and she’s benefiting from some giddy relief among Democrats that their presidential campaign won’t resemble an amateur staging of Weekend at Bernie’s, but though she’s behind Trump in polling averages, she appears to be running about a point ahead of Biden.
So, the race continues, with neither major contender a shoe-in. And, importantly, with no aspirant offering to take office and then leave Americans alone under a government we can safely ignore.
With Kamala Harris ready to lead Democrats into the election, novelist Lionel Shriver wrote this week that she’s “still a double hater” of both leading candidates and “agonised over which presidential candidate I revile the more.”
That’s the thing about politics. When you shake it up, you just bring fresh scum to the surface.
National Post