Kamala Harris takes the Chicago stage on Thursday in the culmination of one of the most audacious bets in recent political history: That in 100 days Democrats can turn the co-pilot of an unpopular Presidency into the reincarnation of Barack Obama’s movement for hope and change. On present course they might even pull it off.
That’s the message that Michelle and Barack Obama were selling as they extolled Ms Harris in their Tuesday speeches in Chicago. And it’s no accident that the Vice-President has recruited Mr Obama’s campaign operatives to advise, if not entirely take over, her campaign. Out go the bad memories of her association with Joe Biden, and in come the gauzy slogans about “our future,” the “contagious power of hope”, and “fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion”.
Ms Harris is no longer the Vice-President who failed to secure the border. She’ll now be tough on illegal migration.
She’s no longer the Veep who said “Bidenomics is working” while inflation reached a 40-year high. She’s now the candidate who will reduce your family’s food bill by going after your grocer for “price gouging”.
She’s no longer the candidate of 2020 who questioned the need for cash bail and blamed police for urban violence. She’s now the tough prosecutor who as California Attorney-General dared to investigate … Exxon.
She’s no longer the presidential candidate of 2019 who wanted to ban fracking, endorsed Medicare for All, and questioned whether the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should exist. Her campaign suggests she’s changed her views on all that, although she hasn’t said why — or even been asked. Americans are expected to take her expedient leap from the left to the centre on faith.
The Democratic Party has a history of nominating candidates who are relatively unknown and offer hope and change. Jimmy Carter was a one-term Georgia governor who promised a more honest politics in 1976. Bill Clinton was “the man from Hope”, Arkansas, whose character flaws were overlooked in 1992. Mr Obama was a first-term senator promising to unite the country in 2008. His divisiveness in office paved the way for Donald Trump.
The difference this time is that all of those men were more vetted than Ms Harris, who was handed the Democratic nomination without a primary contest. She hasn’t done an interview of note since her elevation as the nominee, much less one with any hard questions. Her speeches are scripted and more Teleprompter-safe even than the remarks of the declining President Biden. She is the least known presidential nominee in modern times. What does she really believe?
On domestic policy, it’s possible to infer that she’d pursue President Biden’s agenda, perhaps even more aggressively. Her few distinctive policy hints so far suggest she is a California progressive who favours higher taxes and even greater spending to complete the President’s Build Back Better agenda.
But she has largely avoided specific proposals that carry a price tag and open her to criticism. This is no doubt by design as she runs a campaign about “vibes”. In a version of Nancy Pelosi’s famous crack about ObamaCare, the public will have to elect Ms Harris to see what’s in her plans.
Foreign policy is where the Vice-President’s known unknowns are most troubling. The US faces the greatest security risks since the end of the Cold War, and probably since World War II. The Cold War at least had the relative stability of bipolar competition between the US and Soviet Union. Today there are multiple global risks from multiple adversaries working together with menacing new weapons.
Yet Ms Harris hasn’t had to explain her security views on much of anything. Does she still favour cutting the defence budget, as she did as a senator? She has criticised Israel more aggressively for the war in Gaza than her boss has, but what does she think of Iran’s role as the main instigator of Middle East terrorism? What would she do about its drive for a nuclear weapon, and how would she restore American deterrence in this dangerous world?
The Vice-President can try to slipstream behind Mr Biden’s foreign policy for the rest of the campaign, but as President her personal instincts and decision-making will be paramount. She hasn’t explained to the public what her core principles are, or even who she relies on for foreign-policy advice.
Perhaps Ms Harris has qualities of leadership we haven’t observed. Vice-presidents called on unexpectedly have sometimes risen to the occasion, as Harry Truman and Gerald Ford did. Perhaps, too, she will show some of those qualities in Thursday’s speech or in the campaign to come. But so far she is a vessel for the triumph of hope over experience, whom Americans are expected to embrace mainly because she isn’t Donald Trump.
The Wall Street Journal
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