From a weak field, Kamala Harris the right choice for Biden running mate

‘Let’s go win this’: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris make it Twitter official.

In choosing Senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate, Joe Biden made the right choice from a weak field. Harris is one of the most left-liberal-voting senators in the US. She is as woke as folk, embraces every silliness of identity politics. She favours trillions of dollars of new taxes, supports the Green New Deal and carbon-neutral America, a recipe for national bankruptcy. She would end fracking, which now provides the lion’s share of US energy.

She likes to censor political opponents, demanding that Twitter prevent Donald Trump from publishing his tweets.

But for all that, relatively speaking, Harris is not a left-winger by the standards of the modern Democratic Party. Though she wants to take some money away from police forces, she is not, formally, a supporter of “defund the police”. (Neither is Biden, because defunding the police is literally insane.)

Already murder rates are rising in big cities such as New York and Chicago, while legitimate anti-racism protests have been converted into violent riots and looting in cities such as Portland and Seattle.

If the presidential race is close, and polls show a recent, slight improvement for Trump, law and order will be a huge factor.

Will Harris help Biden? Her mother was Indian, from Tamil Nadu; her father Jamaican. She is hailed as the first African-American vice-presidential candidate. Frankly, all this identity politics is becoming faintly ridiculous. There has been a woman presidential candidate – Hillary Clinton – and two women vice-presidential candidates – Sarah Palin and Geraldine Ferraro. And there has been a black president, Barack Obama. Given there are only two presidential tickets every four years, you have to get into quite a complicated exercise in so-called inter-sectionality to find your historic moment.

Biden could claim his by bragging about how he’s the oldest guy ever to run for president – if he’s elected he’ll be older on his first day than Ronald Reagan was on his last – but he doesn’t seem keen to go down that road.

Harris did not resonate all that well with black voters in the Democratic primaries, where she did remarkably poorly. This is partly because her African background has nothing to do with civil rights or slavery or even under privilege. But also because before becoming senator for California, she had been Californian attorney-general and before that San Francisco district attorney.

Because of her Indian heritage, she gets to call herself Asian-American as well as African-American, so she’s potentially a big winner in the Democrats’ identity politics intersectionality box-ticking exercise. But as a young candidate initially she identified only as “American”. In her campaign for DA she declared: “It is not progressive to be soft on crime.”

She ran against stereotypes about the politics of people of colour. As DA, and as attorney-general, she was a tough-on-crime sort of pollie, routinely seeking hard sentences, though always opposed to the death penalty.

All this helps Biden in two peculiar ways. First, Harris has an extremely mainstream past, which is reassuring to centrist and midwest voters. Secondly, the Trump forces can attack her for her contemporary left-of-centre positions, but cannot unearth a secret youthful radicalism, because if anything she was a secret youthful semi-conservative.

There is some evidence that having a black candidate in congressional elections lifts slightly the turnout of black voters. It’s very unclear whether having Harris on the ticket will do that for Biden. Although Biden is still a long way ahead in the polls, no one could really claim the verbally challenged septuagenarian generates vast positive enthusiasm. The only enthusiasm on the Democratic side comes from the idea of eradicating Trump. But negative enthusiasm is generally less effective at turning out the vote than positive enthusiasm. It’s not likely Harris will generate a vast amount of positive enthusiasm either but she probably answers the first imperative of such a choice: do no harm to the ticket.

Biden overnight has made it probably an even-money bet or better that Harris will herself one day become president. Biden is the bookies’ choice to win on November 3. More than half of American voters don’t believe Biden will make it through his whole first term as president. And if he does, he could hardly stand for a second term at 82. As his vice-president, Harris would start a hot favourite for the Democratic nomination in 2024.

That she was attorney-general of America’s biggest state means she has executive decision-making experience, unlike a lot of politicians. The same is true, at a much lower policy level, of her time as DA. Then, being elected senator shows serious electoral capabilities. She’s a professional politician unlikely to disgrace herself in debate or unduly frighten the voters.

Very few vice-presidential choices influence an election outcome, but some do. John F Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson in 1960 and this was influential in his winning Texas. Kennedy won that election against Richard Nixon by a razor-thin margin, so without Texas he would have lost.

Some choices are disastrous. In 1972 the Democratic nominee, George McGovern, chose senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate. When it was revealed Eagleton had been hospitalised for depression, and hadn’t told McGovern, he had to step down, and McGovern looked an incompetent fool.

George HW Bush chose Dan Quayle, who added nothing to the ticket. Bush won easily in 1988 but the gaffe-prone Quayle was a minor liability in the 1992 election, which Bush Sr lost to Bill Clinton. Clinton chose Al Gore, not to shore up a particular state or region, but to reinforce his central image as a moderate, mainstream, even mildly conservative (at the time) Democrat.

Incidentally, Harris’s malleable plasticity as to political conviction recalls Clinton and is not necessarily a bad quality. She is woke and liberal at the moment but in office could, like Clinton mid-term, pivot back to the centre. Wild-eyed ideologues, that is to say politicians of deep conviction, like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, are more intractable and potentially more dangerous.

Some vice-presidential choices have had little effect on elections but been hugely beneficial to the nation and the world. William McKinley choosing Teddy Roosevelt as veep in 1900, and Franklin Roosevelt bowing to the demands of the Democratic big-city machine to choose Harry Truman in 1944, were, it turned out, magnificent gifts to humanity.

It’s hard to see Harris in that light. But you never know.