I got my first boo and hiss of the campaign season by wading into matters of race and gender. I was on a US election panel in Melbourne. There is a vocabulary for speaking about the first woman of colour to be this close to the presidency that progressives enforce – without quite knowing how.
Because even the left has a hard time assessing Kamala Harris. When Hillary Clinton ran to smash “the glass ceiling”, Democrats embraced the obligation this imposed on voters. To not support this gender equality goal was deplorable. When this backfired, they blamed misogyny. If Harris loses to Trump, they will add racism.
Harris has taken the opposite lesson from Clinton’s botched 2016 campaign: keep shtum on identity politics; don’t alienate men (especially black men) who are sceptical of Harris’s rise. This has denied the Democrats a lazy and ineffective campaign riff and weakened GOP objections to her that she is a DEI hire.
The left doesn’t know whether to defend Harris as a diversity, equity and inclusion candidate or to condemn Republicans who make this claim. President Joe Biden explicitly made gender the basis of his vice-presidential choice in 2020. He added race when he needed African-American delegates (in South Carolina especially) to secure his nomination.
Kemi Badenoch offers a fascinating comparison with Kamala Harris. The British MP of Nigerian heritage is one of the remaining two candidates running to be the next Conservative Party leader. Her world view is chalk and cheese with Harris. But both are campaigning by muting identity politics. Hillary Clinton’s “I’m a woman. Hear me roar!” schtick turned off as many voters as it won over. Harris is not repeating it.
This is a good thing. The first woman of colour to run for president wants race and gender to matter less and her Americanness to matter more. Did you see the profusion of Stars and Stripes at her coronation in Chicago? This is in contradistinction with much of her base, which has deified identity while often disparaging nationalism – and not realised much electoral advantage by doing so.
By de-woking her campaign, Harris reveals a fundamental pragmatism that may be enough to get her elected. More people are about to vote for Harris than for any leader in American history. Perhaps we have underestimated her? If she is the out-of-her-depth diversity hire, the caricature Trumpers over-rely on, why is she within a whisker of becoming America’s 47th president?
The speed of her transition from failing VP to the great Democratic hope hasn’t allowed us time to review her considerable strengths. I’ve argued in these pages, before Biden withdrew from the campaign, that even her own side ignored what these strengths were.
What are her strengths?
The first strength is construed too often as a weakness: her navigation of deep blue California politics. The Harris-as-weak argument sees her rise in San Francisco as deficient in political combat, that she was not battle-tested because she has spent a career mixing almost exclusively with her own side.
This narrative avoids a perennial truth of most politics: that your greatest enemies are behind you. Ask Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. Hatred within camps is often more intense, because of familiarity. Harris learned, and learned quickly, by several accounts, how to play a brutal, internecine type of politics.
There are some big beasts in modern California politics: Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Dianne Feinstein. None of them got near the presidency; Harris is on the cusp of it. Okay, we can put some of this down to luck. But surely her elevation speaks much more to her political skills? She parlayed city then statewide power into the vice-presidency of the United States.
Her widely accepted failure as VP was not so great that she didn’t replace Joe Biden as her party’s nominee. Allies and opponents, by this measure, have consistently underestimated her. Her cackling and vapidity disguise not an idiot but an effective, even ruthless, political operator. She has raised a ton of cash and has a much better ground campaign than her opponent. Isn’t that the kind of president America needs?
Second, she has mostly succeeded in making race and gender matter less. This has made her targeting by an avowedly anti-woke MAGA campaign much harder. Trump did himself no favours by cack-handedly questioning Harris’s racial self-identification. Let the GOP fixate on race and gender, while Democrats can get on with competent government. There is irony in this. Harris has exploited the irony.
Harris has outsourced to Barack Obama the usual racial hectoring we hear from the left. His chastising of black men wavering in their support backfired – but on him, less on her.
Third, she has the remarkable capacity of getting people to invest in her success. According to conservative Jim Geraghty in National Review, “At every key moment in her career until her presidential campaign, Harris has had bigger, wealthier, more powerful, and more influential names sizing her up and concluding she was the one”. Why would an apparent mediocrity, raised in the warm bosom of coastal progressive politics, command such a loyalty? The unavoidable answer is that this is a caricature. Harris has played a long-term political game – and won. And she is days away from possibly being elected leader of the free world.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
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