‘Wokester-in-chief’? Democrats need to reimagine Kamala Harris

US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at South Carolina State University.

America’s most popular woman is in Australia. One of its least popular is contemplating how to become the next US president. While Taylor Swift spreads her special kind of cultural imperialism, Kamala Harris is being positioned to take over the American empire. Let me explain.

Last week, Robert Hur, a special counsel appointed by the Democratic administration to investigate Joe Biden’s garage of classified documents, predicted that “at trial, Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

This formal assessment of the liabilities his age poses has generated a dilemma for Democrats. He will not get younger between now and November 5. Hoping cognitive decline will reverse itself is delusional. And yet the entire strategy of his party is built on Biden being the only candidate less bad than Donald Trump – as he was in 2020. Biden is both unsuitable and irreplaceable.

Taylor Swift

Making this contradiction operable has become impossible. While Democrats have pinned their hopes on fighting a legally wounded but still nominated Trump, their strategy has been undone by their own candidate’s exoneration from charges strikingly like those Trump still faces: the illegal hoarding of top-secret documents at his private residence.

Democrats are beginning to openly question their electoral strategy. This is reversing their scepticism toward Biden’s diversity hire: Kamala Harris. There are at least two plausible ways in which she could be the next president of the US: by default and by assertive choice.

First, Biden could step aside (or worse) between now and November. The US constitution would then pass the presidency to Harris – at least until January 2025. This scenario has hung over US politics since Biden made Harris his running mate. Death or incapacitation of the sitting president would hand the office to his VP.

This has happened eight times in American history: William Henry Harrison to John Tyler (1841), Zachary Taylor to Millard Fillmore (1850), Abraham Lincoln to Andrew Johnson (1865), James Garfield to Chester Arthur (1881), William McKinley to Theodore Roosevelt (1901), Warren Harding to Calvin Coolidge (1923), Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman (1945), and John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson (1963).

Biden is already older than all these men. But there is a more positive scenario Democrats are beginning to contemplate: allow Biden to quit and then embrace Harris’s prospects. Make a virtue of her idiosyncrasies. Her malapropisms, inanities and unwillingness to master detail – half of YouTube is dedicated to them – would be potentially offset by her age (only 59), giving her time to improve.

Her party needs to remind us that these faults, of style and substance, are not much worse than any number of other presidents. Remember Bushisms or the occupation of Baghdad?

She is also only marginally behind Trump in approval ratings (he at 42 per cent, she 39). That is margin-of-error territory.

Trump says crazy stuff even more than does Harris. This was not a barrier to Trump – he sounds like so many of his voters – so why should it be for Harris? Plus, because Biden has set the bar so low for presidential communication, a better-drilled Harris could pass it. The Trump-Biden era will not be remembered as a high tide of US political rhetoric. Harris would arguably be no worse and, with age on her side, could improve her bully pulpit performance.

Clever Democrats should reimagine Harris not as a wokester-in-chief, but as tough and streetwise. As California’s attorney-general she was undeniably tough on crime, earning liberal criticisms for her draconian prosecutions of offenders.

A new narrative around this would dispel the caricature of Democrats as too progressive on law and order. A second-generation immigrant – her mother and father emigrated to America from India and Jamaica, respectively – Harris understands how important strong policing is.

African-Americans who have edged toward Trump for his pro-policing stance would begin to edge back. Her pro-choice position, if she could present it more reasonably and rationally – and less ideologically – would appeal to those independents wary of a perceived Republican “war on women”. Another Democratic electoral asset in November.

Republicans would, of course, have a field day. They have just, somewhat chaotically, impeached the official who, they charge, stoked the crisis on the southern border: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

US President-elect Joe Biden (R) and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris (2nd L) react as confetti falls.

They would extend this campaign to include the woman first handed responsibility for the US-Mexican border in 2021. Harris’s ineptitude in handling – or even visiting – the scene of this unfolding disaster would feature in GOP ads, alongside endless reruns of her bizarre speechifying.

But the whole impeachment effort has compounded the Republicans’ reputation for chaos in defence of extremism. Harris, alternatively, could command a Democrat consensus in pursuit of American common sense.

Finally, she might channel better the Obama effect. Barack Obama prospered by giving American voters a way of feeling good about race in America. How Harris got the vice-presidency – Biden’s bowing to identity politics – need not hamper the positive story of race she represents. She needs to tell that story better.

I get it. Her party may be beyond this advice and Harris beyond repackaging. Biden may already have decided to go and allow for a brokered convention in August. Harris would struggle to be nominated via this route. But American politics is the art of the elastic. The US prizes transformations like few other systems. Assuming Taylor Swift cannot be persuaded to run, the first female president could still be Kamala Harris.