Is this a new Kamala Harris running against Donald Trump or she still the political flop of 2020?
Kamala Harris must wonder whether she has been given a poisoned chalice or the opportunity of a lifetime.
It is only because of an epic and farcical misjudgment by the Democratic machine – by her boss Joe Biden, his family, White House aides and Democrat leaders – that she suddenly finds herself as frontrunner to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
The inability of Biden to have a better awareness of his cognitive decline, and the refusal of his acolytes to tell their Caesar the harsh truth before it was too late has either damned or blessed Harris.
It was only when he refused to go that Democrat leaders who promoted the notion he was fit enough for a second term – Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer – unsheathed their sword and stabbed him in the back.
This whole spectacle has, assuming she wins her party’s nomination, as seems likely, given Harris just over three months to unite her party, sell a vision for the US and defeat a cashed-up, experienced and ascendant Donald Trump.
Defeating Trump now, given he is riding high after his near-assassination and the lovefest of the Republican National Convention, would have been a tall order for any candidate who was chosen through the normal Democratic primary protest.
For Harris to be catapulted into the position without being prepared and with so little time could easily be a poisoned chalice.
If she loses, she will be blamed regardless of the bizarre circumstances of her conscription and she will not get a second shot in 2028.
To win the nomination, Harris may first have to contest a rapid-fire “open contest” with several other candidates, although two key ones, Californian Governor Gavin Newsom and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, have already endorsed her, further cementing her as a clear favourite.
The big question is what sort of candidate would Harris be?
No one knows for sure, but Democrats say she needs to have improved markedly if she is to be a viable candidate on the national stage. It is often forgotten that before Biden chose her to be Vice-President, her presidential ambitions were in tatters. She entered the 2020 presidential race with enormous positive publicity and seemed destined to be a favourite in that contest, which was eventually won by Mr Biden.
The daughter of Indian and Jamaican parents, Harris became a senator from California in 2016 and was only the second black woman to join the upper chamber.
She had a compelling story: being raised by a single mother who immigrated from India, she became the first woman to serve as California’s attorney-general.
During her time in the Senate, she made her name with aggressive questioning of conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh during his contentious confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court. But her bid for president in 2019 was disastrous. Harris struggled to explain her platform and her staff was in chaos, with a revolving door of advisers coming and going.
She never took off in the polls and eventually she dropped out in late 2019, even before the first primary was conducted.
As Vice-President, Harris also started badly. To her annoyance, Biden tasked her with stemming migration across the southern border from Central American countries, a role that quickly saw Republicans attack her as the “border tsar”.
Border control has been an abject failure under Biden’s presidency and, fairly or otherwise, Harris was tarred with much of that failure and for the first two years of her vice-presidency she saw a raft of unfavourable articles about her performance.
The turning point for her came with the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision striking down abortion rights. Biden, a Catholic, was happy to let Harris take the lead on an issue that is a vote-winner for the Democrats.
Harris has been effective in highlighting the fact that the hard line Republican policies on abortion are to the right of mainstream American public opinion, including that of many Republican women. She has made abortion rights a centrepiece of the Democrat campaign and polls show it is a winner for them.
Democrats who know Harris say she has learned from the failures of her last presidential campaign and she will be a more polished and formidable candidate this time around. The biggest advantage she will have is the fact that at 59, compared with Trump’s 77, she represents the generational chance so many Americans say they have been seeking.
Some 70 per cent said they did not want another Biden-Trump match-up and now they have got their wish. Whether the Harris Mark II of 2024 is really a much better campaigner than the one in 2019 remains to be seen.
But it is the dysfunction in her own party that has given her this potential opportunity.
She will soon learn whether it is also a poisoned chalice.
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