Politicians of any stripe in any country – even those who the media deem to be “overnight sensations” – have tended to follow a tried and through path up the proverbial greasy pole. Favours are traded, obligations are owed, backs are slapped, and quid pro quos are as essential to progress towards high office as air is to breathe.
Yet for this topsy-turvy, almost surreal political season – far beyond even the wildest fiction of any novel or Netflix season -- the old rule that the pol picks up important debts to certain constituencies and VIPs on their rise doesn’t seem to apply the same way to Vice President Kamala Harris. Indeed, this lack of ties and its consequence of being potentially beholden to individuals or interest groups is one of the most unusual features Harris’ ascendancy and for now provided her with several advantages.
Thundering out of the lovefest that was the Democratic party convention in Chicago, Harris has built as wide a coalition as any nominee in recent history, though we will not know if its width actually has enough depth to take her to the Oval Office. Practically everyone , every constituency and special interest has claimed her as their own, with arguably the exception of President Joe Biden’s immediate family and a few of his more begruntled staffers. The manner of her rise to power — the replacement of the well-meaning octogenarian incumbent, the lack of a long, drawn-out contested primary, the party’s single-minded obsession with beating former President Donald Trump, the coming together of Democratic back and front room powers around her candidacy in barely 48 hours— means that no single person or agglomeration can claim to have been responsible for bringing her to this point.
What does it mean to owe so few debts? One can design a convention, like the one in Chicago, with little of the identity politics or Gaza passions (and Democrats have mastered this self-defeating ‘art’) that tore up one’s side for years. One can stay ambiguous on policy prescriptions when one want to — no one’s in any position to deny her a check or an endorsement in exchange for a promise to adopt this or cancel that. One has the freedom to tack as one wishes: hence the new centrist, strong-on-crime, strong-on-defense, strong-on-business Harris who, before this summer, didn’t show any of those beliefs strongly to the nation.
Most magically of all: she has somehow managed to come across looking like the newcomer, the challenger. The other guy, in a trick like none seen before, went from beating the aging, occasionally hapless-appearing incumbent in Biden to finding himself as the aging occasionally hapless-appearing incumbent.
The Harris campaign has mere weeks to play out this strategy against Trump, who in his own way is the most formidable politician of the last decade, a veritable master of dodging, bobbing and outright obfuscation who, always defying classification.
The party is so relieved to get a candidate who has a hope to win this exceedingly close race that no one inside the camp seems to mind that she is actually hard to pin down on many issues. In fact, those who gushed over all the centrist policies and the absence of familiar lefty dog whistles point out that Bill Clinton or even John McCain could have given that nomination speech. Defense hawks loved her use of “lethal” to describe the importance of American military power. The leftists respected the patriotism of the immigrants’ child. A tech entrepreneur was sure she was the first presidential nominee to invoke the word “founders” and AI and tech. Her call for an “opportunity economy” sounded vague enough to satisfy everyone.
Every now and then American politics brings to the fore those that seem like walking, living, breathing Rorschach tests – a figure so opaque voters view them through their own particular lens and project their hopes upon the. Pierre Trudeau in 1968, Tony Blair in 1997, Barack Obama in 2008 were all examples of this phenomenon.
While Harris does have deep links to California and Hollywood/Silicon Valley political money, many top Democratic donors don’t actually know her well. Before she got the nod, people worried she might have a hard time raising money for an presidential bid in 2028. Of necessity, she and her campaign have had to spend the last few weeks on reaching out to the establishment donor and policy classes and it’s obvious that Harris and Second gentleman Doug Emhoff are still getting used to a stage as big as the presidential politics arena.
The past month’s geyser of donations washed away any concerns about her ability to collect money — and she didn’t have to provide too many specifics on her positions and governing strategy. As the “alternative” without much definition, Harris raised more ($520 million) faster than anyone ever. In fact, she did it by raising money from more donors in 10 days than Joe Biden managed to in 15 months of campaigning.
In a sense this process of gentle political regicide played out so quickly, and so late in the election cycle, that the usual long-winded, often brutal nomination process could cause Harris to end up in the White House with far fewer IOUs than her predecessors as she essentially managed to short-circuit the primaries.
Like the man whose electoral success Harris so wishes to emulate, Barack Obama once wrote, “I serve as the blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” The line from Obama to Harris was the leitmotif of the Chicago convention. The comparisons of historic candidacies of the first African-American to first woman, who is also of mixed race, are obvious. His electrifying appearance, backed up by a fiery speech from wife Michele, was a not-so-subtle attempt to link the her candidacy with his era, right down to the hopey-changey messaging.
But the differences are equally telling too. In 2008, Obama was the outsider insurgent whose personal story and world views were well defined by his own telling of them in best-selling books and an epic primary fight against Hillary Clinton. He had to carve out a niche to Clinton’s left, defining himself with certain policies (opposition to the Iraq war, a pledge to negotiate with Iran, sweeping health-care reform) that quickly became fodder for general-election attacks from John McCain, his GOP rival. For her part, Harris is – remarkably -- the insider who is far less defined than Obama was at this point 16 years ago. Yes, she is part of the Biden administration, and for the past three-plus years she was sent out to reinforce relationships with the party base that helped her get the nod this summer without any challengers. But she is also largely free to craft her own agenda, unencumbered by the kinds of commitments to special interests that accrue during a primary fight.
If Democrats could project both their hopes of national redemption and a post-racial society on Obama, what’s projected on Harris is the fervent, almost fanatical, desire to keep Trump from regaining the presidency. 2008 for the Democrats was about their guy, this year it’s about the other guy.
The short, European-election-style dash to November 5th will see Harris try to continue to run the outsider race. Trump will, on the occasions where he elects to shy away from outrageous statements and accusations, try to force her to own the Biden record and put out specifics which he and the GOP can then attack. His campaign wants more policy-specific speeches like Harris gave before the convention on the economy and price controls; that’s when Trump’s “Comrade Kamala” nickname started to stick. Her first televised interview, done jointly with her vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, offered no similarly prime targets. But she has a tendency to devolve into word salads and drone on when she doesn’t have much to say, which is a vulnerability and plays into the image of a certain vacuousness which might conceivably be damaging if exposed to more examination. But there are no signs of her abandoning the course of opacity as she has been successful this summer when she manages to sound somehow both crisp and vague.
There’s more upside for her in staying unowned and loosely defined for the duration of the race. Then, if she does indeed win, her lack of a specific mandate may reignite Democratic factionalism and make for a messy start to a Harris term. She may find that everyone will then have a claim on her time and allegiance.
And the American people will still have no idea what she stands for.
Comments