DISTAFF OBAMA:
What the Right Gets Wrong About Kamala Harris (Jill Lawrence, Oct 08, 2024, The Bulwark)
No one can predict exactly what kind of president Harris would be, but she has shown many signs that it would be nothing like what these prematurely disappointed conservatives anticipate. Their judgments about her seem based largely on geography (she’s from San Francisco) and on her first run for the presidency five years ago—a ten-month presidential primary campaign in a field of nearly thirty major candidates.
When Harris entered the 2020 race on Martin Luther King Day, January 21, 2019, the New York Times reported that liberals were skeptical about her. She ended her bid in December of that year. “Sen. Kamala Harris of California never settled on an overarching narrative and rationale for her candidacy that encompassed her life, her record and her plans. And she mismanaged her campaign,” I wrote in a March 2020 assessment of the many dropouts.
As a career prosecutor, gun owner and “top cop” of the nation’s largest state, Harris could have tried to carve out a moderate lane. Instead, she competed for progressive votes against a crush of progressive hopefuls, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, former Reps. Beto O’Rourke and Tulsi Gabbard, then-Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, and former housing secretary Julián Castro.
Fair or unfair, both the right and the left judge her by the climate, energy, and health care positions she took in 2019—positions she left behind a few months later when she became Joe Biden’s running mate. Since then, she’s been what I’d call a solidly center-left politician, by all appearances very much like Biden in her policy preferences and her openness to bipartisan compromise.
Is she a socialist, or even a progressive? Not even close. She calls herself a capitalist, she’s courting Wall Street, and she would increase the $5,000 tax deduction for business startups to $50,000. She has welcomed support from Republicans like Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, the former defense secretary and vice president, and has said she’d put a Republican in her cabinet. Harris has also pledged to make sure that “America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” (a convention speech line that some in her family did not appear to love).