Enthusiasm for Harris is greater than the sum of its parts
Eleven weeks to go….
Enthusiasm for Kamala Harris goes beyond the supposition that she has a better chance than President Biden of defeating Donald Trump. It certainly does not rest purely on excitement about having a female candidate of color. Nor does it wholly stand on a hope that certain left-of-center policies will be pursued if Harris wins. The enthusiasm contains these elements, but it transcends them.
The new-found excitement that has emerged with Harris’s candidacy arises from the sense that the current malaise in American politics is being subjected to a tectonic shift. Kamala Harris offers us a reset.
I am one of those who believe that Donald Trump spells danger for America. This does not mean that I don’t understand some of the aspirations of those who have said they will vote for him. He has managed to captivate millions of Americans whose sincerely held values fall in the right-of-center column. Freedom of choice is the essence of democracy, and I respect the right of people to hold opinions, and vote for policies, that do not align with my personally held values.
But a core value in this country, set by George Washington in 1797 and observed ever since, is that the President walks away from his post when that President’s time is over. Donald Trump blatantly rejected this principle when he tried to influence his party to resist certifying a fair election in January 2021, when he refused to use his position to halt the January 6, 2021 storming of the capital, and when he declared, as he has a number of times, he will not accept an election result in November 2024 unless he is declared the winner. Donald Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensburger on January 2, 2021 pressuring him to reverse Georgia’s election results, and the efforts of a number of Republican state legislators to appoint alternative Electors to tip the Electoral College vote, openly defy the norms of democracy. That the Republican party leadership of old has allowed this state of affairs to proceed with minimal protest is mystifying and frightening.
New York Times columnist David French describes our current Republican party as a party that has removed all considerations of character from qualifications for leadership, that tolerates overt lying, that publicly encourages and applauds violence, and that has treated sexual abuse and adultery as irrelevant to the law and the perpetrator’s capacity to lead.
This nihilist brand of politics has created a sour mood in our country. Civility is rarer as a result. Oppositional behavior is pervasive. This is not the tone we want from our leadership in a moment when climate change, war, and global migration cast a shadow over our world. We are responsive to Harris because she is changing the tone of the discourse. She is calling things as she sees them and projecting an optimism that feels like an antidote to the strange politics of the past eight years.
So, yes, I would like to use my vote to assert values that are different from Donald Trump’s. I believe Kamala Harris will bring a competent and refreshing presence to the White House and to American politics. For those who say she shows few signs of promise that qualify her to hold the highest office in the land, I beg to differ.
Harris’s twenty-year career as a California prosecutor, which led to her election in 2010 as Attorney General of California, the world’s fifth largest economy, is impressive. There are plenty of instances we could cite of her adept capacity to perform that job. Shortly after becoming Attorney-General, she made an impact right away by pulling out of a potential settlement of an improper mortgage practices case with the country’s five largest financial institutions. In 2012 she settled that case with a $20 million payout, five times the original payout figure proposed. This and other cases suggest a high level of professional confidence, capability, and judgment.
Her four years in the US Senate – 2017-2021 – as only the second African American woman to be elected to the Senate, gave her experience of the federal legislative system. Following those four years she had four years as Vice President of the United States.
This accumulation of experience is a great deal more than Barack Obama had when he was elected in 2008. Obama also had had four years in the US Senate, but his additional work experience as community organizer, Senior Lecturer in law at the University of Chicago, and Illinois State Legislator does not add up to as impressive a resume.
It is true that Harris did not seem well attuned when she entered the presidential campaign fray in 2019. She adopted far-left positions, some of which she has backed away from. Her “tough on crime” stance as a prosecutor did not match well with the nation’s George Floyd moment when police brutality was exposed. She struggled to find self-confidence. She was, unmistakably, a DEI candidate when Joe Biden chose her as his running mate. After their election, the Biden administration was not helpful to her in finding tasks that would show off her skills. But she has been unfairly accused by her adversaries of having failed in achieving reform of US immigration policies on the southern border, for, in fact, she was never tasked with being an “immigration czar.” Her task – hardly less difficult – was to enhance relationships with the countries south of the border from which immigrants have been coming, and work with them to stem the tide.
People’s uncertainty about Harris made Democratic Party insiders slow to act to remove Biden as an option for the 2024 election. But the enthusiasm for Harris, born on July 21, 2024, arose because we saw that she had found her footing. She was ready and convincing in the moment of crisis. Commented Tressie McMillan Cottom in the New York Times, “Kamala Harris is a different candidate than we saw four years ago. She is even a different rhetorician than we saw six months ago.”
Now, the question is, whether she can sustain this under national scrutiny during the Democratic Convention which begins day after tomorrow in Chicago.