Brendan Smialowski/Pool via AP
Vice President Kamala Harris arrives at Indianapolis International Airport earlier today.
As Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris displayed no priorities that were not those of the administration. Unlike activist vice presidents such as Al Gore or Hubert Humphrey, who were well-established political figures in their own right, there is no evidence of Harris promoting particular policies as a senior figure in Biden’s government. She was given impossible portfolios (fixing the root causes of Central American immigration) that she didn’t even want.
But she is not quite a cipher. What we have to go on are the themes of her notably unsuccessful 2019 presidential run, her priorities as a senator, and before that her rise to prominence in California as a local prosecutor and then as state attorney general.
Harris’s detractors say she is a pure opportunist, who doesn’t stand for much of anything. Republicans say she was one of the most left-wing of Democratic senators. Both claims are overstated.
The most genuine and revealing part of Harris’s early professional life was her decision, after heading the Black Law Students Association at Hastings Law School, to pursue a job as a prosecutor. It seemed to some an odd choice. Yet it appears to have been a principled one.
Based on her 2009 memoir Smart on Crime, Harris felt that she could combine a career locking up bad guys with criminal justice reform. She felt that Black communities bore the brunt of crime. Sometimes her actions seemed to contradict her own stated objectives. But her goals were far from contradictory or crazy. In terms of opportunism, working as a prosecutor was far from an obvious career ladder for an aspiring African American politician, though she did infuriate Bay Area liberals when she mounted her successful 2003 challenge to San Francisco’s reformist DA Terence Hallinan from the right.
Our former Prospect colleague Ezra Klein quotes some lines from Harris’s memoir: “Nothing is more important than how we choose to keep ourselves, our families and each other safe … Still driving me is the notion that safety is a fundamental civil right.”
Beyond Harris’s obvious campaign theme that Trump is exactly the sort of felon that she has extensive experience locking up, “safety as a civil right” is a terrific credo that links policing reform to health security to reproductive rights to clean air and water to safe schools and gun control—and to women’s safety from sexual predators like Donald Trump.
As a senator, she was a fairly conventional left-liberal, but not consistently so. While she took credit in her 2019 campaign ads for winning $18 billion for homeowners in a 2012 settlement with banks, the reality was not so pretty. There were holdouts for a much tougher settlement, and Harris had to be dragged along to get there with them. But the ultimate agreement was not much better than the initial offer, and was criticized in some quarters (including by David Dayen and me) as taking a dive for the banks.
To give Harris the benefit of the doubt, some politicians who display elements of opportunism in their early rise up the greasy pole of politics do turn out to be good presidents. Exhibits A and B are Lyndon Johnson … and one Joseph R. Biden.
Johnson started out as a Roosevelt progressive but got into bed with oil interests and segregationists. He won election to the Senate in a stolen election. As Senate majority leader in the 1950s, he did just about nothing to advance civil rights. But when he became president, he saw his opportunity to do something historic, and became the champion of completing the New Deal, as well as the partner of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in enacting three great civil rights acts.
Biden was a very conventional senator. He bungled some key challenges such as letting Clarence Thomas off the hook and facilitating his confirmation to the Supreme Court. He blew up his own campaign for the presidency in 1988 when he stole not only Neil Kinnock’s speech but his life story. (Kinnock’s grandfather really did work in the mines; Biden’s did not.)
To the surprise of one and all, when confronted with the risk of a deep recession in 2021, Biden became the most progressive president since the pre-Vietnam Lyndon Johnson. Both men, it turned out, had some deep principles and strength of character that allowed them to rise to the occasion that history offered. And both had presidencies that ended badly because of what some would term character flaws. Johnson was too insecure on foreign policy to overrule his generals, and Biden succumbed to a kind of pride that caused him to insist despite all evidence to the contrary that he was fit to win and serve out a second term.
Somewhere, deep in her being, does Harris have the strength of character and principle that will allow her to seize the moment and display a coherent narrative and program? There are glimmerings that suggest she does. Let’s hope so.
