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Presidencies in this polarized age are battles between coalitions that have clear contrasts on the major issues; you can say a lot without saying much.
In the end, the one thing you can’t lose as a politician is trust. It took Joe Biden about a month to learn that lesson and pass the torch to someone who has immediately, largely out of relief, earned that trust. Kamala Harris has raised roughly $100 million in small donations in her first day as a presidential candidate, along with the majority of delegates elected to the Democratic National Convention. She will be the nominee of the party with overwhelming consensus.
I have been a constituent of Harris’s for 13 years, from her service as attorney general and senator of my home state and now vice president. (I had just left San Francisco when she was elected district attorney.) Yet I can’t say I have a good sense of what she believes, what she really wants to do in public service, and how she wants to go about it.
I’m getting more of a sense. A speech at what is now her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, was refreshingly free of the indecision that ultimately led to the end of her 2020 presidential campaign, before the calendar flipped from 2019. She offered a fairly straightforward Democratic agenda grounded in economic opportunity and freedom, vowing to fight poverty and lower the costs of raising a family. “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said, rejecting the conservative mantra of tax cuts and corporate laissez-faire that “lead to inequity and economic injustice.” And she foregrounded the freedom of women to control their own bodies and of everyone to vote. “What kind of country do we want to live in?” she concluded. “Freedom, compassion and the rule of law? Or chaos, fear and hate?”
It was a well-distributed speech that hit most liberal domestic policy silos. But outside of promising to codify Roe v. Wade, the legislative initiative she has been leading as vice president all year long, it was indirect and detail-free.
Nobody is going to care about this, with 15 weeks until Election Day and Donald Trump still ahead in most polls. A unified party with a relatively uncontroversial statement of general principles is all the base needs to flood Harris’s campaign with the money and volunteers necessary to win.
But we haven’t known less about a candidate for president in pretty much any American’s personal memory. Other vice presidents thrust into the spotlight at least had their own political histories: Gerald Ford was House minority leader for nearly a decade, Lyndon Johnson was a well-known Senate leader, Harry Truman known for a high-profile investigation into war profiteering. More important, all three of them served as president before having to face voters, making decisions and implementing policy.
Harris had a career before vice president too. But it was marked by an extreme degree of caution, saving up political capital the way a Supreme Court nominee tries to avoid a paper trail. As attorney general, she largely went after sure things, and usually then in coalition. As senator, she was a solid questioner in hearings but she served entirely during the presidency of Donald Trump, where there wasn’t much room for a Democratic legislator. During her presidential campaign, her signature moment was confronting Joe Biden in a debate about busing, only to later acknowledge that she had the same position as Biden on the issue.
Maybe that was all saved up for this moment, where she has reached the pinnacle of politics and can now make decisions more freely. But we usually know more going in about someone who wants us to entrust them with the presidency. And the crumbs we’re left with point in all directions.
THE SCRAMBLE NOW TO UNDERSTAND how Harris would govern on things like climate, health care, and the economy consists mostly of nongovernmental organizations that want influence in the next administration making pleasing noises about her. It’s obvious what the NGOs are doing, and it sheds no light on the situation.
Picking through her campaign platform reveals a couple of interesting proposals—she was an early endorser of “march-in” rights to seize the patents of high-cost prescription drugs and hand them to third parties that would distribute them more affordably. (The Biden administration is slowly adopting that approach, but hasn’t marched in yet.) Her LIFT the Middle Class Act was a much larger Earned Income Tax Credit, offering up to $500 a month for families as a kind of basic income. But some of the record involves Harris saying she “is open to” or would “have the conversation” about something or other.
We haven’t known less about a candidate for president in pretty much any American’s personal memory.
Harris did some good things as attorney general, like putting Corinthian Colleges out of business (she was instrumental in getting student loans from those particular for-profit colleges canceled while vice president, too) and investigating Exxon’s climate deception. But when I look at the record I know the most about, I get nervous.
The fact that Harris still talks about “taking on big banks” during the foreclosure crisis and winning $20 billion for Californians while attorney general continues to irk me. I’ve written this a million times before, including at book length, but the National Mortgage Settlement is a moment of national shame, a second bank bailout when our political leaders failed to hold anyone accountable for the actions that triggered the Great Recession, and failed to get homeowners equitable relief.
Banks broke the chain of title on millions of mortgages and engaged in an industrial-scale fraud to fabricate documents enabling them to foreclose. Harris and her fellow state attorneys general (she was no worse than anyone else here) never investigated the misconduct, moving right to a settlement that allowed the banks to pay their penalty with other people’s money. The relief had three parts: $1,480 “sorry you lost your home” checks to foreclosure victims, a state fund that California and other states just stole to use for other priorities than housing, and consumer relief credits, which is the $20 billion Harris talks about. Around 70 percent of that figure was devoted to short sales that removed people from their homes, or canceling unrecoverable debt.
Harris put together a mortgage fraud “strike force” in 2011 that really didn’t prosecute anything except a handful of penny-ante foreclosure rescue scams. I broke the story about Harris’s office declining to prosecute future Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for “widespread misconduct” in foreclosure operations in California. I learned that she had to sign off on every facet of an investigation, creating bottlenecks that slowed action. Most of her triumphs were part of multistate investigations and settlements; going out on her own was rare.
FAST-FORWARD TO TODAY. The Democratic donor community that has traditionally been the most excited about a Harris candidacy is on Wall Street. Harris’s first chief economic adviser was Michael Pyle, a former investment strategist at BlackRock. As Politico notes, Harris alumni are littered across K Street, lobbying for Intel, Airbnb, Ford, Starbucks, T-Mobile, General Mills, Intuit, and many more. Part of this is because Harris has a lot of alumni due to staff turnover and this is mostly where people working in government go.
Among Harris’s early set of aides for the presidential run, Karen Dunn was added to her debate prep team; she also worked with Harris on debates in 2020. I don’t really care who is doing debate prep as long as Joe Biden’s worst-in-class debate team isn’t involved. But Dunn, a longtime corporate lawyer, is literally the lead trial counsel for Google right now in its Justice Department antitrust case over its advertising technology, a case that begins in six weeks.
Dunn is not the only Harris aide representing a company embroiled in legal action against the government in which Harris serves. Her campaign has asked Eric Holder to vet vice-presidential candidates. Holder had the most scandalous non-scandal in recent history when his current law firm, Covington & Burling, held open a corner office for him while he was serving as attorney general and negotiating with the law firm’s bank clients over fraud settlements. Covington & Burling is representing Amazon in its antitrust lawsuit with the Federal Trade Commission.
Harris’s brother-in-law, former Holder Justice Department official Tony West, is the chief legal officer of Uber and has been traveling with her on campaign trips; Uber is part of a coalition suing the Labor Department over its independent contractor classification rule. Several of Harris’s advisers, including strategists Sean Clegg and Ace Smith, are partners at a consulting firm that has done work for Uber, and the presidential campaign is trying to recruit David Plouffe, another former Uber executive, as a campaign adviser.
But in 2019, Harris backed AB 5, the bill in California that classified Uber and other gig workers as employees. (It was ultimately overturned by a ballot initiative.) If she was friendly to tech as a home-state senator, that doesn’t predetermine that she would follow suit as a national politician; just look at Joe Biden, the senator from MBNA. And if she was cozy with Wall Street because it represented an available pot of money needed to run for office, the $100 million haul from ordinary people in 24 hours could convince her that a grassroots effort would have more staying power and offer more ability to put forward her own policies based on her own convictions.
Which leaves us asking what those convictions are. The fact that there are reasons to believe that Harris would be more progressive than the current administration and more corporate than it suggests how she has left all options open throughout her political career, climbing the ladder by declining to fully define her interests. What will she prioritize? Where will she differ from her predecessor? What matters the most to her? What structural reforms will she pursue to reach those goals?
I don’t think this will be a particularly detail-heavy campaign, and most of the battle lines are already drawn. Presidencies in this polarized age are battles between coalitions that have clear contrasts on the major issues; you can say a lot without saying much. I’m willing to believe that Harris will mostly align with the policy architecture Joe Biden set up, which she advocated for the past four years. But it’s worth trying to gather more details because they do matter.
Some will say that this scrutiny threatens the unity needed to defeat Trump. One thing I think we all learned from the Biden situation over the last several weeks is that you can’t hide the truth from the public; that creates only anger and distrust. Kamala Harris has been spending her entire political career in waiting for this moment. We should be able to understand what we’ve been waiting for.
