Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Kamala Harris, pictured in January 2020, is now the third-ever woman to run for vice president on a major-party ticket.
Well, she’s no John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s first veep, who was a racist conservative Texan. The question is whether she in any way resembles the next Texan who popped up on a Democratic ticket, Lyndon Johnson. When John Kennedy announced he was picking the Texas senator at the 1960 Democratic Convention, liberals like the UAW’s Walter Reuther, some of Adlai Stevenson’s progressive diehards, and the handful of Blacks who were delegates howled. None of them, and virtually nobody else, predicted that Johnson would morph into the only genuine progressive on domestic policy to occupy the White House since FDR. (Foreign policy was another matter.)
Kamala Harris, whom Joe Biden anointed as his running mate Tuesday afternoon, is a sharp political operator, but if she has any of LBJ’s political genius, which enabled him to respond to the civil rights and liberal movements of his time by crafting nation-changing laws, it’s not yet in evidence. Like Joe Biden, she’s gone with the flow. As San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general, she did what Democratic DAs and AGs customarily did in those times: Promote legal policies that were generally progressive on environmental and equal-rights issues, and that were “hard on crime,” even as California had more people in prisons than the great majority of nations. That was the accepted formula for political advancement, and Harris was no slouch when it came to understanding and implementing that formula.
She also was no slouch when it came to the traditional Democratic balancing act between business and labor. Harris is pro-union, of course; but she’s also, like any establishment Democrat from Northern California, personally close to Big Tech (her brother-in-law was Uber’s general counsel) and reliant on its financial contributions. She’s nobody’s populist, either in the bad sense of the word or the good.
But, again like Biden, she’s a political animal who understands that the nation, and the Democratic Party in particular, has moved left, and that the policies of a Biden administration, therefore, have to be more progressive than those of Clinton and Obama. How much more progressive, particularly as concerns the balance between capital and labor, we don’t really know.
In short, one reason Biden picked her is that, like him, she occupies the current mushy center of the Democratic Party. And for that reason, he likely reasoned, she’s not likely to harm his prospects all that much. The Republicans will attack her for being a woman (right), Black (right), godless (who knows?), and a socialist (not), but those attacks won’t play that well outside of Donald Trump’s pre-existing base.
The other two African American women who were high on his list both posed higher risks. Susan Rice personified the Obama foreign-policy establishment, but so did Biden, and as a candidate with no background whatever in domestic, economic, or racial issues, she posed too great a risk once she got on the stump (not to mention in the Oval Office). Karen Bass might have encouraged more young Blacks to turn out to vote, as her record as a cross-racial movement leader for social justice is virtually unmatched in American politics, but her years in and around radical organizations made her too great a risk, too.
Of all the possible veepsters, Elizabeth Warren stood out as the one who could clearly assume the mantle of the presidency on Day One if something happened to Biden, but she’s not African American. Her selection might also have reduced Biden’s Wall Street funding to a trickle. On the other hand, she and Bass were the two possibilities who might have persuaded a few more progressives to come to the polls, and a greater number of progressives not just to vote for the ticket but to work for it.
Of course, if Biden wants to have a truly progressive presidency, he can always appoint Warren to run the Treasury. For that matter, should the ticket win, California Gov. Gavin Newsom could appoint Bass to Harris’s Senate seat: Her radical past should pose no obstacles to California’s electorate. The list of potential appointees and candidates for that Senate seat rivals the number of currently sitting U.S. senators, though as ever in California, the establishment will try to anoint a field-clearing candidate, as they did with Newson for governor and … Kamala Harris for Senate in 2016.
All in all, looking at the alternatives presented to him, Biden probably concluded that Harris posed the smallest electoral risk. The triumph of Harris, really, is a triumph of positioning—she was the right pol in the right place at the right time. Let it be said that she’s a really good debater who should give Mike Pence the willies, and that she’s smart and malleable when pushed. And that progressives prevail only when they push malleable pols.
