Vice President Kamala Harris running for or becoming president is the single worst thing that could happen to the United States – if you believe Donald Trump. Just last week Trump criticized her poor performance in the 2019 Democratic primaries and accused her of covering up President Joe Biden’s health issues. He’s even been test-running insulting new nicknames for her, including “Cackling Copilot” and “Laffin’ Kamala Harris.” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, recently characterized Harris as “the worst vice president in history.” Former Republican candidate for president
Nikki Haley has said that the idea of Harris becoming president “should send chills up everyone’s spine.” Even Democrats have questioned Harris’ abilities. An unnamed Michigan Democrat quoted in a February New Yorker article cited her disastrous 2019 campaign and lack of campaigning skills. In January 2023, when asked about Harris remaining as VP when Biden ran again, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) was lukewarm about Harris just moments after enthusiastically supporting Biden. Early in Biden’s presidency, in November 2021, criticism of Harris from Republicans was bad enough that the White House press secretary issued a statement calling Harris “a vital partner” and “a bold leader.” One can chalk up much of the commentary to racism or sexism or both. Republican language about Harris echoes the way they talk about former first lady Michelle Obama, painting Black women as threats, but never enumerating how or whom they threaten. A New York Post contributor last week called Harris the most “fatuous” politician in America, saying Biden only chose her as a running mate because she was a Black woman, and concluded we “may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president.” A recent academic study found that racism and sexism tainted evaluations of Harris; former President Barack Obama Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced similar bias. But when The Atlantic runs a long magazine article asserting that few people think she’s ready to be president, what is going on?
In many ways, Harris is a classic American success story. The daughter of immigrants, Harris attended Howard University, one of the country’s top schools. She was first elected district attorney for San Francisco in 2003, and after a successful run, was elected to statewide office as attorney general of California in 2010. In 2016, she was elected a U.S. senator from California. She has gone from strength to strength and won a number of elections. In 2020, after an albeit unsuccessful run for the presidency, she joined Biden as the nominee for vice president. In November, they won, and she became the first woman, first African American and first Indian American to hold that office. So what, exactly, is so bad about Kamala Harris? Is there some long, horrible list of terrible things she has done? The short answer is no. Has she made some gaffes as vice president? Sure, she repeats herself on occasion, has some odd vocal mannerisms, laughs awkwardly and sometimes delivers rambling “word salads.” Evidently Harris complained that she felt belittled by the Vogue magazine cover photo that depicted her in jeans and sneakers. That’s hardly the stuff of scandal. There is not a politician alive (or dead, for that matter) who hasn’t said something the wrong way or said something that was just plain wrong. Is Harris worse than, say, Biden, a famed gaffe machine, who nevertheless managed to get elected to office again and again for more than 50 years?
Many of the criticisms of Harris seem to be more about her political agenda. When Harris said rural Americans might not be able to photocopy their IDs to vote at polling stations, pundits jumped on her for saying that rural areas don’t have easy access to copy shops. Was she out-of-touch – or merely pushing back against barriers created by restrictive voter ID laws? Other criticisms of Harris seem more like policing behavior. She was condemned for laughing nervously at a press conference when asked whether the U.S. would accept more Ukrainian refugees. It is difficult to see this as disqualifying her from being president. So if she hasn’t done anything terrible over the past couple of years, you might think the issue is that she simply hasn’t done anything much at all. This is not the case. Historically, being vice president was a pretty thankless, do-nothing job. The role was not clearly defined in the Constitution. The voters’ perception was that the VP was nothing more than the guy standing by in case something happened to the president. Walter Mondale ushered in a whole new model of the modern vice presidency under Jimmy Carter, actively participating in meetings and policymaking. Since then, Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden all expanded the role greatly. Harris fits the mold of the modern VP and has been active on a number of fronts in policymaking and advocacy, though the president has assigned her some particularly thorny and hot-button issues. She tackled the immigration challenge convincingly by working on addressing long-term problems in Mexico and Guatemala through a “root causes” approach, focusing on improving economic and social conditions in Central America to make it more attractive to stay in one’s home country rather than emigrating. Unfortunately for Harris, the recent influx of migrants has come more from Caribbean-facing states, including Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela. One might fault Harris for not being able to predict immigration patterns, but she was able to find funding for her initial plan before it was scuttled. This shows a willingness to propose concrete policy solutions, a vanishingly rare trait in politics these days.
She has also proved herself a capable representative of the United States overseas. At the Munich Security Conference in February, she reassured European allies of U.S. support for Ukraine, even as Congress was in a pitched battle over the aid package. She has also been active on the domestic policy front as well. Harris did a lot of work on voting rights reform, only to see it fall apart when key members of her own party defected to a watered-down bill. It is hard to fault her for this kind of party breakdown; after all, as VP, she isn’t the head of the party. Harris has also been vocal about abortion, driving home that it was Trump, through his Supreme Court appointees, who has rolled back women’s reproductive rights. The Democratic Party has leaned into the abortion issue, which became a rallying cry for voters in Virginia and Ohio in 2023. Harris’ kryptonite seems to be her polling so far. She has been criticized as an ineffective campaigner who had trouble with messaging and difficulty with her staff. For the last couple of years, she has consistently had negative approval ratings, with nearly 50% disapproval in polls aggregated as of July
10. But here’s the thing: Kamala may have fumbled her campaign in 2019, but she has led other very successful campaigns for district attorney, attorney general and U.S. Senate. Recent polling shows Harris beating Trump by one point in a general election if she were to replace Biden on the ticket. There is a lot to recommend Harris if people would pay attention to what she does, not how she laughs or if she gaffes. She’s run successful political campaigns, tackled tough issues and supported tentpole Democratic party positions. Skeptics keep asking if she is ready for a prime-time presidential campaign. A better question might be: Is Biden ready to give her the chance? David Richards is an associate professor and chair of the Political Science program and International Relations & Security Studies program at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia.
Source: usnews.com
