Kamala Harris’s ascension to the Democratic nomination happened so quickly that one could have been forgiven for blinking and missing it. One moment, President Biden was insisting that only the Lord Almighty could remove him from his role as the candidate; the next, Kamala Harris had sewn it up. The King is Dead. Long live the Queen! Three cheers for continuity.
For the Democrats, the overwhelming emotion was relief. Relief, and then euphoria. Since the disastrous debate of June 27, the party had been on an emotional roller coaster. At first it experienced an untrammeled panic, which led to resignation, and then to resolve, and then, eventually, to Joe Biden succumbing to the pressure and standing ignominiously aside. Through the translucent pages of the newspaper, one could almost see the joy.
Soon, though, the Democrats will be brought back to earth. If we may borrow a phrase that was popularized during the Trump administration: This is “not normal.” In the space of just four weeks, we have seen a president embarrass himself on live television, a former president come within an inch of being murdered at a rally, the desperate removal of a presumptive nominee, and more. One of the peculiar side effects of interesting times is the sudden suspicion that anything is possible. It’s not, though.
That rule also applies to Kamala Harris. Undoubtedly, Harris will fare better than a moribund octogenarian. But that does not make her George Washington. On the contrary: Harris is still a representative of the most unpopular administration in modern history; she is still more disliked than any vice president since polling began; and she is still a California progressive whose voting record in the Senate was to the left of Bernie Sanders. In 2019, when she ran for the presidency, Harris failed to make it to the Iowa caucuses and ended up dropping out with just 3 percent of the vote share in the polls. And no wonder! During a brief but embarrassing campaign, she boasted of supporting a plan to kick 180 million people off their private health insurance — and then denied having done so; she vowed to ban fracking; she threw her support behind the confiscation of the most commonly owned rifle in America; she opposed enforcement of the border, and endorsed extending Medicaid to illegal immigrants; and she swore to help abolish the filibuster if it stood in the way of the “Green New Deal.” Harris’s task, we are now informed, is to reassure voters who suspect that she’s a radical. That will be no easy task. She is.
Worse still is Harris’s oft-stated disregard for the integrity of American institutions. When told by Joe Biden — no stickler for the rules he — that her gun-control plans would have to pass Congress, Harris laughed in his face and said, “Let’s say, ‘Yes, we can.’” Asked to explain how she would pass her mass amnesty without legislative support, she waved her hands and proposed she’d do it on her own. Having been pressed for details on her crusade against “Big Pharma,” she informed the public that “if Congress won’t act, I will.” In 2017, Harris’s primary objection to the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court had been that he “valued legalisms over real lives.” Given her subsequent pronouncements, there can be no doubt what she meant by that in practice — or what her election would do to our already battered constitutional scheme.
In combination with her bizarre affect — she often descends into empty platitudes of the sort that usually emerge from the business end of a joint — all of this ought to make Harris a dream opponent for the broader Republican Party. But, alas, that GOP has once again nominated as its standard-bearer a Donald Trump who has never been popular and whose relatively disciplined campaign this time around is still shambolic by any normal standard. When, in a century or so, American historians look back upon this age, they will be forgiven for asking why a country with so many virtues yielded so many inadequate national politicians. Now, Kamala Harris joins the roll call in a newly prominent role.