Kamala Harris’s Reboot Won’t Work

T he least convincing of all the possible ways in which Kamala Harris could attempt to jettison the far-left progressive persona she’s created over the course of her career in national politics would be to announce through her staff that she simply no longer believed in the ideas she’s spent the better part of a decade advocating. Of course, that’s precisely the approach the Harris campaign has adopted.

“The Harris campaign announced on Friday that the vice president no longer wanted to ban fracking, a significant shift from where she stood four years ago but one that is consistent with the policies of President Biden’s administration,” the New York Times reported on Monday. “In addition, campaign officials said she now backed the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement; no longer supported a single-payer health insurance program; and echoed Mr. Biden’s call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.”

Is that it then? She’s just going to wash her hands of everything she’s said and done over the past seven years and present herself as a born-again moderate? Are Americans not going to be treated to something resembling a persuasive conversion narrative that attempts to explain why the presumptive Democratic nominee no longer supports these policies? To the extent the Times even attempted to square the circle here, it could only suggest that the version of the vice president who ran for the White House in 2019 “often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed.” Apparently, the only thing that’s consistent about Harris is her confusion.

Harris’s opponents on the right will bristle at the effort by Democrats and pliant media outlets to reinvent a figure with such a well-defined history in American politics, but they should take some solace in her movement in their direction. In abandoning so many of the views she assumed in attempting to appeal to the far Left, the vice president tacitly admits that those policies were both unworkable and unpopular. That’s a welcome development. But Harris’s race to the center is and will continue to be frustrated by the presence of Joe Biden in the Oval Office. Harris is still tethered to the president she served for the last four years, and its Biden who has now become the extreme figure in her party’s politics.

Take, for example, Harris’s endorsement of Biden’s Supreme Court “reform” scheme. As recently as July 1, Rolling Stone correspondent Tess Stuart penned a bitter rebuke of the Biden campaign after sitting in on one of its calls with the president’s surrogates and hearing no concrete plans to rein in the “increasingly lawless and openly right-wing Supreme Court.” Stuart no doubt spoke for many a frustrated progressive activist, and the Biden campaign heard their call. As part of a desperate, groping strategy to help him retain control of the presidency, the Biden camp only began talking to reporters about a plan to “reform” the courts around July 16, after nearly four years of inaction. That gimmicky appeal to progressive sensibilities, which was itself part of an effort to weaponize the far left against the Democratic establishment that had turned against Biden, is now a policy to which Harris has wedded herself.

Democrats are more than capable of convincing themselves that the adulteration of the Supreme Court will be an easy sell to the broader voting public. Americans like the word “ethics,” after all. They can appreciate the value of “term limits,” too. Arguing against those policies on separation-of-powers grounds or even pointing out the impracticality of sacrificing expertise to the Cincinnatian ideal of disinterested patrician statesmen is an intellectual exercise. But Republicans will have an easier time explaining why this proposal is bad than Democrats will have arguing for its necessity.

As Fox News columnist Kelly Shackelford observed last year, more than nine-in-ten Americans polled by the Wall Street Journal “believe an independent judiciary is a crucial safeguard of our civil liberties.” Beyond that, “72% of Americans believe that the politicization of the Supreme Court threatens judicial independence and 59% oppose attacks on the integrity of some of the justices,” according to a Mason-Dixon poll released the same year. Biden’s plan to give elected officials the power to attenuate Supreme Court justices’ authority can be explained rather simply by the GOP as just such an effort to politicize the Court. Democrats, by contrast, must explain to those who are not yet converts to the cause why their own meandering conspiracy theories about intrigue on the bench are proof of grotesque judicial misconduct.

This is an appeal to the Democratic base at a time when Harris could, if she wanted, avoid that costly exercise and position herself in the center of the general electorate. This latest folly is suggestive of the likelihood that the Harris campaign still sees this election as one that will hinge on mobilizing its base voters rather than creatively appealing to a broader constituency. In that sense, the Harris campaign is plagued by the same failures of imagination that encumbered Biden’s reelection bid.

Harris inherited the Biden campaign. Insofar as diverting from its themes represents a repudiation of its approach to the 2024 election that might rub a lot of Democrats raw, Harris may find she is more constrained as a candidate than she’d like to be. But the Harris campaign must acknowledge that, even in his dotage, Biden would likely still be on the ballot if he had been a popular president who governed from the center. From his approach to economic policy and foreign affairs to his capacity to “bring the country together,” Biden’s policies informed voters’ bleak assessment of his performance.

If Harris is going to run a brand-new campaign, she cannot merely divorce herself from . . . well, herself. She’s going to have to strike a posture distinct from that of the unpopular president whom she serves. Simply promising four more years of Biden with a fresh face isn’t going to cut it.