Kamala Harris looks and sounds like the well-programmed product of an advertising campaign, and voters can see through it.
“Here in Delco, we pride ourselves on being authentic,” one of the participants in Kamala Harris’s CNN town hall, which took place last night in Philadelphia’s suburban Delaware County, began. But Harris’s evolving persona, both in terms of policy and in her personal comportment, have proven jarring. That evolution has left “some voters to wonder about the authenticity of your current moderate positions.” How might she assuage his concerns, he wondered.
What an opportunity for the vice president — one for which the town-hall format is tailor-made. In those settings, politicians have the chance to connect on a personal level with their conversation partner with the understanding that an interpersonal relationship like that translates more broadly to the audience at home. It requires some dexterity from the candidate, who must speak extemporaneously and respond instinctively to their interlocutor’s emotional stimuli, but it’s not hard for an adroit campaigner to pull off. Harris is just not that sort of campaigner.
In her response, Harris displayed no indication that she could form an emotional connection with her questioner. Rather, she launched into a rote dissertation on how she is, in fact, friendly to fracking because new oil and gas exploration leases offset the green-energy spending in the Inflation Reduction Act. In addition, Harris insisted, her law-and-order bona fides are beyond question because she started her career as a prosecutor. Whatever happened in the intervening decade is, she implied, immaterial.
But Harris had not answered the question. She was not asked for a rehearsed set of lines that explain why she changed her views — everyone knows why she changed her views insofar as they were designed to appeal to far-left progressives whose policy preferences are anathema to a general electorate. They want to hear a reasonable, plausible story that could assuage their lingering suspicion that it’s all an act with which she will dispense the minute she’s in the White House. And the vice president just cannot do it! She either lacks the ability or imagination to craft a narrative that explains why the “values” that informed her subscription to a suite of radical policies are the same values that oblige her to tack to the center. Instead, she looks and sounds like the well-programmed product of an advertising campaign, and voters can see through it.
Harris’s authenticity problem was always going to be the biggest hurdle she would have to overcome in this campaign. It doesn’t seem like she’s capable of neutralizing that liability — it may be too late now, even if she were. The Harris campaign is going to have to hope that activating as many degree-holding Democratic partisans by resurrecting Joe Biden’s efforts to disqualify Donald Trump on characterological issues is enough to overcome the former president’s advantages, but that’s a risky bet. In an anti-incumbent environment, it’s reasonable to expect undecided voters to break at the last minute for the challenger. And why wouldn’t they? Harris has given them no reasons not to.