Telling Kamala Harris to showcase her centrist side is like telling a penguin to fly.
Jonathan Martin shares a California Democrat’s advice for Kamala Harris: “Shoot the Glock. Frack some oil. Go to the border with Lankford. Tell college kids your pronouns start with mudda and ends with ah. Eat ribs at a tailgate and decry the soft rules protecting QBs. Basically burn your SF/CA card to earn one representing ‘Merica.”
This would be delightful to see and probably do Harris a lot of good in her effort to win the White House. But we all know she’s extremely unlikely to do this — about as unlikely as Donald Trump sitting down and explaining that there’s a lot he doesn’t know about the world, how he thinks a lot of criticism of him is valid and constructive, and how he realizes he hasn’t always lived up to his self-proclaimed “very stable genius” reputation.
So why doesn’t Harris follow advice like this?
In the closing chapter of Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, the author lays out how presidents inevitably end up living in a bubble. Every president, no matter how well meaning, can “leave his office, board an airplane, travel halfway across the nation, land in another city, travel overland 30 miles to a ball park and never see one person who was not a friend or someone whose sole purpose it was to serve or protect him. This is living in the bubble.” Wherever the president lands, everyone’s excited to see Air Force One and the motorcade and “the beast” limousine with the presidential seal. If the president visits a school or business, everyone’s honored by his presence, excited that he’s here, everyone’s all smiles, looking and wearing their best. (Well, almost everyone.) If you’re a president, or a vice president, the overwhelming majority of people you encounter each day are happy to see you and will tell you that you’re doing a terrific job.
Apart from scattered groups of protesters here and there, the people who think you’re doing a terrible job just don’t bother to show up to encounter you.
For almost her entire adult life, most of the people that Kamala Harris has interacted with have been progressives, people who carry that San Francisco card. They’ve probably not only never shot a Glock, they’ve never held a firearm; they either oppose fracking or find it terribly controversial, see no reasonable objection to the Lankford bill (and might think it’s too restrictive and harsh), have special pronouns, are vegan, and think football itself should probably be banned because of the risk of concussions.
Constantly being around those people shapes Harris’s perception of what the country is, as surely as a GOP congressman representing a deep-red district could easily start to believe that the United States is overwhelmingly a country of gun-owning white Christians. (About 42 percent of households own guns, about 75 percent of Americans are white, and about 68 percent of Americans identify as Christians.)
Imagine a West Coast version of the famous New Yorker cover, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” and you probably have a good sense of the perspective that shaped Harris’s adult political life until her presidential campaign.
Sure, once in a while, Harris will visit a state like Texas — but the stop will consist of fundraisers in heavily Democratic cities like San Antonio and speeches to teachers’ unions.
Why won’t Harris metaphorically “burn her San Francisco card”? Because that’s who she is! If Harris were inclined to go to the gun range, dismiss special pronouns, and talk up fracking, she would be a centrist — not a “centrist by San Francisco standards,” but a genuine, indisputable centrist. As is, Harris as a senator racked up a four-out-of-100 lifetime score from Heritage Action, a 4.6-out-of-100 lifetime rating from the ACU, and perfect scores from Americans for Democratic Action.
Telling Kamala Harris to showcase her centrist side is like telling a penguin to fly.