Kamala Harris
Photo by Gage Skidmore
This post is part of Ordinary Time’s symposium of contributor’s Democratic primary endorsements. The views and endorsement expressed are the author’s alone.
I begin with a confession: if you are a political junkie, it is likely that I choose my presidential candidates with different criteria than you. The truth is, I think it’s a phenomenally bad idea to choose a presidential candidate based on the closest matchings of policy-positions.
There are a couple of reasons for my believing this.
The first reason is one of practicality: focusing on the number of policy matches distorts one’s perception of electability. Political junkies tend to judge candidates based on their policy positions, and don’t pay much attention to things like personality, presence, or charisma. This process works well for state reps and city council members, who are generally elected by people who won’t be able to remember their name six months after the election.
But the POTUS race is different. Even the lowest-knowledge voter will know all about the candidates as people, even as half of them won’t be able to identify more than a couple of obvious party-litmus-test policy positions. And it’s always been this way. A quick perusal into our own 2012– and 2016-election predictions archives will reveal how many of us believed that the way folks like Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachmann, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and JEB! looked on paper would make up for the fact that watching even a five-minute clip of any of them would show that each and every one was either excruciatingly dull and uninspiring, crazier than a sack of weasels on crank, or both.
My second reason for eschewing policy-matching for POTUS candidates is more values-centered. Simply put, I don’t think it is the job of the executive branch to be dictating things that are spelled out to be the legislature’s domain. If I were hiring an executive for my company, an exhaustive list of how they stood on every controversial Culture War issue wouldn’t scratch my Top 10 Skills Needed list. (And if you suggested in all seriousness that I not hire someone because they ate arugula, I just might fire you.)
Granted, the president does have the power of veto, so there are absolutely some worst-case scenarios where it is good to have someone in the Oval Office who agrees with you about everything. I just think that if you plan for worst-case scenarios rather than plan for a functioning, stable executive branch, that plan inevitably becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, and you risk electing someone entirely unfit for office who is unable to manage a stable executive branch day-to-day. (Ahem.)
Therefore, when looking for a Democratic POUTS candidate, I am mostly looking for someone I think is likable, commands the stage, has a long history of public service, radiates stability, and will be able to stand firm against whatever hijinks Donald Trump throws at a debate stage while neither conceding ground nor looking angry, annoyed, or exasperated. And it is for this reason that I am choosing to endorse Senator Kamala Harris.
Out of all of the approximately 8,000 Democratic candidates, Harris has the best chance of accomplishing the three goals that I see as critical to the long-term health of the Republic:
- Beat Donald Trump and remove his dumpster fire of an administration from office,
- Return the country to some semblance of normalcy and stability, and
- Demoralize and defang the small but overly-influential white-nationalist and alt-right wing of the Republican Party.
As I have noted in the past, presidential elections rarely come down to policy positions or qualifications; rather, it is the “likability” of a candidate the almost always determines their campaign’s outcome. This means that some candidates that look incredibly strong and qualified on paper — such as Elizabeth Warren — will have limited success in a general election, unfair though that might be. (Her tepid response to her bloodline controversy and her cringeworthy and futile attempts at seeming folksy are good examples of this.) At first blush Biden seems likable, until you realize that he never polled over 50% before he was attached at the hip to Obama, and has since sunk back under that meridian.
At this point, all signs point to Harris being the most “likable” of all the candidates. She appears strong, she’s friendly and outgoing to whoever her audience is at any given moment without seeming disingenuous, and — possibly most importantly — other than the too-inexperienced-to-win Buttigieg, she is the only candidate who communicates in stories rather than spreadsheets. Simply put, people just like her more the more they get to know her — as the polling after the first debate showed clearly.
Harris also represents a return to stability. At least so far, she doesn’t rise to take bait, her message is more one of national unity than partisan rancor, and, regardless of how she feels in her heart, her message is always wrapped in a spirit that welcomes those who disagree with her, even those on the right. More than any of the other candidates, Harris has obviously spent time pondering the question, “what was it that made Obama so popular with mainstream voters?” In another time, we would have called all of these traits presidential; with any luck, in two years time we might do so once again.
Finally, Harris carries with her an opportunity that no other Democratic candidate brings: the possibility of beating back the white-nationalist/alt-right wing of the Republican Party back into whatever dark mother’s basement they came from.
Having spent more than a little time with that particular crowd, I can tell you that much of what drives them to be part of the mainstream political process is a combination of the cult of personality and the aura of invincibility that Trump provides them. But that particular set of motivations is a double-edged sword. The white nationalist/alt-right set have a habit of both turning on and quickly discarding their own leaders whenever those leaders catch even a whiff of weakness. In these movements, you can be proven to be a liar, grifter, or monster and it will in no way adversely effect your status. But if you are ever shown to be a “cuck,” every single person in the movement will treat you like a shark treats chum.
Trump being beaten by an Indian-American woman who was raised in a black community would be more than a lost election for these groups – especially if that same woman casually and matter-of-factly calls Trump a “coward.” Trump’s defeat by Harris would be an existential blow, one that would be utterly demoralizing. So much so, I believe, that more mainstream Republican leaders would finally be able to grow the stones required to tell them to get the Hell out of their party.
Simply put: the influence the white nationalist/alt-right wing has on the GOP today can survive Trump being beaten by Biden or Bernie. It cannot survive Trump being beat by Harris.
It probably goes without saying that I will absolutely vote for whoever comes out of this motley pack of semi-statesmen, pretenders, and nutjobs. But I’m going all in. I don’t want to just win back the White House, I want to win back the country.
That’s why I will be voting for Kamala Harris.
This is as good a case as any. I do think she has a bit of the “it” factor going for her. But I can’t get past her record as a prosecutor, particularly her endangering of sex workers and ignoring law enforcement abuses. And her policy knowledge is … lacking to say the least. She’s taken at least four different positions on healthcare reform in just the last week.Report
Be careful on that prosecutorial record – reading across many platforms shows it to have been misrepresented more then once.Report
And many of the voters she will need actually like it, either the true or the misrepresented oneReport
My only problem with Harris, and it’s not a small thing, is her criminal justice record. She’s shooting for the top executive position, I need to see that she not going to be another “Tough on Crime” democrat who give police and DAs whatever their fever dream tells them they need.Report
I wrote about this below but I think her prosecutor history does not matter to many.Report
FWIW, I think the Kamala is a cop thing only appeals to about a few thousand libertarian types that spend a lot of time on the Internet (sorry few thousand libertarian types).
My preference is for Warren but as you know, I volunteered to do Warren or Harris and am largely split between them. I think Warrene’s folksiness is more sincere than you but she might be too easy to tar as a Cambridge resident/Harvard Law professor despite her honestly modest background and rise to the top. I also don’t want a Republican to appoint her Senate replacement if she wins. This is not a concern for Harris.
Harris can emerge as a kind of compromise candidate in my view. I don’t mean compromise in a negative way. On the one hand, I think she projects a more professional demeanor than Warren and this can appeal to a lot more moderate Democrats (this might be because she was a prosecutor and not a professor). But she is not a full on “I can bring back the good old days of Ronnie and Tipper” like Biden. Plus Biden scolds the young a bit too much.
That being said, Biden still has over 50 percent of African-American voters and Harris needs to catch up. Bernie is not doing well this time because the anybody but Biden voters are split between him, Warren, and Harris, with some others polling very low numbers. I also think that there is more connection between Warren and Harris voters in the polls than Bernie and Biden voters.
But Kamala Harris does come out with some very weak teak policy proposals which sometimes sound like they are trying to appeal to a part of the base but not enough to sound really bold and it can cause some eye rolling. Who is her student loan forgiveness plan supposed to please?
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/07/how-not-to-issue-policy-pronouncements-the-kamala-harris-story
How are recent college grads with Pell Grants supposed to get the capital to start a business? This plan sounds like it is suppose to appeal to people who kind of, sort of realize that student debt is a big issue but they also don’t want to do anything to serious because it means raising their taxes or some other sacrifice.Report
only appeals to about a few thousand libertarian types that spend a lot of time on the Internet (sorry few thousand libertarian types).
It’s not the size of the group, it’s the influence they wield. You just need the right one to write a witty bon mot to the right columnist and, next thing you know, the mot goes viral.
“Hey, *DOES* Kamala Harris have a response to those who argue that she went after young members of ADOS with a vigor and verve that was unmatched?”
“Nobody cares about that sort of thing, besides, the rubes love Law&Order (DUN DUN)” stops working as a response after, oh, the twelfth time somebody asks that.
Which is only a problem if the question keeps coming up over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
Which, lemme point out, it will.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying she’s sunk. I *AM* saying that if she doesn’t have an answer that isn’t “nobody cares about that” then she’s sunk.Report
My view on the influence and power of libertarians is that they have around the same sway as the Greens. And as Lee says, it seems to be mainly white dudes that get their undies twisted about Kamala being a cop and considering she is an African-American woman, I find that revealing.
There are a good chunk of men who seem to have politics that boil down to “Fuck you, mom”Report
As much as I love the idea of shooting down these ideas because of the ethnicity/color of the people making them, my point stands: the problem of libertarians is the problem of intellectual respectability and influence. The Kamala Harris is a Cop thing will have to be addressed by more than “you’re white (or appear to be).”
Eventually, a real answer will have to come up.
And if you don’t particularly like the idea of dealing with the libertarians asking the question, you’re going to not particularly like dealing with the Chapo types even more.Report
Agree with Jaybird. Dismissing my concerns with the specter of racism isn’t going to make my concern disappear, nor will it shut me up.
Which, let’s be honest, is the whole point of you attempting to play the racism card.
So let’s put that racism card back in your hand, right along with the sexism card, until you actually have a solid way to play them. Because frankly I don’t give two shats if the person is a POC or a woman, I care about how they used the power of their office.Report
considering that twenty more people just got shot in Gilroy by a not-white man, it’s entirely possible that a sufficient quantity of voters will respond “about damn time” to suggestions that Kamala Harris is a cop who has it in for not-white men.Report
“You’re goddamn right she’s a cop. A cop is what this country needs!” is one hell of a response to the criticism.
And I say that without any sarcasm whatsoever.
I’m just remembering that, 10 seconds before, we were talking about how we shouldn’t vote for Beto because we need to not vote for Republicans.
Forget it, forget it. Memory hole it.Report
I’ve re-read all the comments on that thread and don’t see a single one that says, in words or substance, don’t vote for Beto because he’s a Republican. He is a fairly standard mainstream Democrat. To the extent that he has positions, they are standard mainstream Democratic ones. If he managed to catch on, which he hasn’t been able to do so far, he would be broadly acceptable to a wide spectrum of Democratic voters.
KD’s piece was all about how he seems insufficiently attached to whatever views he has to do get any nasty, Democratic things done, and that that, the prospect of not getting nasty, Democratic things done, was what was good about Beto.
It wasn’t that Beto himself was a Republican, but that, in KD’s view, he would not effectually get in the way of Republicans doing Republican things. Next best thing to an actual Republican.Report
Oh, I must have misunderstood your comment to Kristin complaining about how she supported Beto because she’s a person who will only vote for a Democrat who is a Republican, part nine-thousand-whatever.Report
Yes, you did.Report
Her point was, literally, that Beto has no firm beliefs.
Say what you will about the tenets of National Conservatism, but at least its an ethos, dude.Report
Just because the guy was named Santino, doesn’t mean he isn’t white:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/us/food-garlic-festival-shooting/index.htmlReport
You have to answer for Santino.Report
An Italian-Iranian but sure, keep telling me how he’s the kind of white dude that people mean when they talk about White Male TerrorismReport
To be fair, more that a few Kamala Harris is a cop people I know are white women.Report
Nearly everybody who is doing the Kamala the Cop thing appears to be white. I haven’t encountered much among real actual African-Americans, although I suppose it exists. There also seems to be a small group arguing that Kamala Harris is not a real African-American because her father was a Jamaican academic immigrant and her mom is Indian. Again, I can’t tell if these happy to very vocal African-American nationalists or white trolls.
I think you are right about why Harris’ demeanor has greater appeal than Warren’s demeanor. Warren’s folkiness is mainly for the warm and fuzzy sweater set. Harris comes across more like a well-educated professional that is all business.Report
Nearly everybody who is doing the Kamala the Cop thing appears to be white.
Speaking of which, here’s a recent (as in last week) New Yorker article on Kamala Harris. The New Yorker has the long knives out.
(Edit: Apparently, “Kamala Harris is a cop” is also one of the memes on The Young Turks. So I imagine that this will pick up among The Dirtbag Left.)Report
“Nearly everybody who is doing the Kamala the Cop thing appears to be white.”
Which does remind me of 2016, where people rolled out Clinton’s “superpredators” remark hoping it would break some black voters away from her, and all the old black voters who were around when she said it were like “uh-huh, what’s your point? We knew what she meant, we agreed, and we still think it was a good idea.”Report
“This summer: Kamala is Dirty Harris! The Enforcer hitting Trump with Magnum Force!”Report
I was thinking much the same. Effective with younger voters only , who lacked the required context — or more specifically, had the context of the fallout from the law but not the circumstances that drove it.
The ‘super-predators’ line was one that could have only arisen in a bubble. it was either never focus tested or the entire staff behind it was really monolithic in some ways. Well, I suppose it could have been some 11-D chess tactic, but it’s never 11-D chess.Report
Exactly. African-American voters are probably the most pragmatic bunch in the Democratic Party. White liberals and leftists like to project revolutionary idealism on them but they are generally more moderate in their policy preferences and choices. Its why Biden is crushing it with older African-Americans compared to other candidates and its why Harris is trying to go head to head with Biden.Report
This. Remember Obama? He didn’t have really overwhelming black democrat support until after South Carolina when he demonstrated he was more than just some flash in the pan (and with Bill stepped in it in South Carolina as well).Report
For the most part, I don’t see any real difference between the two parties.* I am a libertarian and look at the political situation from the point of What Will Enable More Personal Freedoms to the Population. But, I consider Kamala Harris to be such a phenomenally horrific candidate as to make me vote for Trump.
[emph added]
When a state’s attorney gets caught making up false confessions, you don’t double down on it, not in a country of laws. That is what totalitarians do. That’s what Nazis do.
This, along with attempting to jail parents of truant children, is bad enough, and leaves no doubt in my mind that she will double down on many of the abuses of civil liberties that happened under Obama; the title IX abuses, assassinating US citizens, attempts to use the IRS and other government agencies as political weapons, and an overall push to destroy the rule of law to promote “progressive” ideals. Many of which I find abhorrent in the execution.
None of this says Trump is good, just that the Dems/left are so bad about the things I care about and feel make a healthy republic. I truly feel that in a Trump v. Harris election, that he would be the lesser of two evils.
*I am sure someone will start screaming BDSI or false equivalence, but that isn’t doing what they think it does.Report
Kamala Harris is Hillary Clinton without the baggage of the 1990s. And a little less hawkish on foreign policy, but maybe that’s just from not being involved in it previously the way Hillary Clinton was when her husband was in office (and subsequently when working with the State Department.)
If she’s nominated I’ll vote for her. I don’t think she’ll be any better in the role than Donald Trump, but maybe it’ll help people calm the fuck down, and I think we all felt better when someone under seventy is sitting in that office.Report
I have a somewhat particular bone to pick with Harris. Someone leaked Christine Ford Blasey’s letter to Diane Feinstein, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Senator Feinstein. That leaves either Harris or Corey Booker.
If the process had resulted in Kavanaugh losing the nomination, I might well be willing to overlook this, but as it stands, this was a breach of confidentiality for personal political gain, and a poorly calculated one at that. I don’t know it was Harris, but the odds are pretty good.
One point about Warren, since you brought her up. She has been engaging relentlessly in town halls, and her polling trendline shows a steady upward surge. It seems as if she’s doing what the best standup comics all do – workshopping her act in front of a live audience, and figuring out what works the best. This is a very promising sign.
But I’d be happy to support pretty much any of the top 5, like you.Report
Simply put, I don’t think it is the job of the executive branch to be dictating things that are spelled out to be the legislature’s domain.
You may believe that. I may believe that. But for 120 years, Congress’s belief in it has steadily declined. Environmental policy will largely be made by the executive branch. Energy policy will largely be made by the executive branch. The list goes on. At least for those policy areas, I want to hear the candidates state their day-one priorities.
It’s not getting better. This past weekend I read the voting systems bill passed by the House (the SAFE Act). It mandates that federal elections from 2020 will be done by counting paper ballots, printed on recycled paper, marked by hand or a marking system. Beyond that, well, the Election Assistance Commission will be responsible for the huge mass of actual rules that will be laid on the states, and for distributing a sizeable pile of money. (It is entirely possible that my state, which wins awards for accuracy and security in conducting elections, will not be in conformance with the EAC rules. But that’s a debate for another day.)Report
In a matchup of Harris to Warren or Biden, the prosecutor record might be a valuable critique.
In a matchup of Harris to Trump it collapses.
It isn’t because Trump himself wanted to lynch those five innocent men in the Central Part case (and has never recanted).
Its more that Trump’s entire governing philosophy is an attack on liberal democracy, the idea that we are all equal under the law.
A Trumpian judiciary isn’t one that is overzealous; Its one which assigns justice based on where you sit in the social hierarchy; White or black, male or female, rich or poor.Report
This is as good a place as any to ask the question. There have been male Presidential candidates who have been sexually attractive to women. Not many, I grant you, but some. This time, we may get a female candidate young and attractive enough to be sexually attractive to men. I’d be interested in hearing from women how sex has played in past elections, and from men on how they think it might play this time.Report
There were a couple thousand essays written about Margaret Thatcher and how her appeal was to British men who grew up with nannies who were harsh disciplinarians and Thatcher was obviously a dominatrix who only won the election because of all of the weak Brits who wanted a spanking.
These essays always struck me as a fairly long-winded way to say “I’m not even going to look at her policies. The people who voted for her are morally inferior.”
I’m not sure that essays talking about Harris being sexually attractive will be illuminating?
I mean, I spent a couple of minutes trying to write sentences that started with “if I spent a couple of sentences talking about” and then I kept writing, then erasing, examples of things that people might find physically attractive/unattractive and every single one was a Rorschach blot that told you more about me than it told about her.
Like, seriously. I couldn’t come up with a single example. And I tried.Report
Agreed.
I mean, I look at Warren and think what a lovely smile she has and how delightful it would be to have a coffee and brunch with her.
But, as you say, it reveals a bit too much about my middle aged disposition for my liking.Report
Oooh, maybe she will go get a beer during that brunch!
That would be totes spontaneous and genuine(tm)!Report
Yeah, I was thinking what you might be able to get away with saying. “Physically attractive” gets right up to the line. You can also mention the smile. “She’s got a beautiful smile!”
I tried to come up with some other stuff (could you talk about her eyes, for example?) and I’m pretty much sure that you’re stuck at talking about the smile and making statements about her being physically attractive that can be defended by pointing out that, in the modern era, every single candidate for President from either of the two real parties has been physically attractive (and then you leave it at that).
Anything past that is just going to get weird.Report
Anything past that is just going to get weird.
You make that sound like a bad thing.Report
“Kamala Harris is too skinny for me. I need some cushion!”
“Are you kidding me, she’s plenty solid! Look at that backside! I’d like to see her in those sweatpants that have ‘juicy’ written on the tush.”
“Nah. I want my women to jiggle for a while when I give them a smack on the butt. A smack on Kamala might have the wave go around once, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“You guys keep talking about her butt. Can we talk about her torso for a while?”
Seriously. No good could arise from this.Report
Maybe some women ought to weigh in.Report
“Oh, she’s had work done.”Report
This is a great comment, whether or not the pun was intentional.Report
I’m, going to say it once and never bring it up again; it’s a fact every Californian of a certain age is well aware of. Kamala is so attractive that Willie Brown dated her even though she isn’t a blonde.Report
That was what, a 30 year age gap?Report
Willie Brown “dated” anyone who would get down on their knees and “worship” hishonor.
Harris f***** her way into politics, and I sincerely hope she f**** off out of it.Report
There have probably been others, but off the top of my head the only two national-level candidates I can think that were intentionally packaged by their own people as “you know you want to f**k them” candidates for opposite sex voters* were JFK and Palin.
I can’t really speak to Kennedy, partially because I’m a straight male, but mostly because it was a very different culture in a very different time for which I was not quite alive.
The Palin thing is also a little hard to judge, but for different reasons.
There’s no doubt that male conservative pundits trying to pass her off as the hot-swimsuit-model candidate hurt her with voters who weren’t going to reflexively vote for anyway her because she had an R in front of her name. But a lot of that is because she turned out to be such an unserious candidate and incurious person – that is to say, she fit into the swimsuit model stereotype in a more robust way than the McCain camp had hoped. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a woman national candidate who is considered to both have strong sex appeal *and* be considered mentally sharp and extremely professional. And there are probably a lot of deep-seated reasons for that that have everything to do with how we demand women be pigeonholed in certain ways that we do not demand of men.
* I should probably add “and were successful in doing so.” In ’92 the Bush/Quayle PR people really pushed the “he’ll woo suburban mom and young women voters with his raw JFK sex appeal” right after Quayle got the nod. But none of the suburban mom and young women voters were buying.Report
I’m not restricting it to intentional packaging. See, for example, Bill Clinton. (Incidentally, I’ve met a woman who f****d him. I’m not sure how rare a thing that is.)Report
I’ve always had the impression from women that Clinton’s appeal was in his personal charm, and that you could be swept up by in if you met him but you wouldn’t lust from him from afar having not him.Report
Didn’t Paul Ryan do P90X or something?Report
Come to think of it, I actually wrote about how a bunch of high school girls in line in front of me at VVS were talking about how awesome it would be to kiss him.Report
It wasn’t the line TO kiss him, was it?Report
HA!Report
Being more physically attractive than the average politician was part of Sarah Palin’s appeal. They even made some of those types of movies about it.Report
Great post my Tod, it’s really wonderful to hear your voice round here.
I think Harris is my #3 pick right now so I’m relatively content that she’s in the top 5.Report
Uh-oh…
Report
I am very, very surprised that several months before the first primary, in a field of 20 people, voters are not quite sure what candidates stand for. They had that one debate and everything. Well two debates, because there were 10 people in each.
More seriously, it’s months before the first vote. At least 2/3rds of the field are vanity candidates who haven’t admitted it. Nobody knows what anyone really stands for, because every candidate is currently struggling to both define that and inform people against the noise of a far too large field.
At this point, random twitches are just random twitches, and prognostications are pointless exercises in intellectual masturbation. And, as I’m sure Silver would be the first to note, polls are incredibly useless beyond charting the day to day twitches, because the voting remains too far away.Report
Nothing to worry about, then.
It’s not like we know what Biden stands for.
Heck, the only two candidates that we know what they stand for are Andrew Yang (UBI) and Marianne Williamson (Love, Light, etc).
Nothing to worry about.Report
And Inslee.Report
I’m beginning to see why people find you frustrating to talk to. You ignored everything I wrote to create a flippant response to something I didn’t say.
All so you can avoid actually discussing the merits of the situation we’re discussing.
That’s a fun party trick, but I have to ask — if you’re not here to converse with people, why are you here? Wouldn’t blogging with the comments off suit you better?Report
Well, my main point in my main comment was that Nate Silver was getting Mitt vibes off of Kamala Harris. She’s polished but nobody knows what she stands for.
Your response was that his criticism of Harris was a criticism that applied to everybody in the Primary.
While I suppose that might, technically, be true… I can’t help but notice that it’s not. My intention of bringing up Yang and Williamson was to inspire noticing that other Democrats have things that they stand for. Inslee, for example. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, for example. Hell, even Biden, has a vague “what he stands for” kinda thing going on (“I was VP during Obama, I represent a return to normalcy” kinda thing).
I mean, seriously, there are a *LOT* of candidates that we *DO* know what they stand for.
But Nate Silver, no slouch, looks at her and sees someone who represents a cipher.
And waving that away by pointing out that it’s too early to worry about that is something that makes me say “okay, this is something that Harris will really have to wrestle with”.
I mean, if you came back and said “dude, Harris is the Law and Order candidate! You’ve seen the criticisms! ‘Kamala Harris is a cop!'”, I’d say “okay… maybe Silver needs to catch up with the narrative.”
Instead the counter-argument was not “that’s not true” but “that’s true but it’s not important”.
But I know that I can’t convince you that it is important if you think it’s not important. (Good Lord, I can’t even imagine how I’d go about doing that.)
So I can only say “Nothing to worry about” and give examples of other candidates who do have obvious things that they are about and hope that you will see that, yeah, there are other ones who do… a lot of them.Report
Well, thing is that the winners often pull it off by both standing for something AND being a cipher. Obama, for instance, was really good at looking professorial and letting the left wing project their hopes and dreams onto him while he didn’t actually verbally promise anything beyond pretty practical middle of the road centrism.
So you and JS are probably both right. Maybe Harris stands for nothing and that’s a weakness… or maybe she’s good at being vague where it’s useful and it’s a strength. It’ll probably take us getting further into the primary before we can get a better idea of which it is.Report
She’s the only one who, so far, has drawn blood against Biden.
But by taking a position that she had to walk back the next day.
That’s a trick you can’t rely on.
And thinking about this some more, Obama was someone that you could project your beliefs onto pretty easily.
You didn’t ask “what does he believe?”
You knew he believed what you did.
Which is a different dynamic.Report
Possibly a better skill? Or a better honed one?
Believe me I was far from thrilled with Harris’ debate stunt and her raising her hand on abolishing private insurance just to walk it back was pure amateur hour; but it’s pretty early to say that Harris doesn’t stand for anything.Report
Please understand: I’m not saying that she doesn’t stand for anything.
But if your answer to the question “what does she stand for?” begins with an “Uh…” rather than, say, a noun or a verb, then that is an indicator that she ain’t established what it is yet. (Heck, maybe she should pull a Trump and argue that she is a cop. “When you have criminals in the White House, you need a cop. When you have gun violence all over the country, you need a cop. I am Kamala Harris, and I AM A COP.” See? She could run with that.)
I think that she stands for a naked thirst for power but, hey. That’s a criticism that probably applies to everybody up there except for Marianne Williamson (who is batshit insane).Report
Yeah I was going to bring up 2006 Obama.
Beto, I think, deliberately tried to be a charismatic cipher but couldn’t pull it off.
The feedback I heard is that his videos were too heavy on the inscrutable, and a bit too cutesy for the environment we are in, without enough Nat-C punching. In short, we need a wartime consigliere.Report
Well Harris certainly can put the knife in; we know that.Report
The other thing is that Romney was no slouch. He lost in 2012 for just two reasons, neither of which was he was a “cipher”:
1. He was forced waaay further right than he should have had to go after the primaries instead of tacking toward the middle because his own party kept threatening to abandon him. (Which might well happen to whoever comes out of this primary, btw.)
2. He ran against an insanely popular & charismatic incumbent.
Honestly, everyone in 2019 looks at how much Fox News hated Obama and assumes that meant everyone hated him, but that was just never true. (If he had been able to run in 2016 he would have beat Trump with historic numbers.)
Run Romney in 2000 and there is a damn good chance he wins without needing the SCOTUS to declare him the winner.Report
Nobody on the planet would have won against Obama in 2008.
I am skeptical that anybody could have beaten him in 2012. If anybody could have, I suppose Romney would have been that guy. (I kinda wonder what would have happened if he held his powder until 2016… but that means that someone else would have had to have lost the battle for America’s soul that was the 2012 election.)Report
“but voters aren’t entirely clear what she stands for”
Then they aren’t paying attention… and who says she doesn’t have policy chops?
“Under Harris’ proposal, borrowers who received a Pell Grant, the money the government provides to low-income students to attend college, will have up to $20,000 of their student debt forgiven if they start a business and operate it for at least three years in a disadvantaged community. In addition, qualifying borrowers would have their loans deferred interest-free for an up to three-year business formation period.”
Kinda sounds like a prank/dare her friend Mitt told her was a “sure thing” policy proposal.Report
My second reason for eschewing policy-matching for POTUS candidates is more values-centered. Simply put, I don’t think it is the job of the executive branch to be dictating things that are spelled out to be the legislature’s domain. If I were hiring an executive for my company, an exhaustive list of how they stood on every controversial Culture War issue wouldn’t scratch my Top 10 Skills Needed list. (And if you suggested in all seriousness that I not hire someone because they ate arugula, I just might fire you.)
Yes and no. While the legislature should be doing a hell of a lot more, two points: First, wishing that something worked differently than it does does not change how it actually works.
More importantly, there is a very important thing that some policy proposals demonstrate: That the candidates have actually _thought_ about issues.
But not via the general ‘I will come up with an X to solve problem Y that is basically the same as everyone else’s’ policies that every candidate comes up with. There’s a whole list of things that Democratic candidates have to come up with a position on, and those positions will be mostly the same-ish, and it’s utterly silly to worry about differences between those two.
The important thing is when someone steps forward with a detailed policy about _something no one has tried to fix_. Who has identified a problem no one else has, and has stepped forward with a solution. Heck, even if it’s not ‘their’ solution, if they just found some obscure wonk talking about it and had them come up with it. That shows they actually…listed to people with problems, actually operate in the real universe of ‘maybe we should try to fix things’.
This is basically why I like Warren. And I think, if people understand that what you should care about with presidents _isn’t_ ‘policy-match’, also means if they have some problem with a random policy of Warren’s, they should understand: Most of that won’t really get done. It can’t.
But right now the problem in politics is politicians literally just ignoring problems, so someone who says ‘Hey, we should solve this actual problem that’s hurting a lot of people, and here’s a dumb solution’ and everyone says ‘No’ is much better than people who just ignore it, because now that problem has shown up within politics and other people can come up with solutions.
Which also is happening in the election, so while I support Warren right now, I honestly won’t be that bummed if she drops out after Harris steals all her ideas.Report
Wait. What?Report
Business Insider’s copy of the story for those who hit the LA Times’ paywall.
Well, looks like she’s surrounded herself with some sub-geniuses.Report
Gabbard was there to bang the bad prosecutor drum last night.Report
Honest question- since the complete opposite of this happened while Obama was President, why would it be different during a Harris presidency?Report
My thought as well.
White supremacy was dealt a devastating blow in 1865, then again in a series of court and legislative defeats in the 50’s and 60’s, then by cultural shifts in the 70’s, then by Obama and yet each time has resurrected itself.
It will never be defeated for good, instead it will just be something that needs continual struggle.Report
@kolohe: “Honest question- since the complete opposite of this happened while Obama was President, why would it be different during a Harris presidency?”
I don’t believe it is what happened.
There are two things that everyone in 2019 tends to forget about life before the spring of 2016. The fist is that even though Republicans & right wing media opposed him no matter what he did, Obama was an extremely popular president.
The second is that, while people within the alt-right movement existed, they weren’t open a part of the GOP or movement conservatism until Trump gave them permission to do so. If you go back and look at the most terrible things Trump said in 2016 and early 2016, it was aways followed by Republican leaders and right-wing pundits saying, essentially, “thanks for playing; you’re finished now.” Most of the people you see on Fox or places like the Daily Caller or the Federalist who are giant Trump boosters in 2019 railed about him being a blight on politics back in 2015, and they pretty much all condemned whatever Richard-Spenser-lite characters initially tried to jump on Trump’s coattails early on. They didn’t buy into Trumpism or start defending the so-called deplorables until Trump thoroughly kicked their asses. Anyone who felt the way Steve Bannon did back in 2014 either kept it to themselves, only talked abut it in anonymous chatrooms, or was thoroughly ostracized from everyone in mainstream politics and almost everyone in regular society.Report