Kamala Harris is now the frontrunner to be the Democratic party’s candidate for the most powerful job in the world. She appears sorely underqualified, though she is hardly more so than the two men she wishes to succeed. Criticising the failings of leaders thrown up by US democracy has long been a European sport. It may be more useful instead to suggest their possible strengths.
Harris is a 59-year-old Californian lawyer and the daughter of immigrant academics, one Jamaican, the other Indian. Keenly ambitious, she rose to be her state’s attorney general and eventually a senator. She was the first woman, first Black American and first South Asian American to hold the post of vice-president. While it seems likely that the Trump campaign will focus attack lines on her race and gender, Barack Obama’s two election wins – despite endless conspiracy theories centring on his heritage – suggest that this wouldn’t necessarily play well with voters. And the US is surely ready for a woman in the White House.
Much has been made of her shortage of accomplishments as vice-president, but accomplishments are rare in that office. Biden initially saddled her with the poisoned chalice of the border crisis with Mexico; his critics claim deliberately so. It was insoluble. Domestic policy is also riven with divisions on abortion and crime. On the first, Harris has been an outspoken campaigner. On the second, she has written a trenchant if conservative book.
Harris’s urgent task is to weld a shattered Democratic party into a fighting machine capable, if not of stopping Trump in his tracks, then at least of electing a Congress able to hamper his wilder ambitions. For this, different leadership skills are required. In his challenging work The Myth of the Strong Leader, the political scientist Archie Brown demolished the thesis that personalities who “dominate colleagues and concentrate decision-making in their own hands” are the most charismatic and successful. Drawing evidence from both sides of the Atlantic, he concluded that “collegial leadership”, so often seen as a weakness, was actually a strength. He cited Eisenhower and Reagan in the US and Attlee and Wilson in Britain.
In Britain, power derives from a leader’s ability to act in harmony with a cabinet and parliamentary party. Likewise, in the US it lies in marshalling the parties in Congress, in negotiating checks and balances. Leaders rarely win by towering over the institutions of government and bending them to their will, as Obama found in fighting for Obamacare and gun control.
Harris’s strength must lie elsewhere, in the support of a united Democratic party establishment, traumatised by the manner of Biden’s departure. That establishment now has a vested interest in rallying round her. She has no constituency of her own. She will need partners, backers, allies and aides, a team of experience and talent. They must galvanise support in key states, promoting her strengths and minimising her weaknesses.
Many past presidents have lacked experience of high office, but this need not be a defect. Harris’s inquisitorial powers as an attorney and in Senate committees have indicated a keen intelligence. A readiness to learn is often more useful than a belief that you have already learned. So long as Harris listens to advice, she could win. More to the point, Americans desperate to avoid another Trump presidency now have no option. They must help Harris do well.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
