If, as some maintain, anyone younger than 80 with a pulse can beat Donald Trump, Kamala Harris fits the bill. Her main credential for the job of leading the most powerful nation in the world is that she isn’t Donald Trump and she isn’t Joe Biden.
Otherwise, she hasn’t much to recommend her. She’s a former prosecutor and attorney-general in California, who had a short stint in the Senate before running for president in 2020 and getting Biden’s nod as his running mate. Ostensibly, that parallels the CV of another lawyer, Barack Obama, whose own stint in the US Senate was even shorter than Harris’ before he ran for president in 2008.
True, Obama had several terms in the Illinois upper house before moving to DC. And he would have acquired some legislative chops there — knowing your way around the legislative and committee processes, working with allies and opponents on bills affecting America’s sixth largest state. But, honestly, the Illinois Senate to the White House in three and a bit years? Harris’ CV is better by comparison.
As it turned out, Obama was a capable president, if hardly perfect. Being a lawyer, community organiser and mover and shaker in the Springfield Losers Lounge turned out to be not such a bad grounding for the White House. So what’s the problem with Harris?
The problem is what she’s done for the past four years. The vice presidency is a notoriously unattractive job, unless you’re Dick Cheney and your job is to babysit the president. Just think of how many vice presidents have failed to use the office as a springboard to the top gig without Death helping them out — Nixon and Biden only made it after spells out of office; Gore (admittedly robbed by Bush and the Supreme Court), Humphrey and Mondale never made it; only H.W. Bush managed it in recent decades, and he ended up a one-termer.
But Harris has been an especially unmemorable incumbent. Charged with being Biden’s lead on border and immigration issues, she failed to do anything to staunch what is the single defining issue of Trump and the MAGA Republicans — a seething obsession with “invasion” by migrants. She failed to halt the Republican assault on voting rights. She has been a strong voice on abortion rights and the right-wing/Supreme Court assault on women, but that’s been primarily rhetorical.
If Obama had become vice president in 2008 he, too, might have struggled with the curse of that office. But we’ll never know. With little or no executive experience, limited legislative experience and a tepid record as vice president, Harris in normal times would be a poor contender for the top job.
But to state the bleeding obvious, these aren’t normal times. The president can’t run because he’s too feeble. The Republicans have been hijacked, completely, by a rage-filled hate machine dedicated to punishing anyone who isn’t a white American male, overseen by a corrupt elderly rapist who attempted to overthrow the US government and who has openly warned he will use the presidency for revenge. For all the talk of Harris as the first African-American, South-Asian-American woman to run as a major party nominee, her main attraction is she’s vaguely normal and not obviously profoundly unfit for office.
What would a Harris presidency look like? Putting aside the misogynist and racist hatred that would be spewed at her for four years by many Republicans and much the US media, she might be reminiscent of another inexperienced vice president thrust suddenly into the job, Harry Truman, who went from uninspired protegé of corrupt Missouri Democrat bosses to FDR’s running mate when the dying president went for a fourth term. Truman wasn’t even in the VP job for three months before FDR died.
If “Give ‘Em Hell” Harry proved far tougher a nut for the Republicans to crack than they thought, he also oversaw the establishment of the US national security state, the onset of the Cold War and the disastrous decision to prop up colonialist France in Indochina, turning the pro-American Ho Chi Minh into a devoted enemy and setting the stage for Vietnam.
Even so, US democracy survived Truman relatively intact. The same can’t be said about Trump, with whom there’s a non-trivial chance that the world’s most powerful country will either turn to autocracy or descend into civil conflict. Harris might be only the least-worst person in the race, but it’s a very, very big gap to second.
Does Harris have the credentials to be US president — or is it just a matter of anyone but Trump? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
