The Decibel - The paradox – and potential – of Kamala Harris’ campaign

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

In under two days, the narrative around Kamala Harris has completely shifted. It went from questioning her ability to replace Joe Biden, to a nearly complete coalescing around her presidential candidacy after Biden bowed out.Globe columnist Doug Saunders believes that she is the right presidential candidate for the Democrats as they mount their third campaign against Donald Trump. He explains why her strengths – and even her perceived weaknesses – are suited for the moment.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So I'm curious, I just want your take on this. How would you characterize the U.S. presidential election race prior to this Sunday? So like last week, how would you think about the race? It was a mood of creeping despair among Democrats and people who don't like Donald Trump. That's Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders. There was a real feeling that the politics of the United States had entered a slow decline, a contest between two aging candidates. What happened on Sunday afternoon was like flipping on a light switch. And stepping into that light is Kamala Harris.

The vice president was first elected as a California senator in 2016. Prior to that, she was the attorney general in California, and before that, a district attorney for San Francisco. She ran in the 2020 Democratic primary, but ended her campaign early on. While Harris is not technically the nominee yet, as of Monday night, she has enough support to take the nomination. So today, Doug is going to make his case for why Kamala Harris is the best candidate for the Democrats to take on Donald Trump in this year's election. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Doug, thanks so much for being here. A real pleasure. Thank you. So, Doug, we're talking almost two days after Joe Biden withdrew and endorsed Kamala Harris. Since then, dozens of Democratic governors, lawmakers, party officials have endorsed her. And in the first 24 hours of her campaign, she raised $81 million, just a staggering figure there. It's a lot of money and it's very fast. So I guess, Doug, what do you make of all of this? It's a switch to the politics of hope, as the old saying goes. And suddenly there was something to get excited about. But what more fundamentally changed was the basic calculus of this election. The election was basically going to be a referendum

on Joe Biden's capacity and capabilities. You were going to vote one way or another based on whether you saw him as being someone who could function. Immediately, it changed on Sunday to the point where the election is going to be a referendum on Donald Trump's character and capacity. And that's a big difference. The Democrats couldn't really go after Donald Trump around many of the things they would like to get him on. He's unstable, he's crazy, he's dangerous, when they had a candidate whose ability to campaign and function was in question. I wouldn't call it an issue of age. There have been plenty of political candidates in their early 80s. So I don't think it's a matter of age,

but something happened to Joe Biden and everyone knew it. I suspect everyone around him in the party knew it and it looked bad. It looked like the party was hiding something. Now it looks like the party's trying to reveal something. They went from having a very weak starting position overnight to having a very strong one. Yes. And of course, now everyone is talking about Kamala Harris, as we are. And I think we should focus, I guess, on her campaign and her position here, Doug. So there's an interesting kind of paradox, really, at the center of Harris's campaign right now, because there's all this excitement, endorsements, there's this money that we talked about. And yet just days ago, the media and reportedly Biden and his inner circle were basically questioning her strength as a candidate.

So I know that you wrote a column for The Globe that was titled, Kamala Harris is the Democrats' best chance at beating Donald Trump. So can you just outline what you mean by that? You have to understand that this is not the usual way of choosing a candidate. And this is not the usual election situation where various Democrats from Congress and so on spend eight months vying against each other in primaries in various states to get the most votes for a late August convention. If Joe Biden had stepped down in January or in 2023, then we would have had that. We would have had various Democrats slagging each other on the trail, and she might not have prevailed. Maybe she would have as the sitting vice president,

but maybe she wouldn't have. What has changed now is that they don't need somebody to be the best Democrat against other Democrats. They need somebody to be the best candidate against Donald Trump. Can we outline, Doug, what do you see as her strengths, as Harris's strengths and as her campaign strengths? First of all, that she's not Joe Biden. She is a Democrat who is somewhat well-known, but she's young and she's not tied to what are seen as his liabilities. Second of all, she has a background as a prosecutor that will appeal to more conservative voters who might like the fact that she was tough on crime and so on. And third, she's not tied too directly to Joe Biden's policies that drove away some voters, young voters, voters from minority religious and ethnic backgrounds and that sort of thing. Okay. Let's break down these three strengths then. So the obvious one that you mentioned

off the top is that she's not Joe Biden. Tell me more about that and how it's a strength. Throughout the last year, American voters have told pollsters that they would vote for generic Democrat over Donald Trump by quite a wide margin, by a winning margin. And she is the only candidate they could put up. As the sitting vice president and the person who the Democrats were going to consolidate around, she is the only one who can immediately start campaigning. And we saw that on Monday morning. She immediately started campaigning. And we saw that on Monday morning. She immediately started campaigning.

So in the days and weeks ahead, I, together with you, will do everything in my power to unite our Democratic Party, to unite our nation, and to win this election. So that's very important. She's the non-Biden,

and as her 2020 campaign said, she's the anti-Trump. So, yes, she's not Joe Biden, but she was still part of his administration, right? So people might kind of see them, you know, similarly. Election Day is just over 100 days away, Doug. Like, isn't there a risk that there won't be enough time for Harris to define herself on her own terms away from Joe Biden? I think she has a moment when she can do that. And that's partly because she wasn't seen that much as vice president. And when she was, it was often going off in a different direction from the president. That might have been a false perception, but she

has some things that do distinguish her. Because she was attorney general of California and she was the chief prosecutor of the city of San Francisco, she comes from a criminal prosecution background. I think she could easily come back to the ad that she ran during the 2020 primary where she described herself as being the anti-Trump in every way. And it contained phrases like she was a prosecutor who went after sex predators, and he is a sex predator. She prosecuted sex predators. He is one. She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans. He was a for-profit college. At Trump University, we teach success. Literally. That kind of line didn't work with the Democrats in 2020, but it's absolute gold now. But it also gives her a tough on crime

type of image. She was disliked by a lot of people on the left of her party because she locked up a lot of people, although the left of the party did end up endorsing her. So this is kind of getting to your second point about her background as a prosecutor, how this is seen then. That's right. That's right. And as a former prosecutor and someone who's not on that sort of soft on crime side that Republicans claim is woke and these sort of things, she might have an advantage with more conservative voters who've

drifted away from the Democrats, who the Democrats need in those swing states. They need to peel off some moderate Republicans, some independents. In the United States, independents are conservative generally, and other voters who may see the Democrats as being too left-wing. So she's harder to tar as a woke candidate than other people are. She's seen as being somewhat to the right of Biden on many issues, maybe not accurately, but it's a little harder to pin her down as being flaky or those sorts of things than other candidates would have been. Yeah. And the Trump team has been preparing a campaign against Biden, of course, right? So,

Doug, I guess, how much do you think now running against Harris disrupts the plans that the Trump campaign had? It blows a hole in a lot of the Trump plans. I would say even Trump's selection of an even more right-wing vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, was premised on the idea that he would be running vice presidential choice now that Kamala Harris is the opponent. And he might rethink it. It would be yet another piece of drama in this very drama-filled election campaign if Donald Trump suddenly fired his vice presidential candidate and replaced him. But Trump is suddenly faced with Kamala Harris having to engage in the sort of calculus that the Democrats do if he's now having to think how do I attract people who aren't as extreme as me and the people who go to my rallies and so I guess in terms of who Harris might pick as her VP these are all

things that her her team is considering then yeah I mean it's a little more obvious that she's going to pick somebody who's not like her, who's not from California. Identity politics always come into these things. I think that the novelist Gary Steingart, who has quite a sense of humor, said on Sunday, I'm usually pretty cheap, but I'm definitely going to donate money to the Harris slash random white guy campaign for 2024. And so there is a sense that they will find somebody who's very white-bred, maybe Southern. Joe Biden was brought in by Barack Obama for similar reasons. He was the guy who was close to the union members

of the Northern United States, was from a different part of the party. He was brought in as being a good warm-up act for Barack Obama. We'll be back in a minute. Doug, a little bit earlier in the conversation, you mentioned that Harris wasn't seen that much as a VP, just wasn't that visible. Why was that? Mainly because in the United States, vice presidents usually are pretty invisible. They don't have that much of a role other than chairing the Senate and casting the

tie-breaking vote and so on. She did have policy positions as vice presidents have in recent decades. She was responsible for a number of issues, most prominently border issues. But she rarely became front page news. And when she did, it was usually because she either was seen as communicating poorly or because her position was differing from Joe Biden's. And that's partly because on the border issue, she did have a tough time with it. That was given to her as one of the files, the southern border issue.

Yeah, she was sometimes described as border czar, which apparently she resisted that. She wanted to be responsible for the policies that reduced the sources of migration across the U.S. border, but she didn't want to get involved with the policing of the border and all of that ugly stuff, possibly because it's unwinnable and it looks bad, partly because she genuinely saw taking care of the problem at the source as being the thing that works. And it did. I mean,

illegal border crossings have plummeted over the last year. I'm sure both Biden and Harris try to take credit for that. And Trump tries to claim it hasn't happened, but they have plummeted. And I should just say, this is something you looked at in depth, Doug, where you were looking at the flow of migrants up through Central America towards the U.S. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, those migrants themselves followed Joe Biden's policies on a week-by-week basis as they flip-flopped and moved all over the place. And Biden's border policies did flip-flop and move all over the place. And you get the sense that Kamala Harris, who nominally was responsible for that file, was always stuck on her back feet because whenever she thought she'd nailed down some policy involving negotiations with Latin American countries,

suddenly the president would announce a change in the policy. And some people even say that was the beginning of a sense that something wasn't quite right in the presidency, that he kept changing policies on that. Interesting. Okay. We've talked a little bit about her politics here, Doug, and her role in the Biden administration. But I guess if we're looking at Harris's strengths on a policy level, where do you see the places where she really does well? Kamala Harris tends to stand out in areas where she leaves Biden's legacy behind. She is not associated with his stance on the Israel-Hamas war. The idea of unquestioningly supporting Benjamin Netanyahu's conduct of the war,

regardless of how he was conducting it, that was a pretty strictly Joe Biden thing that even people surrounding him questioned. Kamala Harris didn't get caught up in that stuff. Whether she would do things differently on that file are one question. But there certainly is a sense that because she's not associated with that set of policies, she might be able to win back constituencies of voters who had turned against Joe Biden and the Democrats in general because of the policies on the Israel-Hamas war. That includes a lot of young voters. And of course, it includes voters from Muslim backgrounds,

voters from minority backgrounds who identify with Palestinians and so on. And those voters are numerous in important swing states like Michigan. So there is some hope that Kamala Harris can win back those constituencies. There's some hope that she will energize female voters because of her strong stances in protecting reproductive choice and promising to undo the Supreme Court's decision to remove abortion rights as a national issue. And she's been quite vocal on that, where Biden has not. Yeah, I mean, Biden certainly agrees with her on that. I think the idea that because Biden is old and male and Catholic, that he's softer on that issue doesn't really stand up to what he's actually said. He certainly has in his campaign speeches made abortion rights important, but she is a stronger voice on that.

She has a track record and credibility on issues like reproductive choice that will make people more excited. It certainly is one of her great strengths to be an exciting new figure who will cause Democrats who were going to sit out this election to go out and vote. Okay, so those are some real positives for Harris then, Doug. Let's spend a little bit of time now, though, looking at the case against her. One common critique is that Harris is a poor communicator. Doug, is that a fair criticism of her? She was seen in her 2020 primary campaign as being not a terrific campaigner. She has a particular way of speaking and form of oratory that I think is much better than Joe Biden's. And I mean, even Joe Biden at his prime was kind of a loose and lumpy speaker. And Kamala Harris is a better speaker than that. I mean, I think we've seen it recently. She's natural. She's a little bit more like how

Bill Clinton was as a speaker, which is that if you read the speeches on paper, they don't sound great. But if you hear them delivered in person, they sound like personal dialogue with the audience. There's a whole world of memes out there on social media of Kamala Harris delivering weird lines and the falling out of a coconut tree became her weird sentence. My mother used to, she would give us a hard time sometimes and she would say to us, I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? Which by the way, was a pretty rational set of statements if you hear them in context. It's quite a bit philosophical actually, the next line that comes after, right?

You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. And to the extent that it was a slightly eccentric thing to say, it became kind of beloved by her supporters. They became known, I mean, before Biden dropped out, they were known as the coconut tree movement. And she's a lawyer. She knows how to speak and argue. She would probably do quite well in debates if Donald Trump allows her to get on stage with him. I think we should also, for a moment, focus on the fact that Harris is a woman of color. I guess, how might her race and gender play into things here? with a lot of that stuff I just mentioned about her weaknesses as a campaigner and a communicator are things that are thrown at women on the campaign trail that are not thrown at men.

Joe Biden was not a good campaigner. He was a good warm-up act for Obama, but he came across as this kind of sloppy uncle and that avuncular kind of vague quality, even during his prime, was seen as a weakness that was also a strength. Women who come across as auntie-like, which is a phrase that's been used as Harris, do not get that same forgiveness. The old uncle is seen as a positive, but the aunt, not so much. Yeah. And maybe that's part of the reason why there's not a positive word for it, like avuncular. However, I think it's unfair to say that Americans are not ready for a woman of color as a presidential candidate. And people have said that. People within the Democratic Party who are resistant to her have said that. There are even reports that Biden felt that and was one of the reasons why he held off for so long. But if you look at the record, I remember I spent all of 2007 and 2008 hearing everybody outside the United States say there's no way Americans will vote for a black president at this point in history. It's going to take another generation for that to happen.

And then they voted for him by a majority and voted for him by an even larger majority a second time. And if he'd been allowed to run for president a third time under the Constitution, he would have won by an overwhelming majority against Trump as well. Of course, talking about Barack Obama here. Barack Obama. Barack Obama. Certainly the idea of a female presidential candidate, considerably more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But given the nature of Donald Trump's campaign, which is overtly misogynist on an almost minute by minute basis, and frequently draws on images and messages of racial intolerance in many ways. We do know that there is a constituency of Americans who are either drawn to that type of intolerance or who are willing to brush it aside and say it doesn't matter. But there are

also a lot of Americans, and I would hope a majority, who get excited by the idea of someone who's new and different. And the fact of her being fresh and different in this context, after Americans have had several months of having two old white guys who don't speak very well, could work to her advantage. And are Democrats taking a risk by fielding a woman of color when they never have before? There are some people who will say they will, but I would say that those who say that they're actually doing something that can finally excite voters and draw people to the ballot who've not voted before actually outweighs that. Doug, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. My pleasure.

That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Welms. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy-McLaughlin, and Michal Stein. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.