The Journal. - Kamala Harris, In Context

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Democrats are rallying around Vice President Kamala Harris as she takes over President Biden’s campaign. WSJ’s Tarini Parti discusses some key moments in her political career and explores what they reveal about her as a candidate. Further Listening: - Biden Taps Out. Harris Taps In.  - Takeaways from the RNC: Trump Is in Control  Further Reading: - Inside the Slow-Building Biden-Harris Relationship  - How Kamala Harris Views Policy  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's only been a few days since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection campaign and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. And since then, her campaign has gotten out in full swing. On Tuesday, she spoke at a rally in Milwaukee. Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in freedom? Yes! Do we believe in opportunity? Yes!

Do we believe in the promise of America? Yes! And are we ready to fight for it? Yes! When you started covering Kamala Harris in 2019, did you imagine that we'd be in a moment like this? I don't think anyone could have predicted what we've seen in the last few weeks. That's our colleague Tarini Pardee. For the last few years,

she's had a front row seat to the Kamala Harris story. She says, while Harris has become a familiar face, she's still a relatively unknown entity. There is a lot of confusion about exactly what her politics are. And everyone I've talked to is still trying to pinpoint what exactly they can say about her. So now that she's running for president, your summer just got a whole lot busier. It did.

I feel like I'm going to have to explain to a lot of people who Kamala Harris is. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Wednesday, July 24. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, July 24th. Coming up on the show,

Kamala Harris steps into the spotlight. Your teen requested a ride, but this time not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your team to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your team to your Uber account today. Do you remember the first time that you met Kamala Harris? I have to really think back here. I think the first time I probably saw her would have been on the campaign trail in Iowa in 2019.

When Kamala Harris entered the Democratic presidential race, she was seen as a rising star. Before running, she'd been a prosecutor and served as California's attorney general. In 2017, she was elected to the Senate. She was only the second black woman and first South Asian woman to do so. Why was there buzz about her when she entered the 2020 race?

So if you remember when she was a senator, Trump had just been elected. And she was on the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time. And there were a lot of Trump administration officials who were coming before her for nominations. For example, now Justice Kavanaugh was one of them. And so she really caught the attention

of democratic activists, of donors, and just, you know, voters in general through her questioning. She brought some of that same toughness to the democratic primary debates when she went after then candidate Biden. She attacked him for what she saw as his friendly relationships with segregationists same toughness to the Democratic primary debates when she went after then candidate Biden. She attacked him for what she saw

as his friendly relationships with segregationists in the Senate in the 1970s. You also worked with them to oppose busing. And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools. And she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.

That was when she got a lot of support in terms of fundraising. People started noticing her more. And they tried to build momentum off of that. So that summer they did a bus tour in Iowa, trying to win more support. Terini traveled with Harris on that tour. And she says Harris found some unusual ways

to court voters by cooking dinner for them in their homes. — So I did red wine vinegar with just a little orange juice. Any kind of vinegar. — How much you want in the oil, too? — Like one third vinegar to two thirds oil. kind of vinegar. How much you want in the oil too? Like one third vinegar to two thirds oil. There was a lot of chatter at the time about her being, you know, an inauthentic politician because there was confusion about what her campaign message was and what her policies

were which came across as muddled. So this was a way for her to, you know, one-on-one connect with people. Yeah, I mean, I think she definitely has some cooking skills. Even when I've traveled with her, whether it's abroad or domestically, she will sometimes make stops at markets to pick up local food or spices. But yeah, it has definitely been a theme throughout her political career. — Despite the buzz, Harris struggled in the primary

and dropped out in late 2019, before any voting even took place. What happened? Why did it not go so well for her? — There were many reasons. I think the main reason was it was such a crowded democratic primary and you had major progressive icons like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. And then you had the moderates, you had former Vice President Joe Biden, you had Pete Buttigieg, you had Amy Klobuchar.

So she was trying to find a lane where she could get some support in a Democratic primary. And that was tough for her because it was hard to sort of fit her into an ideological box. But Biden said he saw her potential. And when he won the nomination, he asked her to be his running mate. And how did she do as vice president initially once she took the job? She got off to a rocky start. She didn't come in with a policy portfolio as other vice presidents had done.

She also didn't have a relationship with the president. They were campaigning in a pandemic, which meant they didn't really spend a lot of time together. And the first assignment that she got from the president was related to the border. At the time, there was a surge at the southern border. The administration was trying to figure out a way to respond to it. And Biden wanted her to have a role he had held

when he was vice president, which was handling the diplomatic relations between the US and some Central American countries. In this role, Harris tried to take a tough stance. She gave a speech in 2021 that didn't go over well with some Democrats. She told migrants in Guatemala, do not come. I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico

border. Do not come. Do not come. And as the daughter of immigrants herself, that was not taken well. So it sort of set her off on this path where she was getting criticized by people in her own party for not really having a good handle on things. Trini says Harris began to find her footing after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Abortion rights is something that she's worked on throughout her career, and she really took this as an opportunity to travel the country, to talk about this issue, and it was something that Biden

has not been comfortable talking about. And so it was a clear space for her to try to campaign, but also sort of turn her image around. Even though she was the vice president, Harris hasn't always been seen as an obvious successor. When Democrats began to call for Biden to drop out of the race, Harris wasn't necessarily a shoo-in. But within hours of Biden endorsing her on Sunday, she received a groundswell of support from party leaders and delegates.

And her campaign raised $81 million in 24 hours. It was still surprising to me how fast it happened. I mean, like you said, it was just within a matter of hours, just only about a day before she seemed to have locked up all the support that she needed to all but clinch the nomination. Yeah, I think you're not the only one who was surprised. I think even insiders, even some party leaders, have been surprised by how quickly all of this

happened. Going into it, there was this thinking that it shouldn't come across as a coronation. There was this effort to make it seem as much as possible as an open process, as a competitive process so that voters wouldn't doubt that anything nefarious had happened or that the establishment had just selected their favorite person and put them on the ticket. They wanted it to come across as democratic as possible. To some, it might still come across as a coronation. — The party has a new leader,

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Joe Biden had a hard time connecting with younger voters. But so far, it seems like Harris isn't having that problem. A speech she gave last year, in which she quoted something her mom said, has taken off on social media. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? People have created mashups, most notably with songs by the pop star Charli XCX, whose album Brat has been hugely popular this summer. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

Charli XCX endorsed Harris on social media on Monday, saying, quote, Kamala is brat. All of this has been a huge boost for Democrats. Y'all, she's the one. She is the one. This election just got so interesting and I am in fact ready for it. So Harris and Biden are obviously two very different people and Harris might resonate with voters differently than Biden did. But how far apart are they when it comes to actual policy? She's coming into a campaign that's already built in just for someone else.

So I think she's expected to run on basically the same platform that Biden did. So is this basically the Biden campaign just with a new face on it in terms of its apparatus? That's what it's shaping up to be at the moment with a new face, a sort of a different message in the sense that it's a sharper contrast between the campaign and Trump. But it is largely, I mean, it's the same campaign headquarters. She went to Wilmington, Delaware, though she has no connection to Delaware so that she could see her campaign staff

who, as of a few hours ago, had worked for someone else. But does that mean that she will necessarily adopt all of Biden's policies? So a lot of Biden's policies are also her policies. She was a big part of the administration as vice president. And even before then, there wasn't as much daylight between their proposals based on what they put forward in 2020. So how would you describe her policies?

I think she is progressive on some issues and she is not on others. What I've been told is that she doesn't like to be put into a box. She thinks of policy as sort of in a more pragmatic way and on a case by case issue because she still thinks of herself as a lawyer and not a politician. She didn't come up, you know, in a state legislator crafting policy, writing bills. She came up through the legal world. And so she thinks about policy in a much more different way than other politicians might. Democrats have been winning in 2020 and 2022 with really very moderate candidates. What

does that mean for Harris in this 2024 election? Do you think that she's going to try to moderate and appeal more toward sort of middle America or will she lean into things that might excite more of the progressive base? I think she will continue to run on his policies which were pretty progressive, even though he has this image of being a centrist.

But I think what will be different is she will run on things like abortion rights that are exciting the progressive base. So she won't be able to distance herself from Biden's record and policies and his ideology, but she can sort of put her spin on it and focus maybe on some more progressive issues. There are calls, especially on the Democratic base, for Harris to do things differently. Like some of her in her party have been angry at Biden's handling of Israel's war in Gaza, and they want the U.S. to take a different approach. Is there any indication that that might happen under Harris? Harris inside inside the administration, has for months been a proponent of at least talking about the war differently, if not changing the policy.

So she was pushing for expressing more empathy toward Palestinians. She was pushing for talking about a post-conflict plan. She gave this big speech in Dubai in December, where she was critical of Israel in a way that we had not seen many administration officials and definitely not Biden be. I think ultimately, even though there might not be official changes,

we will see administration officials potentially talk about the war in a different way. Harris didn't attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress today, but she is scheduled to meet with him on Thursday. She's been put in this position now where she's the nominee. How big of a challenge is it for her to win? Yeah, I think she definitely has some weaknesses that we saw in the 2020 presidential campaign that some Democrats have been worried about. One being concerns about her sort of messaging abilities that we also saw early on in the

vice presidency, being able to communicate a clear message against Trump. And we're seeing her starting to do that the last two days that she's been out as the likely Democratic nominee. There's also been an effort from Republicans to label her as this radical liberal politician. And she will have to show that she isn't that person that Republicans have portrayed her to be. Immigration is going to be a potentially a big problem for her.

There's another sort of thinking in talking to voters, this idea of whether a woman can be president and especially a black woman. I was in North Carolina last week, and I talked to a lot of black women at her event who told me that they were ready for a black female president, but they weren't sure that America was. Does Harris seem like she's ready for this moment? that America was. — Does Harris seem like she's ready for this moment? — I interviewed her in February and asked her explicitly if she felt that she needed to convince voters she was ready because she was serving as vice president to the oldest president.

And she said she was ready, and she didn't feel like she needed to convince anyone. And if people just watched her and thought of her doing her job as vice president, that they would know that she was ready. That's all for today, Wednesday, July 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Alexander Saidi, John Camp, Richard Rubin, and Justin Lehart. Thanks for listening.

See you tomorrow.