Today, Explained - What kind of Democrat should Kamala Harris be?

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

The last two Democratic presidents took distinct approaches toward leading their party and the nation. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait explains why he thinks Kamala Harris should embrace Barack Obama’s style of governance over Joe Biden’s. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anyone watch the DNC last night? Bueller. Bueller. Um, he's sick. If you didn't, let me catch you up. People quoted rappers. In the words of the great American poet, Nelly, it's getting hot in here. People quoted ballers.

In the words of the great Steph Curry, we can tell Donald Trump night-night. And there were way too many people. New York's motto is excelsior, ever upward, and Trump takes us ever downward. What there wasn't a lot of was policy. Not a lot of talk about what kind of president Kamala Harris will be. So, on Today Explained, we're going to hear from someone who has some strong opinions on what kind of president Kamala Harris should be.

And he thinks she should be more of an Obama than a Biden. I've made a lot of mistakes in my career. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about Bet MGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball

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responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Explained. 2024 Explained. explained 2024 explained jonathan chait is a political columnist at new york magazine and any political columnist could tell you it's kamala time yet chait just wrote about 6500 words comparing barack obama's presidency to joe biden's. So we asked him why. I think the Democratic Party made a huge mistake over the last eight years in convincing itself that the Obama presidency was a disappointment or even a failure.

And I think this wrong decision that the party made has had a series of unfortunate effects on its decisions that I try to trace over the last eight years and has brought us to the current point where that's the decision point that Harris is facing, whether she should essentially resuscitate the Obama model or embrace the idea that Obama was a failure and chart a course favored by the Obama skeptics. It's interesting to hear you say that. I think a lot of people in our audience may not be aware that within the Democratic Party, conversations around the party, people see the Obama years as some kind of failure.

I was in a movie theater last night, Jonathan, and Obama popped up on the screen for a bit in a documentary, and there was like an audible sigh of elation in the theater. Where is the argument that this two-term presidency was somehow a failure? Where is that being had, and what's it grounded in? It's very interesting because it's a top-down phenomenon that has not filtered into the party rank and file. And that's one of the interesting phenomena that I describe in the story, that the Democratic voters still love Obama, still think Obama was great. It's an elite-driven phenomena to decide that his presidency was a failure. He presents himself as this figure, as just faced against these innumerable odds. And I mean, it's just very, very dismissive and absolving, really, of himself, of so many decisions that he made

throughout his presidency. And this began during his presidency, when Obama had a fairly chilly relationship with what they called the professional left, which was at the time a very embryonic formation of kind of progressive activist groups and intellectuals in their orbit. And then when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, a lot of those people decided that this was an indictment of the entire Obama style, the entire Obama presidency. Why did only 65% of Latino voters vote for Democratic candidate? Well, let me show you the immigrants deported under the last two administrations. Well, George Bush, he deported a lot of people. That's at the bottom, 2 million.

Guess who broke his record? Barack Obama. And then the frustrations they had with Obama began to take on a different and more specific form. How does this perception that he was maybe not left enough stack up against some of his major accomplishments, namely Obamacare? Yeah, I mean, one of the things I try to argue in this story is that Obama had an incredible array of domestic policy accomplishments. Obamacare is the most well-known.

And Obamacare itself is, you know, a whole package of reforms. It's a gigantic expansion of Medicaid. Before expansion, most adults without children or a disability weren't eligible at all, no matter how low their income. It's a regulation and subsidy of the private insurance market. It had a nationalization of the student loan industry. If you tweet, use the hashtag, don't double my rate. Don't double my rate. They closed the Medicare donut hole. Probably there was more in Obamacare than the entire Biden presidency. Come on. But they also had an economic rescue effort, which was of historic size.

They bailed out Detroit and probably saved the entire Midwest. They passed the Dodd-Frank reforms. They had, at the time, the largest green energy stimulus of all time, which led to the first global climate treaty, and a lot of other sort of medium-sized accomplishments that I think people would be celebrating if they were thinking of them. But a lot of that has kind of faded from memory. If I had told you eight years ago that America would reverse the Great Recession, reboot our auto industry.

And one argument I have is that because there was so much of it, it's kind of like Trump's misconduct. There's so much you can't keep it all in your head, and therefore it's easy to think that there wasn't very much of it. If I had told you that we would win marriage equality and secure the right to health insurance for another 20 million of our fellow citizens. If I had told you all that, you might have said our sights were set a little too high.

I'm not writing this piece, you know, for Barack Obama. So I'm not saying in this piece that everything Obama did was right. One of his major mistakes was to get behind Hillary Clinton in 2016 instead of Joe Biden. Joe Biden thinks he would have won in 2016, and I think Biden is right about that. So that was a significant error on Obama's part. But the conclusion was that Hillary Clinton was repudiated as a repudiation of Obama, as if Obama himself was on the ballot in 2016. And a lot of the indictments I've read of Obama read almost as if Trump literally beat Barack Obama in 2016. But of course, if Obama had been permitted to run by the Constitution, he would have wiped the floor with Donald Trump.

By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could. It's just that Hillary Clinton was a very poor politician and Obama was a good one. So that error is on Obama's shoulders, but it doesn't, I don't think, negate any of the accomplishments of the administration itself. But it indicts his succession management. Since you mentioned Joe Biden might have beat Donald Trump, I think we should talk about Joe Biden running against Donald Trump in 2020 briefly here. Did he do it as a Obama moderate? Did he do it as, you know, left of Obama? And if so, how did that sort of evolution transpire? This is a good point to pick up the story of where the anti-Obama campaign went during the Trump era. So

it started off with this intellectual campaign to argue against Obama and argue for a different way. And there was a lot of money going into think tanks, universities, magazines, opinion writing, pressing this argument against Obama and in quote-unquote neoliberalism. And this had a huge effect on the environment of the Democratic primary in 2020. All the candidates assumed as a result of this campaign that the party had totally repudiated Obama liberalism and was now racing left. And the whole primary was this race to the left to, in some ways, explicitly or implicitly repudiate what Obama had done and just go as far left as they could. My plan also includes getting rid of Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

When somebody comes across the border, not to criminalize desperation, to treat that as a civil violation. And a lot of the positions they adopted were toxic, just extraordinarily unpopular. Raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants. You can even see the damage of that to Kamala Harris. She was probably the greatest victim of this campaign

because she was pulled way, way to the left of where she started in the campaign. She had to repudiate her history as a prosecutor. The bottom line is the buck stops with me and I take full responsibility for what my office did. Then she started talking about defunding the police. When you have many cities that have one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way and the best way or the right way to achieve safety. Those are, to this day, her greatest liabilities. The survivor of that episode was Joe Biden. Joe Biden was offline. Joe Biden was too uncool to even know what everyone else

thought they knew about the future of the Democratic Party. And the activists all assumed that Joe Biden was yesterday's news anyway, so they weren't even really bothering to pressure him because they just assumed he was going to fade away because he was yesterday's man. But he wasn't yesterday's man. The Democratic Party's base hadn't moved very far. They still were in the same kind of center left place for the most part as they were under Obama. And they still liked Obama a lot. So Biden and his connection to Obama and Obama liberalism, made him the most popular candidate in the race, and Biden won handily.

But then he made this kind of strange decision to act as if he had been defeated. So whereas almost every candidate moves to the center after the primary, Biden moved away from the center. One thing they did was to start using race-conscious rhetoric. So I'll give you a counterexample first. When Obama passed the stimulus, someone came up to Michelle Obama and said, hey, this is the greatest anti-poverty legislation we've had in decades. And she said, shh.

And the reason she said that was they didn't want this to be seen as something for poor people. They wanted to portray it as something for the broad middle class. So unlike the tax cuts that we've seen in recent years, the vast majority of these tax benefits will go not to the wealthiest Americans, but to the middle class, with those workers who make the least benefiting the most. The same was true of Obama's approach on race issues. He knew that a lot of his measures had a really important racial equity focus, right?

You know, black people are underprivileged compared to white people by almost every, you know, major social and economic dimension. So anything you do that transfers resources from rich to the poor, and Obama did quite a bit of that, benefits black people. But he wasn't saying that. The people who were saying that were his enemies, right? It was like Rush Limbaugh saying healthcare is reparations, healthcare is for black people, healthcare is punishing the white people. Obama didn't want to say anything like that because he knew the politics were bad. Under Biden, they started following the advice of people on the left and specifically saying we are advancing racial equity in all these policies.

When the goals could just as easily have been sold in different terms. Black and Latino Americans are dying of COVID-19 at rates nearly three times that of white Americans. And it's not white Americans' fault, it's just a fact. And the Americans now know it, especially younger Americans. I mean, there's Democrats out there, even, you know, reporters out there who claim that Joe Biden may have accomplished as much as any Democrat since FDR. I saw Nancy Pelosi argue that he should have a place on Mount

Rushmore. Such a consequential president of the United States, a Mount Rushmore kind of president of the United States. I take it you disagree. That would be kind of ridiculous. I mean, so he moved rhetorically to the left, but he didn't actually achieve very much. So progressives seem to want to believe that he did what he said or are sort of acting as if he had the FDR-sized presidency that he hoped to build, but it's just not the case. I mean, and one thing we should acknowledge here is that he's a pretty unpopular president. He's a deeply unpopular president, and some of that is his fault, some of that isn't his fault.

But one of the really strange things about the way the critique has played out in the current election is that progressives are acting as if he's super popular. They've been writing a flurry of columns warning Kamala Harris not to abandon Bidenomics and not to make the mistake of doing what Obama did, as if Obama had been a failure and as if Biden had been a success, when I think the evidence suggests the reverse. We're going to talk to Jonathan about Kamala when we come back on Today Explained. 2020 2020 2020, 2020, 2024. Today Explained is back with Jonathan Chait from New York Magazine and Intelligencer. Wherever you land on these legacies, Obamas, Bidens, this conversation that you've, you know, helped kick up into a higher gear, it feels like a healthy one to be having right now, because somewhere in Chicago, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and their teams are deciding where to take this party. Where do you think they should go? I mean, I want to argue that it's a fitting topic to discuss right now because Obama really is the

closest thing we have for a model for how a politician like Kamala Harris can present herself to the public and how she can govern. Obama understood that he would read as culturally scary or new or different to a lot of Americans. But his way of handling that was to engage in, you know, what some leftists would disparage as, you know, respectability politics. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins of every race and every hue scattered across three continents. And for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible. He was trying to empathize with traditional values. He would

always, you know, express patriotism. He would always express the value of hard work. He'd say, I don't want the government to solve all our problems. He had this habit that people almost made fun of at the time of every time he explained his position, he would try to articulate what the conservative objection was and to the degree to which he understood it and had incorporated it into his own thinking. I think one of the proposals that has been focused on by the Republicans as a way to reduce costs is allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines. We actually include that as part of our approach. But the caveat is we've got to do so with some minimum standards because otherwise... And this was effective.

This was one of the reasons why he won two overwhelming elections and was able to get so much done. He didn't go around saying, I'm fundamentally transforming the country. It was his opponents who went around saying, he's fundamentally transforming the country. And he's saying, no, I'm just trying to implement some common sense solutions. So I think this question of what is the best model for Democrats is very alive. So that's one reason why my editors and I decided that this, you know, was the question that had been burbling beneath the surface for eight years. And we wanted to bring the whole story to the surface and just present the question right up front. Do you think we've seen Kamala Harris do anything so far in this, I don't know,

month of campaigning or so that suggests she's going to hew closer to Biden or Obama? Yeah, I think most of her decisions, just about everything other than picking walls, really is the kind of decision making that I would like to see from her. Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members. She's done almost everything right. Fixing the border is tough.

So is Kamala Harris. She has ditched all the positions that progressives forced her to take in 2020. She's re-embraced her identity as a prosecutor, which progressives forced her to abandon. As a prosecutor, I specialize in cases involving sexual abuse. Well, Trump was found liable for committing sexual abuse. You know, I think she's really trying to carefully tailor her rhetoric to actually existing public opinion, rather than just assume that she can, you know, whip up progressives to turn out by getting all these, you know, left-wing voters who haven't been wanting to vote, which I don't think is a realistic model of how to win elections. So yeah, I think she's making a lot of really, really strong decisions.

You said everything but picking Tim Walz, who's got this super liberal reputation from his time as governor in Minnesota, but he also seems really good at selling his liberal positions. I'm surrounded by states who are spending their time figuring out how to ban Charlotte's Web in their schools while we're banishing hunger from ours with free breakfast and lunch. Do you think he could help her sell a more liberal agenda or policies? I don't think the vice presidential pick matters a ton, but I think Walls represents a little bit of the opposing view. Don't ever shy away from our progressive values. One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness.

We don't need to actually pay any respects to conservative beliefs. All we need is someone who has a background that we think conservatives can relate to. My first car, it's a summer 1980, been saving up. I buy a 1973 orange Chevy Camaro, got an eight track player in it. Previous owner left Bob Seger's night moves in there. And then they can, their positions could be as liberal as they want. And the redder can be as liberal as they want. So today I am directing my state agencies to take action to protect and They believe there won't be a backlash. I don't think that's really true. And I think if you look at Walz's record as governor, he basically just gets everyone who's a Democrat and is opposed by everyone who's a Republican.

I don't think he really expands beyond the Democratic base. Enthusiasm for Walls, in some ways, is one of the ways in which this left-wing impulse has been redirected. This idea that you can use character and biography as a substitute for any kind of substantive concessions or even rhetorical concessions to the left, right? When you ask Tim Walz, he doesn't say like, you know, I understand why some people have concerns about abortion. He just says, even if we wouldn't make the same choice for ourselves, there's a golden rule. Mind your own damn business. You know, this piece that you've written, it's about policy. It's about policy accomplishments. It's about policy positions. Does policy matter in this election or is everyone voting on vibes?

I think, you know, American politics is very, very polarized, the decisions that those voters make pretty much determine the election. And some of those voters, you know, only go by appearances or how is the economy doing. But there really are some of them who have opinions that are somewhere between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Or maybe they have some issues that line up with one party and other issues that line up with another party. I think people on the left have underestimated the degree to which one element of Trump's success in 2016 was that he abandoned the most unpopular positions of the Republican Party. How did Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012? By running against the right-wing, unpopular Paul Ryan plan to cut taxes for the rich and cut spending on Medicare and Medicaid. And Trump instead said, no, I'm not going to cut Medicare.

That's stupid. Like, those Republicans who did that are idiots, and I'm not going to touch Medicare and Social Security. And he at least said he would raise taxes on the rich even though he wound up doing the opposite. And of course, when he did the opposite, that was unpopular and contributed to him losing. So I don't think any of this tells us that policy doesn't matter. I think, you know, taking positions that voters agree with make it easier to win elections.

Jonathan Chait, Intelligencer at New York Magazine. You can subscribe at nymag.com. Miles Bryan produced the program today. He was edited by Matthew Collette. We were fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Llewellyn and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter. I'm Sean Ramos from Noelle's Got More for You from the DNC, tomorrow on Today Explained.