Hard-nosed cop or soft-pedaling prosecutor? Friend of Wall Street or closet socialist? Sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians or steadfast defender of Israel?
It’s revealing that, this deep into her career in public office, Vice President Kamala Harris’ allies and enemies have struggled to pin down her ideology. Are her political instincts progressive or is she a moderate? As Harris stakes out a party platform and polishes her stump speech, a makeshift Harris doctrine will become clearer. But for now, in some ways she remains a mystery who’s been subject to wildly conflicting portrayals from the media, her Republican rivals and even those within her own party.
When she ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003, she beat incumbent Terence Hallinan in a nonpartisan runoff by running to his right, attacking Hallinan for not being tough enough on crime, while also courting the police union, with whom Hallinan had run afoul.
Yet when the Los Angeles Times profiled her a year into her term it referred to Harris not as a tough-on-crime crusader but as being “in the vanguard of progressive reformers who say that California’s criminal justice system is in dire need of drastic change.” Then she found herself on the wrong side of that same police union — and California Democratic giant Jerry Brown — when she stuck to a campaign promise that she wouldn’t seek the death penalty after a young police officer was killed in the city.
After her election as attorney general of California in 2010, Harris quickly won a big settlement from banks amidst the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and established a national profile as a speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. But during her time as attorney general, she also ran afoul of left-wing activists in the state, many of whom had previously supported her. Complaints began to surface that she wasn’t doing enough about police brutality, in particular after she declined to investigate the police shootings of two Black men in 2014 and 2015. In 2016, in the midst of her statewide campaign for U.S. Senate, she proudly adopted the moniker of “top cop,” referring to a tough on crime record.
After she won her seat, just as Donald Trump was ushered into the White House, Harris quickly became one of the Trump administration’s leading antagonists, asking probing questions of various Trump officials and allies in Senate hearings. She was particularly harsh on fellow trained lawyers Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh, attacking the latter during his confirmation hearing about the Mueller investigation, then a liberal hobbyhorse. In doing so, she endeared herself to the resistance left, who saw her as well positioned to take on Trump.
In the leadup to her 2020 presidential run, Harris tried to build a coalition of more moderate liberals and progressives — in particular, she attempted to build left-wing bona fides by supporting the two legislative building blocks of a progressive agenda, the Green New Deal and Medicare for All (though her M4A plan differed from other progressives’). But progressives nevertheless latched onto the “Kamala is a cop” rhetoric in an attempt to leverage the perception on the left that Harris’ pro-law enforcement background made her unfit to be the Democratic nominee — and thus should be discredited as an opportunistic progressive. The cop memes that proliferated online in 2019 frustrated Harris, who said at the time she was “fully aware” of the memes and upset by them.
Ironically, with a shifting political environment and no real primary battle to overcome, the cop memes and the idea that she was not a true progressive prosecutor might actually redound to her benefit this year in a general election setting. And the longstanding critiques of her on the left may also insulate her to a degree against Republican attacks on her as a left wing extremist. The National Republican Congressional Committee has called her “the most extreme progressive presidential nominee in history,” but it’s a difficult case to make given the moments in which Harris has angered the left (she went so far as to write in her 2009 book that liberals should move beyond “biases against law enforcement”).
Harris also boasts good relationships on Wall Street, and the top Wall Street executives who are now jumping in to help Harris raise cash are hopeful that she’ll maintain cozier, more moderate relationships with the big banks than the Biden administration has.
As some of Harris’ contradictions come to the fore — friend to Wall Street and co-sponsor of the Green New Deal — some critics have cast her as a shapeshifter whose ideology is mutable. In other words, as someone quickly willing to change her mind as the political moment requires.
The reality is more complicated. The quick moving nature of her career and the different roles that she’s on her climb up the ladder has made it difficult to discern a cogent worldview. Now, as the standard bearer of the Democratic Party, she has to build one, and fast, before Republicans define it for her. Even in her first week in charge, there are already signs it’ll look a little bit different from Biden. When she stumped in Wisconsin today to the delight of a re-energized crowd, she mentioned many of the same pledges as Biden — protecting unions, expanding abortion rights and rebuilding a stronger middle class. The difference was back in D.C. — as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived on U.S. soil, she announced that she wouldn’t be presiding over his address to Congress.
Source: Politico
