Hey Ross - your perspective is pretty much 100% in line with how I feel. Yes, Biden kinda screwed up by picking Harris vs. other more popular, likable options in 2020 (even if you narrowed it only to African-American women). But in the context of late July 2024, V.P. Harris is a comparatively, young, experienced, energetic, female, pro-choice, multi-ethnic, SANE candidate running against a duplicitous (yes...an understatement), geriatric, racist, narcissistic, and just plain NUTTY white man who gave us the SCOTUS that overturned Roe v. Wade and Chevron while granting broad immunity to the Executive. (Oh yeah...he stared into the sun, told us to drink bleach, called war heroes suckers, discussed "secretly" bombing drug cartels on Mexican soil, etc., etc. - how were none of THOSE things permanently disqualifying?)
Kamala Harris was the Attorney General of California – tough on crime in a liberal state, which often didn't win her popularity contests, but also makes her kind of a “centrist” and perhaps takes a little of the "crazy California liberal" stink off her in a general election fight. This also means that it’s the Prosecutor vs. the FELON - the ads write themselves. And if they debate under the same rules as the Trump-Biden debate last month, the Prosecutor will mop the floor with the Felon.
In answer to my fellow left-leaning readers of your substack who point out Ms. Harris' lackluster performance in the 2020 primaries, allow me to respectfully remind you that she was running against a field of (mostly) sane, accomplished candidates who had a wide range of resumes and views to offer the electorate. In this case, she is running directly against Donald J. (for January 6th) Trump.
It won’t be a landslide…but I think she clearly has a better shot than Biden did (even before the disastrous debate). Consider this (and I apologize in advance for a bit of identity politics here): Kamala Harris is a comparatively young, female, half African-American, half Asian-American married to a Jew. In a race that is likely to be decided by a handful of votes in a handful of states, she may get JUST enough people who would have stayed home on the couch to come out to the polls instead. I'll take it!
I agree. It'll be interesting, too, to see if she leans on her experience as DA and AG, which she never did much when she ran for president. "I'm a prosecutor who put felons like Trump in prison" is a compelling approach. By substituting on the ticket now, she's generated a lot of goodwill with Democrats that I haven't seen before. A lot of people are relieved Biden isn't running again and a healthy, coherent candidate can make the case against Trump aggressively.
I'll add, as a 66yo white woman, that I've been wanting to see a woman in the WH for a long time. I wote a pro-choice article for my school newspaper in 1973 and got beaten up by Catholic students as a "baby killer." In 7th grade, I organized a strike to allow females to wear pants. Those of us who have lived in sexist, mysogynistic, exploitative, male-dominated, gender-prescribed environments--and I have, on both sides of the cultural divide--are pissed as hell. We do NOT want young women, even children, forced to carry dead fetuses to term. We insist that female bodies must have autonomy and the ability to craft the direction of our own lives. We are not incubators. And we are certainly not incubators intended to secure "the white race."
You kind of elided over the most important point, though. Harris, when put to the test, has proven to be incredibly unpopular in her own right.
I know we can expect every paper to start drafting hagiographies any minute. I think the last month has demonstrated that they really might hurt. When it’s obvious that something is wrong - and a lot is dramatically wrong with the Democrats right now - and the press refuses to dig into it, lots of us just assume the rest.
My point is that Harris loses in November. Someone else might have had a chance, though this election cycle is going to rank the Democrats reputation like the Iraq war tanked the republicans; but Harris? No way. And the fact that nobody important is ever going to hold her feet to the fire is going to make it worse.
I also share the concerns about Harris as a candidate, but one good sign is the way she and her team were able to consolidate support in just a few hours. That shows competence at least.
You were one of the few Democrats recognizing the obvious about Pres. Biden and brave enough to say it.
No longer in disarray? I don't know about that. The Democratic party I grew up in is gone, and this new version seems to be more focused on maintaining power (superdelegates / 'polls' used as an excuse to coup Biden out ...) than anything else.
This group is fixated by war. Trump campaigning in 2020 with 'no new wars' was correct. Now we've Israel Gaza / Russia - Ukraine / and the ginning up for China - Taiwan. The shooter at the Trump rally was, wait for it, helped along by ... Iran?? Odd that the next hot war the Dept. of Defense craves, led by a Raytheon boardmember, is brought up. I'm not the only person to see these things.
I grew up in a party that was anti war. The inability of to brush off the bloodthirsty nature of this current group of Democrats is baffling to me. That Trump is the anti-war candidate is an uncomfortable truth. Vice Pres. Harris will do nothing to stop the flow of funds to Ukraine or Israel.
I have known _of_ Harris for a long time - most of my family (which contains quite a few lawyers, not including me) has lived in San Francisco or very close to it (e.g. Oakland) from the middle 1960s on (I personally left San Francisco city limits in 1981 and the region in 1982, but stayed in CA so I have been a Harris "constituent" since her AG run); my brother went to law school with Harris and my father crossed swords with Willie Brown back in the early 1970s.
I'm not a fan of hers, although her stint as San Francisco DA back in the day was above replacement in that she did a somewhat better job - IMHO of course - than either her predecessor or her successor in that office; in very different ways SF politics over the last few decades has been as bizarre as NYC local politics (for which I again give thanks to you for the perspective you bring on that latter topic).
You wrote "because Biden himself plainly made a poor decision in choosing her in 2020"; FWIW, at the time I would have agreed with you, but I did not have quite as low an opinion of the Democratic Party collectively back then as I have developed over the past year or so :(
I have read many different stories (i.e. stories published in the 2020-21 timeframe) about the process by which Biden chose Harris, all of which I take with enormous quantities of skepticism and cynicism.
I find it very had to believe**, notwithstanding the claims many of those stories, that there was ever any real doubt that Biden was going to chose someone who could plausibly be claimed to be a Black Woman. Not "prioritizing for electability, especially swing state representation" in any direct sense, but rather to keep enough of the Identitarian Caucus (many of whom were/are of course People of Pallor) within the Democratic party/power structure on board (which in turn would also help to keep any remaining non-identitarian lefties in check). You surely remember far better than I, and in much greater detail, just how nuts 2020 was (then again, I was quite surprised that you were at all surprised by the non-reaction to the Win Rozario shooting; again, I do acknowledge that you are in NYC and I am LA-adjacent where there are important structural differences in the race and progressive hustling rackets).
** Do I correctly infer that you disagree, given What (if anything) We Know Now about what was happening behind the curtain , about the decision process Back Then, i.e. that there was a realistic chance of Biden choosing a Woman of Pallor? Please say more.
Back at the time, as a spectator, I thought overall the least bad choice was probably Keisha Lance Bottoms - publicly justifiable by Biden because she endorsed him quite early in the process and to the degree that she might have pulled a tenth of a percent extra in Georgia electorally valuable; _some_ accounts had Karen Bass, with whom my wife shared a couple of classes in high school, on the short list; that would have been an "interesting" choice.
Harris's first statement on Palestine since announcing her candidacy was to call the protesters in D.C. pro-Hamas, anti-semetic and unpatriotic, and meanwhile she met with a genocidal war criminal, presumably to get ready to continue Biden's horrible policy of 100 percent material support of Israel while offering some minor tsk-tsks over civilian deaths. I think she just told us who she is, and it's not pretty.
It is true that there's a whiff of the stitch-up about how Harris has apparently assumed - even subsumed - the nomination without having to raise so much as a fist. There's an argument though that she's the most 'democratic' candidate they could choose right now.
What was the first thing the Republicans did after Biden withdrew? With a foxy smile they affected mock-concern for all those Democrats who voted for Biden and now weren't getting what they asked for. Even though we know there was no primary (and a good reason why many of us thought ol' Joe should shuffle backstage in 2022), this is literally true, and true enough to become a stubborn talking point, enough to vex the Democrats to anxiety. But, given there was never any doubt as to who Biden's running mate would be, Harris provides them with an out, as we know that the VP automatically takes over the top of the ticket should anything happen to the nominee. A delegate royal rumble at the convention would have probably been more fun for us political tragics, and would have looked more democratic in many ways, but in the most literal sense it's probably less democratic than simply moving first desk partner up one chair to lead the band.
The original sin, yes, was the anti-democratic parody of a primary last year. Now the cards have fallen like they have, however, and this is probably the best way out of it (even though I'd have much preferred Evers, say).
Remember, that in the debate with Bernie Sanders, Biden vowed to pick a black woman to run with him, so he was sort of locked in to Harris from the start.
I remember Susan Rice, Karen Bass and Keisha Lance Bottoms all at various times being considered as altermatives to Harris. Unfortunately, I think none of them had enough of a record winning or holding a high-level political office, and Kamala's (relatively brief) stint as Senator helped seal it.
I believe the final choice was ultimately between Rice, Harris, and Val Demings. Demings was even more of a cop than Kamala - during probably the only cycle in US history where that was an electoral weakness - and Rice was too anonymous despite the Obama connection.
I was super happy yesterday morning when I saw Biden had resigned. Then super bummed in the afternoon (and even more so this morning) to see folks lining up to simply annoint Kamala without a process where she and others would have been forced to earn the nomination through some kind of mini-primary process like the one Carville was describing.
While I think she at least doubles the odds of beating Trump compared to Biden, she is a proven terrible campaigner (both as a candidate for president in 2019 and as the VP nominee in 2020) and she's done nothing since becoming Vice President to demonstrate that she has gotten better. Hopefully, I'm wrong, but from what I have seen from her as a candidate, I think her odds of being Trump are under 20%; whereas as I think a stronger candidate like a Whitmer would have odds that ranged from 40-60% depending on how a campaigner they turned out to be. Tremendously disappointed we're never going find out. I'm a Bay Area sports fan, and I'm very afraid Kamala is the James Wiseman or Trey Lance of nominees.
Think you get it right Ross that Democrats prioritized ending the "Democrats in disarray" perception. But there would have been plenty of time for that to happen after the convention. What should have been the priority over the next three weeks is identifying the best candidate to take over from Joe.
Meanwhile Ross, one point of feedback. While I think you've been broadly right about the race, I'm disappointed that you and other folks who were (correctly) calling for Biden to drop out didn't do more to advocate for the kind of telescoped process that Carville and others were calling for. I don't know why you didn't ever write about that over the last month. I think the rush to endorse Kamala was largely the result of not having an alternative process to point to, which made it a lot more difficult for potential candidates to put their hat into the ring (since there was no ring to point to).
I’m with you that Biden made a terrible choice of vice president. We have to pray that we survive it many of the names that are floated as VP are ridiculous. Nobody should want a Jewish first gentleman second gentleman and second lady in these fraught times nobody wants an African-American man And a gay man is too much of a reach. Mark Kelly did not support the pro act and would lose a Senate seat. Choose between Andy Bashir and Roy Cooper and be done with it.
I'm gay and I ask that you be aware how annoying and reductive these kinds of comments are, even if you think it's politically useful. If we always play the "country isn't ready" card, we will never have change.
I know that this sort of discourse is a Family Feud deal ("I *personally* would vote for a woman but think that the median American wouldn't") rather than reflecting on the speaker's actual opinions. But... jeez louise. You really think a ticket where both the prez and VP have Jewish *spouses* is a no-go? Really? Whose votes are imperiled by that? Stewart Rhodes? The two zoomers who are going to write in Linda Sarsour?
Maybe I don’t belong in this substack. My friends and family are livid about Gaza. They are very aware that activists are being harassed and accused of being anti-Semitic. Kamala’s husband is Jewish. The white nationalists say that Jews secretly run everything. Need I say more? Maybe I just don’t belong here.
Hey Ross - your perspective is pretty much 100% in line with how I feel. Yes, Biden kinda screwed up by picking Harris vs. other more popular, likable options in 2020 (even if you narrowed it only to African-American women). But in the context of late July 2024, V.P. Harris is a comparatively, young, experienced, energetic, female, pro-choice, multi-ethnic, SANE candidate running against a duplicitous (yes...an understatement), geriatric, racist, narcissistic, and just plain NUTTY white man who gave us the SCOTUS that overturned Roe v. Wade and Chevron while granting broad immunity to the Executive. (Oh yeah...he stared into the sun, told us to drink bleach, called war heroes suckers, discussed "secretly" bombing drug cartels on Mexican soil, etc., etc. - how were none of THOSE things permanently disqualifying?)
Kamala Harris was the Attorney General of California – tough on crime in a liberal state, which often didn't win her popularity contests, but also makes her kind of a “centrist” and perhaps takes a little of the "crazy California liberal" stink off her in a general election fight. This also means that it’s the Prosecutor vs. the FELON - the ads write themselves. And if they debate under the same rules as the Trump-Biden debate last month, the Prosecutor will mop the floor with the Felon.
In answer to my fellow left-leaning readers of your substack who point out Ms. Harris' lackluster performance in the 2020 primaries, allow me to respectfully remind you that she was running against a field of (mostly) sane, accomplished candidates who had a wide range of resumes and views to offer the electorate. In this case, she is running directly against Donald J. (for January 6th) Trump.
It won’t be a landslide…but I think she clearly has a better shot than Biden did (even before the disastrous debate). Consider this (and I apologize in advance for a bit of identity politics here): Kamala Harris is a comparatively young, female, half African-American, half Asian-American married to a Jew. In a race that is likely to be decided by a handful of votes in a handful of states, she may get JUST enough people who would have stayed home on the couch to come out to the polls instead. I'll take it!
I agree. It'll be interesting, too, to see if she leans on her experience as DA and AG, which she never did much when she ran for president. "I'm a prosecutor who put felons like Trump in prison" is a compelling approach. By substituting on the ticket now, she's generated a lot of goodwill with Democrats that I haven't seen before. A lot of people are relieved Biden isn't running again and a healthy, coherent candidate can make the case against Trump aggressively.
This is close to my analysis of Harris, Shep.
I'll add, as a 66yo white woman, that I've been wanting to see a woman in the WH for a long time. I wote a pro-choice article for my school newspaper in 1973 and got beaten up by Catholic students as a "baby killer." In 7th grade, I organized a strike to allow females to wear pants. Those of us who have lived in sexist, mysogynistic, exploitative, male-dominated, gender-prescribed environments--and I have, on both sides of the cultural divide--are pissed as hell. We do NOT want young women, even children, forced to carry dead fetuses to term. We insist that female bodies must have autonomy and the ability to craft the direction of our own lives. We are not incubators. And we are certainly not incubators intended to secure "the white race."
You kind of elided over the most important point, though. Harris, when put to the test, has proven to be incredibly unpopular in her own right.
I know we can expect every paper to start drafting hagiographies any minute. I think the last month has demonstrated that they really might hurt. When it’s obvious that something is wrong - and a lot is dramatically wrong with the Democrats right now - and the press refuses to dig into it, lots of us just assume the rest.
My point is that Harris loses in November. Someone else might have had a chance, though this election cycle is going to rank the Democrats reputation like the Iraq war tanked the republicans; but Harris? No way. And the fact that nobody important is ever going to hold her feet to the fire is going to make it worse.
I also share the concerns about Harris as a candidate, but one good sign is the way she and her team were able to consolidate support in just a few hours. That shows competence at least.
You were one of the few Democrats recognizing the obvious about Pres. Biden and brave enough to say it.
No longer in disarray? I don't know about that. The Democratic party I grew up in is gone, and this new version seems to be more focused on maintaining power (superdelegates / 'polls' used as an excuse to coup Biden out ...) than anything else.
This group is fixated by war. Trump campaigning in 2020 with 'no new wars' was correct. Now we've Israel Gaza / Russia - Ukraine / and the ginning up for China - Taiwan. The shooter at the Trump rally was, wait for it, helped along by ... Iran?? Odd that the next hot war the Dept. of Defense craves, led by a Raytheon boardmember, is brought up. I'm not the only person to see these things.
I grew up in a party that was anti war. The inability of to brush off the bloodthirsty nature of this current group of Democrats is baffling to me. That Trump is the anti-war candidate is an uncomfortable truth. Vice Pres. Harris will do nothing to stop the flow of funds to Ukraine or Israel.
I have known _of_ Harris for a long time - most of my family (which contains quite a few lawyers, not including me) has lived in San Francisco or very close to it (e.g. Oakland) from the middle 1960s on (I personally left San Francisco city limits in 1981 and the region in 1982, but stayed in CA so I have been a Harris "constituent" since her AG run); my brother went to law school with Harris and my father crossed swords with Willie Brown back in the early 1970s.
I'm not a fan of hers, although her stint as San Francisco DA back in the day was above replacement in that she did a somewhat better job - IMHO of course - than either her predecessor or her successor in that office; in very different ways SF politics over the last few decades has been as bizarre as NYC local politics (for which I again give thanks to you for the perspective you bring on that latter topic).
You wrote "because Biden himself plainly made a poor decision in choosing her in 2020"; FWIW, at the time I would have agreed with you, but I did not have quite as low an opinion of the Democratic Party collectively back then as I have developed over the past year or so :(
I have read many different stories (i.e. stories published in the 2020-21 timeframe) about the process by which Biden chose Harris, all of which I take with enormous quantities of skepticism and cynicism.
I find it very had to believe**, notwithstanding the claims many of those stories, that there was ever any real doubt that Biden was going to chose someone who could plausibly be claimed to be a Black Woman. Not "prioritizing for electability, especially swing state representation" in any direct sense, but rather to keep enough of the Identitarian Caucus (many of whom were/are of course People of Pallor) within the Democratic party/power structure on board (which in turn would also help to keep any remaining non-identitarian lefties in check). You surely remember far better than I, and in much greater detail, just how nuts 2020 was (then again, I was quite surprised that you were at all surprised by the non-reaction to the Win Rozario shooting; again, I do acknowledge that you are in NYC and I am LA-adjacent where there are important structural differences in the race and progressive hustling rackets).
** Do I correctly infer that you disagree, given What (if anything) We Know Now about what was happening behind the curtain , about the decision process Back Then, i.e. that there was a realistic chance of Biden choosing a Woman of Pallor? Please say more.
Back at the time, as a spectator, I thought overall the least bad choice was probably Keisha Lance Bottoms - publicly justifiable by Biden because she endorsed him quite early in the process and to the degree that she might have pulled a tenth of a percent extra in Georgia electorally valuable; _some_ accounts had Karen Bass, with whom my wife shared a couple of classes in high school, on the short list; that would have been an "interesting" choice.
Harris's first statement on Palestine since announcing her candidacy was to call the protesters in D.C. pro-Hamas, anti-semetic and unpatriotic, and meanwhile she met with a genocidal war criminal, presumably to get ready to continue Biden's horrible policy of 100 percent material support of Israel while offering some minor tsk-tsks over civilian deaths. I think she just told us who she is, and it's not pretty.
It is true that there's a whiff of the stitch-up about how Harris has apparently assumed - even subsumed - the nomination without having to raise so much as a fist. There's an argument though that she's the most 'democratic' candidate they could choose right now.
What was the first thing the Republicans did after Biden withdrew? With a foxy smile they affected mock-concern for all those Democrats who voted for Biden and now weren't getting what they asked for. Even though we know there was no primary (and a good reason why many of us thought ol' Joe should shuffle backstage in 2022), this is literally true, and true enough to become a stubborn talking point, enough to vex the Democrats to anxiety. But, given there was never any doubt as to who Biden's running mate would be, Harris provides them with an out, as we know that the VP automatically takes over the top of the ticket should anything happen to the nominee. A delegate royal rumble at the convention would have probably been more fun for us political tragics, and would have looked more democratic in many ways, but in the most literal sense it's probably less democratic than simply moving first desk partner up one chair to lead the band.
The original sin, yes, was the anti-democratic parody of a primary last year. Now the cards have fallen like they have, however, and this is probably the best way out of it (even though I'd have much preferred Evers, say).
Remember, that in the debate with Bernie Sanders, Biden vowed to pick a black woman to run with him, so he was sort of locked in to Harris from the start.
I remember Susan Rice, Karen Bass and Keisha Lance Bottoms all at various times being considered as altermatives to Harris. Unfortunately, I think none of them had enough of a record winning or holding a high-level political office, and Kamala's (relatively brief) stint as Senator helped seal it.
I believe the final choice was ultimately between Rice, Harris, and Val Demings. Demings was even more of a cop than Kamala - during probably the only cycle in US history where that was an electoral weakness - and Rice was too anonymous despite the Obama connection.
Good piece Ross.
I was super happy yesterday morning when I saw Biden had resigned. Then super bummed in the afternoon (and even more so this morning) to see folks lining up to simply annoint Kamala without a process where she and others would have been forced to earn the nomination through some kind of mini-primary process like the one Carville was describing.
While I think she at least doubles the odds of beating Trump compared to Biden, she is a proven terrible campaigner (both as a candidate for president in 2019 and as the VP nominee in 2020) and she's done nothing since becoming Vice President to demonstrate that she has gotten better. Hopefully, I'm wrong, but from what I have seen from her as a candidate, I think her odds of being Trump are under 20%; whereas as I think a stronger candidate like a Whitmer would have odds that ranged from 40-60% depending on how a campaigner they turned out to be. Tremendously disappointed we're never going find out. I'm a Bay Area sports fan, and I'm very afraid Kamala is the James Wiseman or Trey Lance of nominees.
Think you get it right Ross that Democrats prioritized ending the "Democrats in disarray" perception. But there would have been plenty of time for that to happen after the convention. What should have been the priority over the next three weeks is identifying the best candidate to take over from Joe.
Meanwhile Ross, one point of feedback. While I think you've been broadly right about the race, I'm disappointed that you and other folks who were (correctly) calling for Biden to drop out didn't do more to advocate for the kind of telescoped process that Carville and others were calling for. I don't know why you didn't ever write about that over the last month. I think the rush to endorse Kamala was largely the result of not having an alternative process to point to, which made it a lot more difficult for potential candidates to put their hat into the ring (since there was no ring to point to).
There are other processes. Open primaries and ranked choice voting. FairVote. RankTheVote.
Ross, I noticed the leading Democrats lining up to support Kamala on cable yesterday afternoon. The only one I saw on CNN's air equivocating was Mayor Eric Adams. He was mumbling about process. Here's the transcript: https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/569-24/transcript-mayor-adams-appears-live-cnn-s-cnn-breaking-news-
I’m with you that Biden made a terrible choice of vice president. We have to pray that we survive it many of the names that are floated as VP are ridiculous. Nobody should want a Jewish first gentleman second gentleman and second lady in these fraught times nobody wants an African-American man And a gay man is too much of a reach. Mark Kelly did not support the pro act and would lose a Senate seat. Choose between Andy Bashir and Roy Cooper and be done with it.
I'm gay and I ask that you be aware how annoying and reductive these kinds of comments are, even if you think it's politically useful. If we always play the "country isn't ready" card, we will never have change.
This is my reaction, Chris, during my first entry into this space. Perhaps I should be quiet, and listen for a while.
I know that this sort of discourse is a Family Feud deal ("I *personally* would vote for a woman but think that the median American wouldn't") rather than reflecting on the speaker's actual opinions. But... jeez louise. You really think a ticket where both the prez and VP have Jewish *spouses* is a no-go? Really? Whose votes are imperiled by that? Stewart Rhodes? The two zoomers who are going to write in Linda Sarsour?
Maybe I don’t belong in this substack. My friends and family are livid about Gaza. They are very aware that activists are being harassed and accused of being anti-Semitic. Kamala’s husband is Jewish. The white nationalists say that Jews secretly run everything. Need I say more? Maybe I just don’t belong here.
Well a lot of the activists *are* antisemitic. Are Dems depending on some combination of their approval and the votes of white nationalists?