How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be?
"For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been circling around this question: Does it actually matter if Kamala Harris stands for something? The days that have passed since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President have been filled with palace intrigue, the occasional stirring speech, a bounce in the polls, and a Vice-Presidential pageant that, frankly, got a bit boring, as a handful of perfectly fine candidates tried very hard to be nice to one another. We know Campaign Kamala is about “freedom,” which her first ad defines in terms that align entirely with the policy preferences of the Democratic Party—so, for instance, the freedom to own whatever kind of gun you want is superseded by, as the ad puts it, “the freedom to be safe from gun violence.” This is totally reasonable but, linguistically speaking, perhaps a bit of a stretch. We know that Harris was a prosecutor. We know that Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, are “weird.” And we know that Harris has erased much of Trump’s lead in swing states, and that things are looking up.
That’s about the extent of it. Harris has shown more talent for giving speeches than the last time she ran, in 2019, and her campaign and her fellow-Democrats deserve credit for her rise in the polls amid heavy skepticism from many, including me, that they could pull off a candidate switch. But we should also be honest about what we are dealing with here. In tennis, a “pusher” is a player who safely returns the ball over the net, again and again, waiting for an increasingly frustrated opponent to make a mistake. This appears to be Campaign Kamala’s strategy: don’t make any unforced errors, keep things vanilla, and eventually Trump or Vance will implode. Harris—as Vance has repeatedly pointed out on Twitter, with the hashtag #wheresKamala—has taken almost no questions from reporters, and has spent most of her time giving stump speeches at rallies. She has not explained what, exactly, happened in Washington after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate; or why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for All, which she once supported; or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is said to be unpopular among some of Harris’s wealthy donors; or much about how a Harris Administration would handle the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
I suspect that a majority of voters don’t really care about the answers to those questions, at least not in any serious way. On the Democratic side, there’s an energized, good feeling about Campaign Kamala—to a degree not felt, on a Presidential level, since Barack Obama’s last race—and nobody wants to mess that up with debates about policy. Harris is popular; Biden was not. Harris gives the Democrats a shot at beating Trump; Biden most likely did not. Most of the liberals I know seem to be enveloped in a pleasant if thin fog in which concerns and criticisms melt away. The believers do not need explanations as long as Harris’s poll numbers remain encouraging...
There was a chance, perhaps, that Harris could have defined herself more pointedly with her choice for Vice-President... Like every other aspect of Harris’s campaign to date, they represented safe choices, and the decision arrived with little public explanation from above. (Another thing about the Harris campaign: so far, it seems to have leaks under control.) Walz, in the end, might not bolster the ticket enough to get Harris elected, but it’s hard to see him becoming the center of constant negative attention the way that Vance has for the Trump campaign. He is another ball played safely back over the net.
Part of Harris’s success thus far derives from the extraordinary circumstances that led to her becoming the presumptive nominee. She is running in a general election without having gone through a primary, in which all her vague positions would have been interrogated both by the press and by the candidates running against her. There have been no awkward debate moments, like the one in 2019 when Tulsi Gabbard, then a member of Congress, reminded voters that Harris had put more than fifteen hundred people in prison for marijuana violations and had “laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” (In response, Harris, who inconsistently adopted her “prosecutor President” persona in what ultimately was a confused campaign, didn’t address the specific critique, instead later noting how poorly Gabbard was polling and calling her an apologist for the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad.) Now Harris is running as a quasi-incumbent who doesn’t have to answer all that much for what she did during the past four years. A Democratic polling firm concluded, for instance, that “voters do not hold her accountable for Biden’s perceived failures on inflation,” meaning that Harris “can run hard on economic messaging.” She can claim credit for things that voters like about the last four years while plausibly distancing herself from some of the things they don’t.
As wildly different as Harris and Trump are, their campaigns seem to share a degree of indifference to the specifics of what their candidates are saying, because both campaigns realize that many of their voters are unconcerned about such details—or, at the very least, are unlikely to be moved by them. What matters to many voters right now is their hatred and fear, however justified, of the opposing candidate, and the fun they have calling the other side weird, dangerous, and deranged. Harris and Trump, under differing circumstances, and in different ways, have floated above what was once the perfunctory and deeply unsexy muck of campaigning on a platform, or for some particular issue, and seem to exist more as brands. Other Presidential candidates have risen above that muck, too—often the highly charismatic ones, like John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Obama—but I can’t think of a race that was quite as unmoored as this one from the actual details of governance. Trump has been insisting that he doesn’t actually know anything about Project 2025. Harris’s campaign Web site, meanwhile, does not even have a policy section, or an articulation of beliefs. There’s just a button to donate, some merch and yard signs, and a biography that describes her as “the daughter of parents who brought her to civil rights marches in a stroller.”
The task of filling in what Harris prefers to leave blank would usually fall to the press. But, to date, there have not been particularly loud or widespread calls for her to sit down and answer questions, as there were for Biden after his catastrophic debate. I think it’s fair to say that, so far, the mainstream press has handled Harris quite gently. This is not, in my view, a matter of partisan leaning—although I should say that, having worked in the media for about fifteen years, at several institutions, I have not had a single co-worker who openly supported Trump. (I don’t even know of anyone who I suspect might have voted for him.) But if the media’s liberal makeup inured all Democratic candidates from criticism, we wouldn’t have had endless coverage of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, or a relentless call for Biden to withdraw from the race. You could argue that the overwhelming push in the media to remove Biden simply had to be followed by the lionization of his successor—but the media, especially those of us who churn out opinions for a living, cannot actually achieve that level of coördination...
I wonder how the mainstream press will respond to a scandal, or even a hiccup, in the Harris campaign. If it turns out that Harris has been maintaining an idiosyncratic and not entirely secure approach to e-mail, or if a relative dropped off a laptop filled with salacious images for repair and they were shared with the New York Post, how would the media handle the story? More plausibly, if Campaign Kamala sticks with this strategy of keeping the candidate on message through speeches and answering few questions from the press corps, will reporters just shrug and let it go? Should we care that she has not done a sitdown interview or had to answer a substantive policy question in weeks?
The answer is that reporters should care but shouldn’t expect voters, or even their audiences, to follow suit. This may be a minority view, but I don’t think that journalists are ethically bound to stop Trump and “preserve democracy,” nor do I think that every criticism of or investigation into a liberal candidate needs to be balanced with a cursory statement about how Trump is a lying felon. If Harris is running a campaign that’s full of energy but short on specifics, we should say that, even if we think that Harris’s content-light approach is an optimal strategy for winning in November.
A few weeks ago, back when Biden was still the presumptive Democratic nominee, I wrote about his attacks on the media. He seemed to be tapping into a feeling that members of the press, who had labelled themselves the guardians of democracy during the first Trump Presidency, should live up to that grandiose title and protect the Republic against the dangers of his opponent. I understand why many people feel that this is the press’s job right now, and it can be difficult to write proportionally about flip-flops and fudging when those things are measured against Trump’s absurd inventions and provocations. But I do not think that it will help anyone if the media allows Harris to run her campaign with zero criticism, or any probing into where she stands on contentious issues—even if such questioning is met with pushback on social media, where the mildest criticism of the Democrats can unleash a flood of outraged claims that the press is repeating the “but her e-mails” travesty and dooming the country to four more years of Trump. One can believe, as I do, that some mistakes were made in the coverage of Clinton’s e-mail server and still understand that the media should do its job, and interrogate the Harris campaign, especially the parts that don’t exist yet.
A generic candidate who promises nothing on the campaign trail and is unburdened by any past might be the dream of electoral-politics nerds, but it’s the job of the press in a healthy democracy to make sure that voters know whom they’re supporting. An unexamined candidate can become anything, and can work under the influence of anyone, when they assume power. This week, Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland, suggested on CNBC that a Harris Administration would change course from Biden’s more restrictive regulatory economic policies and create a friendlier atmosphere for “our large industries.” Was he speaking on Harris’s behalf? Does he know something that Harris has declined to share with the public herself?
On Wednesday, Harris was interrupted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators at a rally in Michigan, a state with a large Arab and Muslim population. She went off script, one of the few times in the past three weeks that she has done so; after responding respectfully to the chants at first, she said, “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” She has called for an end to the war in Gaza and has coupled her concern about the suffering of Palestinians with an ironclad support for Israel. But how does she plan on bringing about the ceasefire that she says she’s for? On Wednesday, the Times reported that Harris, before the rally, had told leaders of the Uncommitted Movement, seeking to discuss an arms embargo, that she was open to a meeting; on Thursday morning, her national-security adviser insisted that she was not in favor of an arms embargo. Why the seeming change in tone? And how does Harris feel about the student protesters who will be returning to their campuses in the upcoming weeks? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions."
