U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris speaks at the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. annual convention at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, on July 10.LM Otero/The Associated Press
Update: This columm was written before Joe Biden dropped out of the U.S. presidential race on July 21. Read more here.
It wasn’t so long ago that United States Vice-President Kamala Harris was said to be doing so poorly in her job that Joe Biden should drop her from the Democratic ticket.
Now, of course, it is Mr. Biden who could well be discarded. And if that transpires, it’s Ms. Harris, the 59-year-old Californian who spent her formative teenage years in Canada, who has the best chance of getting the nomination.
Once again the fates have intervened to prop her up.
She ran a dismal campaign in the 2020 Democratic primaries – so bad that she dropped out before a single vote was cast. But the shocking police murder of George Floyd made it all but mandatory that Joe Biden pick a Black American as his running mate. Ms. Harris became the choice.
Then came the strange turn of chance that saw Mr. Biden appear on the presidential debate stage in June looking and sounding like he’d just suffered a stroke. As with her weak showing in the primaries, her poor performance as Vice-President didn’t matter; unforeseen developments catapulted her.
What role will providence play next? Will it take Ms. Harris, who went to high school in Montreal, all the way to the Oval Office?
Ms. Harris spent a quarter-century as a prosecutor in California. No candidate is better suited to taking on criminals. The way the stars have aligned, if she replaces Mr. Biden as the Democratic nominee, she will be right in her element: she will face the convicted felon Donald Trump.
If Mr. Biden somehow keeps the nomination and goes on to win in November, Ms. Harris will still be – given the extent of his 81-year-old frailties – well-positioned to take over from him at some point in that second term.
Should Mr. Biden step down, there are several other potentially strong contenders for the nomination. But she is clearly, being Vice-President, in the pole position. California Governor Gavin Newsom is eloquent, smooth, and Kennedyesque – but he’s so coastal, so French laundry. The other most mentioned contender, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, says she’s not interested in running should Mr. Biden step aside. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo gets rave reviews, but is unknown. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who did so well in the 2020 primaries, has all but disappeared.
Ms. Harris shares in Mr. Biden’s low approval ratings, but probably stands a better chance of beating Mr. Trump than he does. Her expectations are low and easy to exceed – and she is starting to surpass them. As Vice-President, she has lacked clarity of purpose until – in another good break for her – the Supreme Court solved that problem with its ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
In seizing the abortion-rights issue, Ms. Harris found her footing, and the media are giving her a second, less critical look. That the Trump team is worried more about her than Mr. Biden is evident from the fact that they are not saturating the airwaves with ads featuring his debate collapse.
They’d prefer him to stay in the race, and it’s no small wonder. For all her shortcomings, the much younger Ms. Harris has potentially more appeal to Black Americans, more appeal to youth, more appeal to women, more appeal to independents (as a recent CNN poll showed), and more command – she bested Mike Pence in the 2020 veep debate – of any debate stage.
The unknown is how she could hold up to the intense pressure of a presidential campaign – whether she can find the gravitas, the cutting edge, the confidence she showed as a senator cross-examining Trump appointees. It’s what brought her to prominence. They withered under her glare.
In her role as Vice-President, Mr. Biden didn’t ease Ms. Harris’s difficulties by giving her the next-to-impossible assignment of handling the immigration file, amid a crisis at the southern border. But insiders say that Mr. Biden has come around to respecting her abilities and that, if pushed out by the party, he is prepared to signal that she should be the one to take the mantle.
Mr. Trump has started, as he did at a campaign rally in Florida on Tuesday, painting Ms. Harris as a leftist who is way off in Bernie Sanders Land. She will come under heavy bombardment from the master of malice. But I think, should she become the Democratic nominee, that she has the potential to counter him more trenchantly than did Hillary Clinton.
Given her trajectory of good fortune, she might not even need to run a stellar campaign. The fates might again intervene on her behalf. They might at long last deal Mr. Trump the reckoning that his rancid character so deserves.