At the beginning of 2019, I wrote a column enthusiastically arguing that Kamala Harris was the Democratic Party’s strongest candidate to take on Donald Trump. My core argument was pretty simple: If Democrats hoped to defeat him, they needed the toughest gladiator they could get, and Harris fit that bill.
Her campaign memoir from that year features a string of scenes in which she trounced powerful men. People who watched her as a prosecutor and a rising political star have testified to her skills in the art of confrontation. In the column, I quoted something that Gary Delagnes, the former head of San Francisco’s police union, told Politico: “She’s an intelligent person. She is a — let’s see, I better pick this word carefully: ruthless.”
Looking back, that column was not wrong, but it was limited. We’ve seen a lot more of Harris in the ensuing years. Today, as she seemingly cruises to the Democratic nomination, I find myself experiencing a dizzying range of emotions. Some moments, I share the jolt of enthusiasm many are feeling. Other moments, I think the Democrats are suffering from a mass hypnotic delusion, nominating a candidate who is seriously flawed. To make sense of this mishmash of thoughts, I thought I’d put together a report card of her strengths and weaknesses.
Toughness: A. Harris still has it. In the rallies and events she has done since her ascension, Harris has been dominating, poised and exuberant. She prosecutes Trump with smiling self-confidence and an undertone of utter contempt. If playful aggression is a thing, she projects it.
Leadership and management skills: C. Harris’ ability to get pretty much the entire party behind her in just a few days after Joe Biden dropped out is tremendously impressive. On the other hand, from her time as the San Francisco district attorney straight through her time as vice president, Harris has earned a reputation for degrading underlings and burning through staff. Biden has a coterie of people who have been with him for decades, but Harris has no such group. The Substack newsletter Open the Books ran the numbers and calculated that as of March 31, over 90% of the staff she had at the beginning of her vice-presidential term had left.
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” a former staff member told The Washington Post in a December 2021 article. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So, you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
This criticism is incredibly damning, but the turmoil in her office was more evident at the beginning of her time as vice president than more recently.
Analytical abilities: B+. As vice president, Harris has earned a reputation for being focused in meetings, for asking the right questions, for asking people to get to the point, for her ability to size up a situation. “My bias has always been to speak factually, to speak accurately, to speak precisely about issues and matters that have potentially great consequence,” she told the Times last fall. “I find it off-putting to just engage in platitudes. I much prefer to deconstruct an issue and speak of it in a way that hopefully elevates public discourse and educates the public.”
Vision: C. One problem with her terrible 2020 presidential campaign was that she was running as a prosecutor at a time when her party was lurching leftward. Another was identified by former Obama adviser David Axelrod in an interview with Elaina Plott Calabro of The Atlantic: “It looked as if she didn’t know where to plant her feet. That she wasn’t sort of grounded, that she didn’t know exactly who she was.” That’s still somewhat true. She hasn’t shown that she has the kind of coherent worldview — the way, say, Biden does — you need to be a good decision-maker in the White House. Over the past few years, when Harris has been asked to articulate her overall philosophy, she often produces a meaningless word salad, ripe for ridicule.
In California politics, the safe thing to do is to play to the progressive base. So in interviews she gave during her 2020 run she would often revert to positions that some progressives loved, even though they were politically suicidal in the swing states. She said she wanted to ban fracking, decriminalize illegal immigration, end the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal and eliminate private health insurance. Republicans are now making hay out of these statements, but it’s not clear how much she believes what she claimed to believe back then.
Relatability: B. Some of Harris’ best moments come not when she is giving a speech to an audience but when she is listening to others describe their lives and problems. She is good at compassionate exchange. To me, when Republicans criticize her laugh, it’s both trivial and politically counterproductive. Her laugh is big, genuine and unguarded — a rare feature in any politician.
Her larger problem, of course, is that she’s a member of the progressive educated elite from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her father was a Stanford professor and her mother was a cancer researcher. She has lived her life in a very unusual slice of America. This is not an ideal background if your job is to win over working-class voters in western Pennsylvania, small-town Michigan and suburban Georgia.
Composure: C. Some politicians have minds like a jukebox. You mention a topic, and they will play whatever record they have stored in their brain that goes with that topic. Harris has seemed less good at handling that kind of spontaneous exchange. This has led to some of her worst and most insecure moments. In 2021, after she was tasked with finding the root causes of the immigration crisis, NBC’s Lester Holt asked her if she would visit the U.S.-Mexico border. She replied, “At some point, you know, I — we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole, this whole — this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.” Holt reminded her that in fact she hadn’t yet visited the border. Harris cut back on media interviews after that humiliating encounter.
Overall reputation: C. Today, many Democrats are smitten by Harris. Having endured despair as the Biden campaign foundered, they are thrilled to have a strong, dynamic and fresh candidate who at least gives them a chance. But this was not how well-informed Democrats thought of her over most of the Biden term. In February of 2023, my Times colleagues Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Katie Rogers and Peter Baker surveyed Democratic views on Harris. Here is the core of their reporting:
“The painful reality for Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her,” they wrote.
“Through much of the fall, a quiet panic set in among key Democrats about what would happen if Biden opted not to run for a second term. Most Democrats interviewed, who insisted on anonymity to avoid alienating the White House, said flatly that they did not think Harris could win the presidency in 2024. Some said the party’s biggest challenge would be finding a way to sideline her without inflaming key Democratic constituencies that would take offense.”
My bottom line, I guess, is that Harris is a smart and forceful person with a commanding political presence. But as of 18 months ago, she would not have made an effective president or even a good candidate. She ran a disastrous presidential campaign and has been a mediocre vice president, even measured by the low standards of the office. She could always repeat the normal Democratic positions but had no distinctive view for where the country needed to go.
The crucial question is: Has she learned and grown? Democrats keep telling me that she’s a much more confident campaigner, a much more effective manager, a much more focused thinker. I’m open to that possibility. But I just spent a week in Milwaukee during which Republicans kept reassuring me that Trump had changed for the better, was a man transformed.
The Republican arguments turned out to be hokum. The Harris 2.0 theory had better be more correct.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
