Who Is Kamala Harris?
Matthew ContinettiSeptember 2024 Issue Commentary.org
On July 30, Kamala Harris released the first TV ad of her presidential campaign. The 60-second spot, titled “Fearless,” leans heavily on biography. The narrator begins with Harris’s career as a prosecutor, when she locked up “murderers and abusers.” There’s a mention of her tenure as California state attorney general and her fight against “the big banks.” Harris’s years as vice president, we are told, have been spent controlling the price of insulin. We hear a quote from one of her recent speeches. “This campaign,” Harris says, “is about who we fight for.”
The commercial is noteworthy for what it excludes. It leaves out Harris’s four years in the U.S. Senate, when she compiled a voting record that put her in the same company as the far-left Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The ad doesn’t mention her calamitous run for president in 2020, when she called for the abolition of private health insurance, the decriminalization of border crossings, and the passage of the economy-crushing Green New Deal, then dropped out two months before Iowa. The name of the man for whom Harris has served as vice president also goes unuttered in the television spot, but that’s understandable: At this writing, according to Real Clear Politics, President Biden has an average job approval rating of 41 percent.
“Fearless,” then, is a giant step in Kamala Harris’s ongoing redefinition, her miraculous transformation from political liability to electoral juggernaut. As I write, it’s 10 days since Joe Biden left the presidential race, and in that brief time she has tried to change her positions, drop the baggage, and pretend that she’s never met this Biden guy. It’s clear that Harris wants to be perceived, in her latest guise, as a Democrat who is tough on crime, and a populist eager to take on Wall Street and Big Pharma. She wants to go forward, not back, toward freedom, not fear, and blah blah blah. The ad skims across a surface of generalities. Harris never says whom, exactly, she fights for. She never says what, concretely, she would do as president.
But her actions provide clues. In her first week, Harris not only racked up endorsements and cash. She also made decisions that tell us more about her politics and her instincts than any slickly produced TV spot. Whether the subject is Israel or the Supreme Court, Harris has aligned with forces in the Democratic Party pushing a left-wing agenda. Like Biden, she masks radical change behind a genial, moderate smile. Unlike Biden, she has no discernible physical or mental infirmities and can read a teleprompter without struggle. That makes her more competitive with Donald Trump—and more dangerous.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on July 24, for example, Vice President Harris was nowhere to be seen. She and roughly half of the Democrats serving in Congress skipped Netanyahu’s speech, in protest or in fear of the consequences of associating with Israel amid rising anti-Semitism in their party. Harris chose instead to visit Indianapolis, where she addressed the Grand Boulé of Zeta Phi Beta, a historically black sorority. While there, she praised Joe Biden and called him, presumably with a straight face, a “leader with bold vision.” She cast the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as “extreme.” Above all, she basked in the adoration of the crowd. “So let us continue to fight with optimism, with faith, and with hope,” Harris said. “Because when we fight, we win.”
If only she had the same attitude toward Israel’s fight against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the terror masters in Tehran. The next afternoon in Washington, Harris greeted Netanyahu by saying, like a teacher to an unruly student, “We have a lot to talk about.” When the talk was over, Harris appeared alone before the cameras. “Israel has a right to defend itself,” she said, “and how it does so matters.” The formulation was odd. Israel’s right to self-defense should be self-evident. And the second half of the sentence implies that Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, atrocities has not met her unspecified standards.
Still, Harris said she supported Israel. She read aloud the names of the five Americans that Hamas holds captive. That was good. The rest of her remarks, not so much. She suggested that Netanyahu, not Hamas, is responsible for the devastation in Gaza, and she adopted the pro-Hamas framing of massive, indiscriminate civilian casualties and widespread “food insecurity.” She suggested that Netanyahu, not Hamas, is the real obstacle to a hostage deal and proclaimed that the “war in Gaza is not a binary issue.”
In fact, there is no more binary issue in the world today than a democratic nation retaliating against a genocidal terrorist organization that rapes and murders innocents, hides behind hospitals and schools, and burrows underground. Harris’s reluctance to adopt the moral clarity of her Democratic colleagues Senator John Fetterman and Representative Richie Torres, and her bathetic equivalence of “anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and hate of any kind,” ought seriously to disturb supporters of Israel—and of America.
A few days later, President Biden took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to announce his planned renovation of the U.S. Constitution. Angered by recent Supreme Court decisions on abortion and presidential immunity—while saying nothing of the numerous cases on which the Court agrees unanimously—and triggered by a flurry of spurious charges of ethical impropriety against two conservative justices, Biden proposed several drastic countermeasures.
He unveiled a new “No One Is Above the Law” amendment to the Constitution, which would overrule the Court’s decision in Trump v.United States and “make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office” (details to follow). He proposed a system of Supreme Court term limits in which a president “would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.” And he demanded “a binding code of conduct” for the Supreme Court.
The reforms are the most daring assault on the separation of powers and judicial independence since the Court-packing scheme of 1937. Finally, Biden has something in common with FDR.
His ideas are hypocritical—note that only at the end of Biden’s 50-year career does he embrace term limits, and then for someone else. His ideas are also unconstitutional, unworkable, and, with a GOP-controlled House of Representatives, dead on arrival. Biden’s Court proposal isn’t high-minded or considered or realistic or connected to the rule of law. It’s a payoff to the left wing of his party. It’s a bid to mobilize the Democratic base this November.
Vice President Harris signed on immediately. The Biden scheme, she said in a statement, would “restore confidence in the Court, strengthen our democracy, and ensure no one is above the law.” On the contrary: Biden’s refurbished Court would be more politicized than before, more partisan, and more riven by accusations of corruption. And Biden’s fantasy immunity amendment would make it more likely that former presidents would face bankruptcy or jail for contentious decisions made in the crucible of high office.
When you shift your gaze from Harris’s “Fearless” ad and the wall-to-wall positive media coverage of her campaign rollout and look at Harris’s treatment of Netanyahu and her reckless approach to the Supreme Court, a more accurate picture of her begins to emerge. A Harris presidency would be as incompetent and as unpleasant as Joe Biden’s, but even, if you can imagine, farther to the left.
Who is Kamala Harris? She’s afraid we might find out.
Photo: AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson
