It’s Harris as Biden plays it safe

So, it’s finally clear that Joe Biden doesn’t hold a grudge. If he had, he certainly wouldn’t have made Kamala Harris, the junior senator for California, his pick for vice-president.

Arguably, Biden has made an uninspired choice given that this ticket had been the obvious call for the past two years, but perhaps that means it makes particular sense right now. This year has been unpredictable in almost everything and there’s little reason to think that the election won’t be any different, given Donald Trump’s clear intent to invalidate and/or litigate any result other than a huge win. If the logic going into this election cycle was to pick the people Trump would least like to run against (a Sanders/Warren ticket would have been his dream), the Democrats have at last done just that. Ignore the President’s protestations otherwise, Biden/Harris is not the team that the incumbent would have picked to run against. They are a solid choice for Democrats who can now present a balanced, sensible, and familiar alternative to Donald Trump.

Really, the only question going into this process had been: why wouldn’t Biden pick Harris?

Doubts arose because of an early Democratic debate, back in June 2019, when Harris has been particularly egregious in accusing Biden of supporting “bussing”, the practice of addressing racial inequalities in local areas by moving black students into white schools. Biden had said it was a matter for the states and districts and that the federal government should have no position on the matter. Harris had memorably responded by talking about herself being bussed.

“That little girl was me”, she said, in what might have been her most effective campaign performance but also her most performative performance. It demonstrated the capacity she has for connecting with voters but also her relative inexperience that can lead her to overreach and stray into somewhat crass sentimentalism. What began as a crude hit appeared even cruder in subsequent days when it became evident that her own opinion was the same as Biden’s. It wasn’t just unfair it was bad politics and a huge miscalculation. Her campaign never recovered and, so it seemed, went her chance to join Biden on his ticket.

Yet Biden has a reputation for playing safe and this time he had good reason. He’s the oldest candidate to run for the presidency, older than the man he seeks to replace (himself the oldest president on the day of his inauguration), and, as such, he looks from here to be lining up a one-term presidency. All those facts put extra emphasis on his running mate. The field of candidates was broad but too many lacked experience on the national stage. It’s just four short years until the next election and his pick could be in a prime position to win the party’s nomination next time around. This choice becomes, then, both a gift to the candidate but also a marker as to the future direction of the Democratic Party; a pick that ensures success this time but also, perhaps, in the next election cycle.

In those terms, Harris is a solid pick. She’s not so centrist to arouse the contempt of the left but nor is she so radical to alienate the moderates. She also sets Republicans something of a puzzle. It was only minutes after Harris’s nomination before her Wikipedia page was defaced with a particularly ugly four-letter ad-hominem but that perhaps reflects the degree to which Harris presents a difficult target. For hours leading up to the announcement, the name of Susan Rice had been trending on Twitter, which perhaps had less to do with Democratic enthusiasm for Obama’s former National Security Advisor than Republican optimism that the next few months could be spent relitigating Benghazi.

Harris, on the other hand, offers no such easy vector for attack. She had a spell as Attorney General of California but, like others with similar backgrounds, it shouldn’t come into play in this election. It would be self-defeating for a so-called “law and order president” to accuse her of being too tough on crime.

Indeed, it’s a sign of how much Harris is in something of a blind spot for Trump that his first reaction was to tweet out a video in which Harris was given the “radical left” label he’s been pushing for the past few years. As with his attempts to portray Biden as being the plaything of the “violent left”, these attacks are already thin porridge. He can throw it as much as he wants but it’s hard to see any of it sticking, let alone hardening in the way “crooked” clung to Clinton in 2016. In a press conference shortly after the announcement, the President displayed a distinct lack of bombast. He accused Harris of being phoney, a liar, and called her “nasty” but the latter is something he often levels against female opponents and doesn’t necessarily help him win over older female voters, who comprise a large and important bloc in the coming election.

Beyond that, we can expect attacks along familiar lines – spending, the military, taxation – as well as attempts to portray her as American’s president-in-waiting but, again, these tend to underscore rather than undermine. Harris was an early favourite in the main Democratic race for good reason. She’s one of Senate’s tougher brawlers who effectively led the pushback against Trump and gave Bill Barr a tough time during his confirmation hearing. She’s also a familiar presence on TV, more eloquent than Biden, and certainly sharper, even if that edge can sometimes reveal her biggest weakness, which is the perception (well earned, it must be said) that she is singularly driven to promote herself. Yet the sin of being overly ambitious is a hard one to level in a game largely defined by self-belief.

It’s also hard to level against somebody who is the first African American woman to be selected on a presidential ticket for one of the two major parties and who also has roots in the Asian community. These details might seem to factor crudely into an election that, on one side, is being characterised by opaquely racial rhetoric, but they also emphasise how the Democratic ticket is grounded in the stuff of aspirational America. Chiefly, it is the aspiration of Democrats who want to remove Donald Trump from office.

Tuesday’s announcement was predictable but also the surprisingly pragmatic, sensible, and calculated culmination of a process that, at times, seemed destined to confirm everybody’s worst fears about Democrats and their unwillingness to make the intellectual compromises needed to win elections. Make no mistake: Biden has made many missteps over the past two years. This, however, does not look like one of them.