A REMINDER THAT KAMALA HARRIS WAS A TERRIBLE CANDIDATE. Recently, a video circulated of former Vice President Kamala Harris engaging in her trademark word salad during an appearance at an AI conference in Las Vegas. Harris was saying something about nacho cheese Doritos, but beyond that, the point was not clear. The most striking effect of the video was to see and hear Harris again after her virtual disappearance from the public scene in the last 4 1/2 months. During the presidential campaign, we saw and heard her every day, and these days … mostly nothing.
But we will soon learn a bit more about the Harris candidacy from book-length accounts of the 2024 campaign. One that is coming on April 1 is called FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, two reporters who have often focused on Democrats.
A new excerpt from the book looks at the fraught relationship between Harris and former President Joe Biden, whose infirmity led to his withdrawal from the race, which, in turn, led to Harris becoming the Democratic candidate in late July 2024. The excerpt concerns Biden’s demands that Harris hew closely to his administration’s record — he told Harris there should be “no daylight” between her campaign positions and his record as president. But before going into that, Allen and Parnes make a telling observation about the nature of the Harris candidacy.
The issue was how Harris could present herself as a change agent. She thought it was risky to make a big break with Biden — after all, she had been his loyal vice president for four years. Maybe she could find some new issues. Or maybe, as Allen and Parnes write, Harris “could rely on voters to see her gender, her genes, and her ‘lived experience’ — a middle-class upbringing, schools outside the Ivy League, and a career as a prosecutor — as symbols of change.”
That’s pretty revealing. The first two factors Harris could think of to present to voters were her gender and race. You can make history by voting for me! Then Harris would tout that she grew up middle class — just like you! — and didn’t even go to an Ivy League school. Imagine that. And then she would stress, against voters’ observation and common sense, that her experience as a prosecutor and elected official in San Francisco made her a tough-on-crime candidate.
That is a pretty concise way to say that there just wasn’t much to Harris as a candidate for president. There was a reason Democratic primary voters were unimpressed with her when she ran for president in 2019. Four years as vice president did not change much.
But there’s no doubt Biden made things difficult for Harris. Even as the media fawned over her — remember the “sugar high” that stretched from the time she was given the Democratic nomination through the party convention? — she was still burdened by Biden’s disastrous record on inflation, on the border, and on global disorder.
Biden “would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win,” the authors write. “But privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition: let there be no daylight between us. ‘No daylight’ was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular president, George W. Bush.”
That, too, is revealing. In 2008, Biden used the “no daylight” gambit to tie an opposing presidential candidate, McCain, to the disastrous record of his predecessor, Bush. And now, in 2024, he did it again, only Biden was the president with the disastrous record and Harris was the successor candidate. The results, a McCain loss and a Harris loss, were the same.
It didn’t help that it seemed Biden’s entire staff jumped onto the Harris campaign. “Almost everywhere she went, Harris walked among former Biden aides who sought to defend his presidency,” the authors write. “Her campaign was run by a former White House deputy chief of staff … and a phalanx of department heads who had served Biden until the previous month.”
Here’s a question. If Harris had not been so tied to Biden, if she had been able to craft the campaign she wanted to run, would she have been able to win? That seems highly unlikely. The truest truism in politics is that candidate quality matters. And Harris was a terrible candidate. Had she been freed from the Biden constraints, she would still have been a terrible candidate. Had she run against someone other than Donald Trump, she would still have been a terrible candidate. Had there been a world of daylight between Harris and Biden, she would still have been a terrible candidate.
So blame Joe Biden for handicapping the Harris campaign. If he did, he did it not by tying Harris to his record as much as by having an awful record in the first place. But in the end, don’t blame Biden for Harris’s loss. She did that all by herself.