Kamala Harris should put off a 2020 run
Kamala Harris is not going to run for president in 2020.
There is already plenty of speculation on both coasts that California’s new U.S. senator is going to pull a Barack Obama and leverage her noteworthy first step onto the national political stage in November into an almost-immediate campaign for the White House. With such tremendous amounts of media conjecture, grassroots excitement and donor encouragement inevitably comes a great deal of temptation. But Harris and her team understand that while there’s little to be lost by allowing such gossip to escalate, that enthusiasm in no way obligates her to act precipitously.
Much of the Harris boomlet is driven by the unprecedented emotional dudgeon caused by President Trump’s first months in office. The anger and unhappiness that fuel the Democratic resistance to Trump’s presidency are accompanied by equally high levels of impatience for identifying his successor. Fully one-quarter of the party’s 48 U.S. senators have already been identified as potential presidential candidates, along with a battalion of other national and state party leaders. Democrats want a standard-bearer — and they want her (or him) now.
A potential Harris candidacy becomes even more tantalizing when the Democrats’ generational skew is considered. Their three most recognizable potential candidates — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — will all be in their 70s by the time of the 2020 general election. The party’s congressional leaders are all of that same generation — Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer will be a few weeks from his 70th birthday when the polls close, making him the pup of their legislative litter. By contrast, Harris is only 52 years old, and she also presents a unique demographic and ethnic heritage with the potential to appeal to the Millennial voters who now make up the Democratic base.
Representing a nation-state with 55 electoral votes doesn’t hurt either. There was once a time when any Republican statewide officeholder in California was considered a potential presidential candidate, but until now, circumstances have conspired against the state’s most prominent Democrats. If Jerry Brown were even a few years younger, he would be one of a small number of potential front-runners for the nomination. But California’s soonto-be-octogenarian governor seems to have grown wistful as he considers that his age makes another national campaign very unlikely.
For most of their careers, Dianne Feinstein was considered too moderate to compete for the nomination while Barbara Boxer seemed too combative (albeit in a pre-Trump era). But Harris has found a way to combine Boxer’s ideology with Feinstein’s temperament, allowing her to rally the party’s progressive base on the issues while reassuring moderates and the Democratic establishment with a more measured demeanor. By focusing her most visible efforts against Trump’s immigration and refugee policies, Harris has identified a topic that unites a party that is still divided on a range of economic, foreign policy and cultural issues.
All of which makes a presidential candidacy an extremely tempting prospect. But a look back at the two presidencies that preceded Trump demonstrate that it is much easier for a rising political star to get to the Oval Office than to succeed there.
Only the most rabid of partisans would dispute the notion that Obama and George W. Bush could have accomplished much more during their White House years had they come to the presidency with a greater amount of governing experience. Bush had served only slightly more than one term as governor of Texas, a deep-red state almost completely controlled by his party, which left him with little need to pursue bipartisan cooperation. Obama’s tenure in the Senate was even briefer, giving him a comparably small amount of experience at reaching across party lines to achieve policy goals. The results were predictable, as both presidents struggled to keep Washington — and the country — from becoming increasingly and dangerously polarized. The result of those years of hyper-partisanship is Trump.
By contrast, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton came to the White House with more experience in politically challenging circumstances and therefore a deeper understanding of the benefits of forging common ground with the opposition. Not coincidentally, both men were able to build coalitions that allowed them to achieve sustainable policy victories on trade, on taxes, on Social Security and any number of other policy fronts. Such bipartisan cooperation is looked at with disdain in today’s hyper-frenzied political environment. But the smartest and the most patient leaders understand that is still the best path on which to achieve real and lasting success.