Kamala Harris, an underrated asset, has hit her stride
Vice President Kamala Harris was never as flawed as her critics made her out to be. From the onset of her term, she maintained a rigorous and effective diplomatic travel schedule and bolstered President Biden’s fight for voting rights. Unlike Biden, she never got ahead of the president on policy. Unlike former vice president Dan Quayle, she never made a late-night-comedyworthy gaffe. And she has avoided her predecessor’s cringeworthy fawning.
Some defenders pointed to her eagerness in taking on seemingly impossible tasks (e.g., stemming the tide of Central American migrants); others argued the first woman of color in the job attracted disproportionate criticism. Whatever the cause, she has received harsh and sometimes petty media coverage, which too often simply regurgitated Republican
attacks.
However, whatever one thought of her early days in the administration, those who look carefully will see that she has hit her stride, providing Biden with key support among critical constituencies. Most prominently, her fierce and eloquent defense of abortion rights postdobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has “broken through” with voters, according to respected Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.
Her empathic rhetoric tying abortion to “freedom” has helped reset the pro-choice message.
Her speech in Wisconsin in January on the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade underscored her effectiveness. “These extremists want to roll back the clock to a time before women were treated as full citizens — Wisconsin to the 1800s,” she told the audience. “Just look at what happened here in this beautiful state of Wisconsin.
After Roe was dismantled, extremists evoked a law from 1849 to stop abortion in this state — 1849 — before women could vote, before women could hold elected office, before many women could even own property.” She pressed on, repeatedly interrupted by applause: “In a state whose motto is ‘Forward’ these extremists are trying to take us backwards. But we’re not having that. We’re not having that.” To
cheers, she declared, “We trust women. We trust women to make decisions about their own bodies. We trust women to know what is in their own best interest. And women trust us to fight to protect their most fundamental freedoms.”
Indeed, she has been enthusiastically greeted throughout her barnstorming tours of college campuses in which abortion rights have been front and center. Even amid the controversies surrounding the Israel-gaza war that have roiled campuses, she remains relentlessly on message, stressing issues that resonate with younger voters, including school shootings, climate change and LGBTQ+ rights.
In particular, she has excelled in her role as Biden defender and prosecutor of the case against four-times indicted former president Donald Trump. She launched a succinct and compelling indictment of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s lapse in prosecutorial judgment. “As a former prosecutor,” she declared Hur’s comments about Biden’s age and memory “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.”
Moreover, she explained that during the interview in the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Biden spent “countless hours” with his national security team. She recalled that Biden was “on top of it all, asking questions and requiring that America’s military and intelligence community and diplomatic community would figure out and know: How many people were dead? How many are Americans? How many hostages? Is the situation stable?” She stressed that he remained “in front of it all, coordinating and directing leaders who are in charge of America’s national security — not to mention our allies around the globe — for days and, up until now, months.”
She concluded that “the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and, clearly, politically motivated — gratuitous … We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.” Her delivery was crisp, her tone appropriately indignant and her eyewitness account of Biden’s actual performance the single most effective rebuttal to the age issue.
And last week, in a critical international setting, she warned attendees at the Munich Security Conference of the danger of obsequiousness to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death. While not specifically naming Trump, she left little doubt about the target of her remarks. She told the audience, “I ask you: Imagine if America turned our back on Ukraine and abandoned our NATO allies and abandoned our treaty commitments. Imagine if we went easy on Putin, let alone encouraged him.” We need not imagine, of course, because Trump, just days before, had invited Putin to attack the alliance.
With Ukraine aid in the balance, she explained, “History offers a clue. If we stand by while an aggressor invades its neighbor with impunity, they will keep going. And in the case of Putin, that means all of Europe would be threatened.” She closed succinctly: “History has
also shown us: If we only look inward, we cannot defeat threats from outside. Isolation is not insulation.”
Despite her near-flawless performance over the past year or so, do not expect the media to send out any “Kamala comeback” stories, let alone mea culpas for their excessively negative evaluation that she would handicap Biden. The media seems bent on artificially leveling the playing field rather than providing substantive coverage of Biden and Harris’s record and probing the egregious defects in their opponent. (Sure, Trump’s a crazy insurrectionist, an indicted criminal and a fascist, but Biden is old and has Harris!)
That said, her work as the tip of the campaign’s spear on critical issues such as abortion and her fiery prosecution of the case against Trump will be gauged by in her reception internationally and at home with voters critical to the Bidenharris victory. So far, she is hitting her marks.