Sen. Harris slides after a dazzling debut
SAN FRANCISCO — When Kamala Harris launched her presidential bid four months ago, the stars all seemed to align.
She drew a crowd of roughly 20,000 to a lavish Oakland rally. She raised $1.5 million in just 24 hours. She boasted a string of endorsements from California politicians.
But as she returns to the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend for the annual state Democratic Party convention — along with 13 other candidates eager to fight on her home turf — Harris no longer dazzles quite so much.
Rather, there is a prevalent sense that for all her seeming potential, California’s charismatic U.S. senator has fallen short of expectation.
The disappointment, observers say, stems in part from Harris’ failure to present a compelling case for her candidacy beyond her background as a prosecutor, her buoyant personality and a deep contempt — shared by others in the contest — for President Donald Trump.
“You don’t get elected because you’re a list of qualities,” said Gil Duran, a former Harris adviser who is now the opinion editor of the Sacramento Bee. “What’s the big idea she’s carrying? That’s what she’s trying to figure out. She’s having trouble figuring out what she represents.”
Other candidates have forged past Harris.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — both welldefined personalities — have staked their place as frontrunners in the crowded contest. Upstart Pete Buttigieg, the brainy young mayor of South Bend, Ind., has garnered buzz and big bucks from some of California’s major political donors. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has won praise for her soup-to-nuts sheaf of liberal policy proposals.
Backers say Harris’ slow-and-steady approach is the right one for this early stage of the campaign, arguing that consistency on the trail and fundraising matter more than catchy sound bites or viral moments.
“I don’t think anyone ever thought she would get in the race and blow away the field and be a front-runner from January 2019 through Election Day,” said Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’ two successful runs for state attorney general. “She needs to stay in the upper tier, which I think she is. Stay in striking position and you outlast everybody.”
Harris’ 2016 election to the Senate coincided with Trump’s unexpected victory, and she arrived in Washington as a fierce adversary of the polarizing president. Her pugnacious grilling of Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr, among others, thrilled fellow Democrats.
But she has largely failed to replicate those compelling performances while campaigning. Instead, her equivocations have often overshadowed efforts to excite partisan passions.
In one of her first national campaign appearances, at a CNN town hall, she offhandedly backed eliminating the country’s private health insurance system. Months later, she is still trying to explain her position. (She said that her support for Medicare for All meant eliminating health care bureaucracy, not doing away with private insurance.)
During another televised town hall, Harris said she was open to a “conversation” about letting incarcerated violent felons vote, only to state the next day she would not support that right for the most serious offenders.
After touting her get-tough initiative on child truancy throughout much of her career — a centerpiece of her focus on protecting youth — she more recently pulled back, saying she regretted the “unintended consequence” that some parents went to jail.
The hedging revived one of the criticisms that has followed Harris throughout her public life, the suggestion she is politically timid and overly cautious. As attorney general, she was notably muted on some of the state’s most fraught issues, such as police use of force and ballot initiatives to change California’s sentencing laws.