Harris now under microscope
Democrats and Republicans alike are scrutinizing the policy record of Biden’s VP running mate
Almost immediately after Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his pick for vice president, the Trump campaign and his acolytes began casting the California senator as a “far-left radical” set on transforming the U.S. into a socialist’s dream and a suburbanite’s nightmare.
At the same time, the most progressive members of the Democratic Party lamented the choice of a former prosecutor as kowtowing to an aging, increasingly irrelevant establishment.
“We at Bay Area for Bernie sincerely hope Harris remembers her commitments to her progressive constituents,” the group said in a statement. “If she does not, this ticket will turn away independents and progressives in droves.”
So where does the Oakland-born, Berkeley-bred, former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general really stand on the political spectrum? Her record suggests it’s somewhere in the middle.
On Wednesday, Biden formally introduced Harris as his running mate in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, praising her for going after the gun lobby and oil industry and saying he wanted her “to be the last voice in the room” when he makes his toughest decisions.
Harris said she was proud to join Biden and blamed President Donald Trump for mismanaging the coronavirus and the economy.
“We need a mandate that proves that the past few years do not represent who we are or who we aspire to be,” she said. “Joe likes to say that character is on the ballot. And it’s true.”
But on Wednesday morning, Trump’s war room wasted no time, accusing Harris in a video of backing Sanders’ “socialist takeover of health care.” Harris came out early in support of “Medicare for All” but later backtracked, suggesting she still wanted to continue to allow private insurance plans.
During her unsuccessful presidential campaign, Harris attacked Biden for failing to support an overhaul of the nation’s health care system, but he slammed her for attempting to “have it every
which way.” With Biden at the top of the ticket, Harris will have to move from supporting a modified single-payer system to backing his vision for a strengthened Affordable Care Act. And while that will leave some progressives upset, for most voters, said politics professor Dan Schnur, the back and forth is mostly just noise.
As surprising as it might sound in deep blue California where attacks on Harris’ record as a top cop are well known, Schnur thinks the Trump campaign will ultimately turn to law and order to paint Harris as a failure.
“The Republicans are flailing right now trying to figure out whether it makes more sense to attack her as a liberal or as a disappointment to liberals,” said Schnur, a former GOP consultant-turned-independent who teaches at USC and UC Berkeley. “At
some point, they’re going to decide that painting her as far left makes more sense … and as peculiar as it might seem to Bay Area progressives, at some point they’re probably going to decide the best way to come at her is on crime.”
As San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris chose not to seek the death penalty for a gang member, David Hill, who shot and killed Isaac Espinoza, a young police officer in 2004. The announcement enraged law enforcement and cost her the support of police unions in later campaigns. It also drew a public scolding from senior Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Harris’ more recent actions may also provide fuel for Trump. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, she has backed legislation that would bar chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and she tweeted her disappointment that the Louisville,
Kentucky, police officers who shot and killed Breonna Taylor in March have not been charged.
For their part, progressives have attacked her for overseeing nearly 2,000 marijuana convictions as San Francisco district attorney and implementing an anti-truancy program that threatened parents with misdemeanors if their kids missed too much school.
“Her agenda might not sound sufficiently ambitious in Northern California but it could very easily play differently in Michigan and Wisconsin,” Schnur said, naming two swing states narrowly clinched by Trump in 2016 but that Biden now leads in the polls.
Still, Republicans say they have plenty to work with when it comes to Harris’ record.
“She’s got a very cluttered history of taking opposite
positions on a number of issues,” said San Francisco-based Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon.
A Trump supporter, Dhillon said she voted for Harris for district attorney after hearing her promise to be tough on crime.
“It was a trail of disappointment,” Dhillon said.
On Wednesday, Trump slammed Biden on housing, a critique he could extend to Harris, who last year called for a major bump in federal funding to fight homelessness, including new supportive housing and more housing vouchers for low-income families.
“The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood. Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in
charge!” Trump said, misspelling Democratic Sen. Cory Booker’s name.
Booker, the New Jersey senator, shot back, intentionally misspelling Trump’s name: “Donaled, your racism is showing.”
Some Harris supporters say Biden’s choice of a daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants is a long overdue nod to women of color and especially Black women — who have reliably voted Democratic but been largely taken for granted while campaigns have pandered to rural, white voters.
But Dhillon, herself an Indian American, isn’t convinced.
“It’s not exciting to anyone in real life,” she said. Most Americans, she said, are not focused on the choice of a woman of color, “they’re caring about who is going to educate my kids this fall, how am I going to pay rent … that’s what people care about.”