Harris: Why she’s surging
Kamala Harris “changed the campaign” with her dazzling performance at the first Democratic presidential debate, said Ezra Klein in Vox.com. The California senator was the runaway winner of the two-night, 20-candidate face-off. Her triumph came largely thanks to a “devastating,” if carefully planned, assault on front-runner Joe Biden over his recent boasting about working with segregationist Senate colleagues and his late1970s opposition to federally mandated busing to integrate schools. Harris, who is of mixed Indian- and Jamaican-American heritage, was bused to kindergarten in Berkeley. “That little girl was me,” she said. With the shrewd caveat “I do not believe you are a racist,” Harris made the former vice president look feeble, out of touch, and defensive. It’s no surprise she’s now polling in double digits. Watching California’s former attorney general “eviscerate” Biden, “who’s to say she couldn’t do the same to Trump?”
She’s certainly well-versed in Trump’s playbook, said George Will in The Washington Post. Harris’ shameless contradictions are eerily “Trumpian.” Soon after announcing her candidacy, she endorsed “Medicare for All” and conceded it would mean outlawing private health insurance. She walked that back, only to raise her hand at the debate when asked if she supports a mandatory government-run plan. The next morning, Harris claimed she misheard the question. She pulled the same trick with busing, said Philip Klein in Washington Examiner.com. After her debate stunt in support of compulsory busing—which just 4 percent of whites and 9 percent of blacks approved of in a 1973 Gallup poll— Harris hedged days later, saying busing is merely something school districts should consider. That’s the same position Biden took in the ’70s. She has indeed set herself apart—for her willingness to be “brazenly dishonest.”
Democrats face “a familiar choice,” said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times: Do they want ideological purity, “or a candidate who might be cagey enough to win?” Harris’ “policy gymnastics” on health care, the “Green New Deal,” and other issues suggest she hopes to attract progressives in the primaries, then “shift to the center if she gets the nomination.” Her real message is that she’s a “fighter” who could take down Trump. But now that Harris has joined the top echelon of Democrats, we’ll soon find out whether she can take a punch as well as deliver one.