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They say you gotta dance with the one that brung you.
Now, American politics is giving us the Kamala Harris exception.
The old rule that the pol picks up important debts to certain constituencies and VIPs on their rise doesn’t apply the same way to her. This is one of the most unusual features of the Harris ascendance and for now gives her unique advantages.
Coming out of the convention in Chicago, Harris has built as wide a coalition as any Democratic nominee in memory. Everyone there claimed her as their own, with arguably the exception of President Joe Biden’s family and a few of his staffers. The manner of her ascent — the replacement of the octogenarian incumbent, the lack of a primary, the single-minded obsession with beating former President Donald Trump, the coming together of Democratic powers around her candidacy in barely 48 hours last month — means that no one can claim to have brought her this far.
What does it mean to owe few explicit debts? You can design a convention, like the one in Chicago, with little of the identity politics or Gaza passions that tore up your side for years. You can stay ambiguous on policy prescriptions when you want to — no one’s in any position to deny her a check or an endorsement in exchange for a promise to adopt this or cancel that. You can tack as you wish: hence the new centrist, strong-on-crime, strong-on-defense, strong-on-business Harris who, before this summer, didn’t present any of those attributes strongly to the nation.
Most magically of all: You somehow come across looking like the newcomer. The other guy, in a trick like none seen before, went from beating the aging incumbent in Biden to finding himself as the aging incumbent.
The Harris campaign has nine weeks to play out this strategy against Trump.
The party is so relieved to get a candidate who has a hope to win this race that no one inside the camp seems to mind that she is hard to pin down. In the moments after her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago, I ran into a Third Wayer who gushed over all the centrist policies and the absence of familiar lefty dog whistles. Bill Clinton or even John McCain could have given that speech. Defense hawks loved her use of “lethal” to describe the importance of American military power. The leftists respected the patriotism of the immigrants’ child. A tech entrepreneur was sure she was the first presidential nominee to invoke the word “founders” and AI and tech. Her call for an “opportunity economy” sounded vague enough to satisfy everyone.
As much as Harris has deep links to California and political money in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, many top Democratic donors don’t know her well. Before she got the nod, people worried she might have a hard time raising money. One of her friends, a top bundler, said that the last few weeks were spent “on building bridges” to the establishment donor and policy classes. Someone who was with Doug Emhoff at a recent fundraiser noted, with admiration, that Harris’ husband was still getting over “his imposter syndrome.” They are new to a stage this big.
The past month’s money gusher washed away any concerns about her ability to collect the money — and she didn’t have to flesh out a 300-page governing plan. As the “alternative” without much definition, Harris raised more ($520 million) faster than anyone ever. She did it by raising money from more donors in 10 days than Joe Biden managed to in 15 months of campaigning.
“The way this played out so quickly, and so late, averted the usual process of building support over a drawn-out campaign,” said David Pepper, the former head of the Ohio Democratic Party. “Which could be liberating. She would enter the presidency with a lot fewer IOUs than the previous guys. They pile up in a primary, which Harris didn’t have to win.”
It has for sure been liberating for her at this stage of the campaign. Barack Obama once wrote, “I serve as the blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” The line from Obama to Harris was the leitmotif of Chicago. The comparisons of historic candidacies of the first African-American to first woman, who is also of mixed race, are obvious.
But the differences are telling too. In 2008, Obama was the outsider insurgent whose personal story and world views were well defined by his own telling of them in best-selling books and a long primary fight against Hillary Clinton. Obama had to carve out a niche to Clinton’s left, defining himself with certain policies (opposition to the Iraq war, a pledge to negotiate with Iran, sweeping health-care reform) that quickly became fodder for general-election attacks from McCain, his GOP rival. Harris is, remarkably, the insider who is less defined than Obama was at this point 16 years ago. Yes, she is part of the Biden administration, and for the past three-plus years she was sent out to reinforce relationships with the party base that helped her get the nod this summer without any challengers. But Harris is largely free to craft her own agenda, unencumbered by the kinds of commitments to special interests that accrue during a primary fight.
If Democrats could project their hopes of national redemption on Obama, what’s projected on Harris is the fervent desire to keep Trump out. 2008 for the Democrats was about their guy, this year it’s the other guy.
The short, European-style campaign will see Harris try to continue to run the outsider race. Trump will try to force her to own the Biden record and put out specifics. His campaign wants more policy-specific speeches like Harris gave before the convention on the economy and price controls; that’s when Trump’s “Comrade Kamala” nickname started to stick. Her first televised interview, done jointly with her vice presidential candidate Tim Walz this week, offered no similarly prime targets. But she has a tendency to speak on when she doesn’t have much to say, which is a vulnerability at next month’s debate. She has been successful this summer when she is somehow both crisp and vague.
There’s more upside for her in staying unowned and loosely defined for the duration of the race. Then, if she wins, her lack of a specific mandate may reignite Democratic factionalism and make for a messy start to a Harris term.
The nice thing about having a date for the dance is you know what you’ll do once you get there. This is a problem, naturally, that the Democrats would love to have.
