It’s a routine mistake to see politics and policy as disconnected — to cast “politics” as some grubby, self-interested thing and “policy” as an elevated, cerebral exercise in serving the common good.
This reality was brought home by Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday and it helps explain why the Harris of 2024 is a far better candidate than the Harris who unsuccessfully sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. What Harris’s opponents cast as “flip-flops” — and, yes, she has changed her positions on, among other issues, fracking and aspects of immigration policy — are about more than, say, the urgent need to carry Pennsylvania. They also reflect a progressive movement that found a way during the Biden years to manage the trade-offs that progress requires.
Start with fracking. The movement for climate action has spent years experimenting with which policies can command sufficient popular support to make a dent in the carbon numbers.
Failures (think back to cap-and-trade in the Obama era) begat rethinking. The Green New Deal created controversy because of its reach, but it was also a shrewd initial attempt to link climate action to job creation. Victory — in the form of large first steps, not a comprehensive solution — finally came with President Joe Biden’s green-energy investment program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Advocates of climate action took what they could get, realizing that, for now at least, demands such as banning fracking could sink everything else.
Similarly, neither Harris nor her party has given up on comprehensive immigration reform as a necessary long-term goal. But it’s clear that dealing with the crisis at the southern border is a political precondition to moving the debate away from the hateful scaremongering of Donald Trump and his allies.
Some might call these shifts “selling out” or, more blandly, “moving to the center.” Neither formulation grasps one of the genuine achievements of Biden’s presidency: He created policy coalitions that brought center and left together on behalf of incremental but significant changes with an eye toward more progress down the road. Harris is now the standard-bearer for that approach, a role she embraced on CNN with her praise of Biden’s “extraordinary successes.”
But it is Harris’s political success over the last 40 days or so that has surprised so many who judged her primarily by her earlier quest for the party’s nomination. It was so troubled that she ended her campaign in December 2019, before a single primary vote had been cast.
But students of her rapid climb in California politics are getting exactly what they expected long ago. Her talent was so obvious that national Republicans, including George W. Bush’s political maestro Karl Rove, tried to end her career before it got off the ground by spending $1 million on attack ads at the close of her 2010 campaign for state attorney general. She prevailed narrowly and went on to sweep her Senate race six years later.
Her gifts availed her little in her first presidential run, despite what Post writer Chelsea Janes rightly called a “dazzling” start — and Harris had a moment of opportunity after an aggressive attack against Biden in an early primary debate drew attention her way. But she was held back by divisions within her campaign and because she could never decide where she wanted to land philosophically in a contest divided between center-left candidates (led by Biden, future Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar) and the left of the party led by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Even then, Harris stood roughly where she stands now, somewhere between those poles. But there weren’t many votes to be had in that space. She tacked left at times (thus her need now to revise her positions on fracking and immigration) but to no avail. After a pre-primary surge by Warren, and then surges by Buttigieg and Klobuchar in the early primaries, the race came down to Biden and Sanders — and ended in Biden’s victory.
Dropping out early turned out to be the wise move when Biden selected her as his running mate. But what helped Harris soar this summer was Biden’s outreach to the party’s left and his effort to meld his own relatively moderate but strongly pro-labor politics with the aspirations of the party’s progressive wing. The ideological and policy ground Harris had hoped to occupy four years ago is now the center of gravity in her party.
Biden and Harris’s joint appearance at a Labor Day event in Pittsburgh will prompt more chatter about Scranton Joe’s role in helping Harris win a swing state than on anything having to do with policy. But she’s in this position because Democrats spent the last three years trying to get the politics of policy right. It was the necessary prelude to the opportunity Harris has to live up to her promise.
