The Unbearable Lightness of Kamala

D onald Trump has been in public life for less than a decade, but we know everything about him — including his antics, his narcissism, his over-the-top rhetoric, and his fabrications. We also know where he stands on issues because he gives hundreds of interviews, and his overall themes are usually consistent. Kamala Harris was first elected San Francisco’s top prosecutor more than 20 years ago. Since then, she has been California’s attorney general (six years), a U.S. senator (four years), and the U.S. vice president (four years). And yet many voters and reporters agree that her real views are largely a mystery.

Alex Thompson, a veteran Washington reporter writing for Axios, says it’s clear that Harris “doesn’t want voters to know” if she will govern as the “San Francisco liberal” she was during her 2019 presidential campaign or the more centrist candidate her staff — she rarely addresses the issue herself — insists she now is. Thompson reveals that his Axios colleagues have submitted more than a dozen questions to Harris and her staff, asking if she has changed her mind on specific issues. The response? Nothing, nada, zip, silence.

Here are some major policy ideas, articulated by Harris or her co-partisans in the past, on which she has recently decided to stay silent or ambivalent:

• Unilaterally grant a path to citizenship to two million people brought to this country as children by undocumented immigrants — the “Dreamers.”
• End the federal death penalty.
• Mandate that car companies build only electric or hydrogen vehicles by 2035.
• Legalize prostitution (Harris’s 2019 campaign stated that “we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed.”)
• End the use of for-profit prisons, an institution Harris once labeled “morally wrong.”
• Circumvent the Senate filibuster in order to, for example, expand the Biden-Harris administration’s green policies.
• Give reparations to black Americans because of the impact of slavery.
• Support sanctuary cities that promise not to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
• Bestow voting rights on all people convicted of crimes who are no longer in jail.
• Renegotiate international refugee policy to protect people displaced by climate change and welcome many of them to the U.S.
• Limit drilling for fossil fuels in 30 percent of the land and sea areas in the U.S. by granting those areas “national protections.”

As I am from San Francisco, I have talked with Kamala Harris on a few occasions. Unlike many of her conservative critics, I don’t believe she is stupid. Rather, I believe that her awkwardness and lack of transparency on the national stage are rooted in two facts about her life. First, her formative years were spent in French Canada, where she graduated from high school and finished her first year of college before transferring to Howard University. Second, though she is, of course, an American, she doesn’t have much of a connection to or understanding of non-coastal America. Indeed, her entire career has been spent in an isosceles triangle between San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland. There are no communities more progressive: In 2020, Donald Trump won 13 percent of the vote in San Francisco, 4 percent in Berkeley, and 7 percent in Oakland. The unanimity of thinking, the intellectual conformity, and the intolerance of other points of view likely made it easy for Kamala to think that the views she had marinated in for decades were neither radical nor controversial.

Now, thrust to the front of the national stage, Harris is always calculating which and how much of her previous views she can jettison while keeping her base happy.

Matt Bai, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, admits that “too often as vice president, Harris has seemed out of her depth — at her worst, a caricature from ‘Veep.’” (That would be the HBO political satire featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a vice president who is both clueless and ruthlessly ambitious.) Bai says that her inability to answer basic questions in interviews and town halls is often maddening: “Three months ago, when Harris had suddenly been elevated to the top of the ticket, she might have been excused for fumbling around for the occasional answer. But these are things she has surely been asked a thousand times by now.” When asked by Anderson Cooper, during a recent CNN Town Hall, about her weaknesses, she acknowledged that if she is “asked a certain question and you’re expected to have the right answer right away,” she doesn’t always have one at her fingertips. According to Bai, “she lacks confidence in her own ability to make an argument in the moment. And so she tries to say less, which often leaves the impression that she has less to say.”

I don’t believe that. I think Harris has plenty to say. It’s just that, unlike during her 2019 presidential primary campaign, when her handlers had told her that she had to seek out and woo the hard Left, that is no longer a plausible strategy. She now is speaking to a country that is evenly divided between the parties and often in disagreement with her previously expressed opinions. In short, Harris may be suffering from “ideological dissonance”: She wants to promote the progressive values of her native Bay Area but knows that doing so could chop the political ladder just before she reaches the top. Her ideology is incompatible, she fears, with that of a majority of voters.

The result is that she is a walking contradiction, publicly conflicted and tongue-tied. She’s not stupid. She’s smart enough to realize the awkward position she’s in and hopes that distracting people with endless attacks on Donald Trump will allow her to narrowly slide into the White House. We’ll soon find out if that works.