US Vice President Kamala Harris, newly tasked by the Democratic Party to run against ex-president Donald Trump at this year’s US presidential election, spent her first week as a candidate trying to outrun her political past.
Her vigorous rebranding – occurring during one of the strangest episodes in recent US political history with Joe Biden’s still unexplained and sudden exit from the race and the assassination attempt on Trump – seems bent on fitting Harris into a mainstream Democratic Party mold.
In this quick change of course, there are some issues best not to mention. One big rebranding effort has involved a rewrite of Harris’s role as the top Biden administration official tasked with curbing uncontrolled migration into the US across the Mexican border.
Harris’s associates insist that she was never actually Biden’s “border czar,” i.e. someone who would propose changes to immigration rules. Rather, the new version suggests she was simply on a high-level gathering of information about the root causes of migrant traffic – and then only on migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico.
Last week, Jason Marczak, a Latin America expert who accompanied Harris on the Central America and Mexico trip, provided an updated description of Harris’s mission. “Harris sought out new ideas to inform the administration’s strategy on topics ranging from transparency and economic development to security and good governance,” he wrote on Atlantic Council website.
Marczak said she also spoke with Caribbean leaders along those same lines. He made no mention of the steady flow of migrants from countries far from the Americas, including Afghanistan, Iran, China and countries in Africa.
Her actual enthusiasm even in the shrunken role seemed limited. After given the role in 2021, Harris responded testily to a television interviewer’s question about why she had failed to visit the border itself, where masses of migrants were crossing.
She answered, “And I haven’t been to Europe. I don’t understand the point that you’re making.”
In any event, comparison of illegal migration statistics between the Biden and Trump administrations will haunt the Harris campaign. The highest number of border crossings during Trump’s time in office was 1.4 million in 2019. Biden’s one-year peak was 3.2 million crossings in 2023.
At one point, Trump ordered the automatic ejection of migrants who illegally crossed the border into the US.
In June this year, 2.2 million migrants crossed. That same month, Biden issued an order that migrants could be turned away without presenting a case in court for obtaining asylum. It was effectively a throwback to Trump’s “remain in Mexico” order to quickly eject border crossers.
When Harris inaugurated her candidacy last week, she omitted any mention of immigration.
Inflation also presents a challenge. The rate of increase has fallen to around 3% increase but prices have spiked by around 19% since Biden and Harris took office. A recent opinion survey said potential voters prefer Trump’s handling of the economy (43%) to Biden’s (37%).
Harris has apparently dropped Biden’s “build back better” slogan promise of economic progress. Instead, she runs on pledges to provide “freedom to thrive” and “building up the middle class.”
Her slogans speak to social programs she plans to introduce rather than promises of economic growth, wrote The Economist, a London-based financial journal. Harris’ plan “includes trying to secure more funding for kindergarten, higher wages for homecare workers and paid family leave for all,” The Economist asserted.
Harris also avoided discussing concerns about her commitment to fighting crime, except apparently when it applies to Donald Trump. He has been convicted in a New York City court of trying to deceive voters in 2020 by hiding a hush-money payment to a pornographic movie actress.
Harris told supporters that, because of her early legal career in as a prosecutor, “I know Donald Trump’s type.”
The pitch has a way to go to alter views about recent US crime waves. A recent public survey by the Pew Research Center said 58% of Americans believe crime reduction should be a priority for the government.
Related to her stand on crime, Harris is also trying to leave behind comments she made in 2020 that suggested she favored “defunding the police,” in the context of a series of police killings of African-American men.
At the time, there had been calls to channel public funding for police into social programs. “This whole movement is about rightly saying we have to take a look at these budgets and whether they reflect the right priorities,” she said before she joined the 2020 Biden ticket.
Harris hasn’t apparently repeated the police defunding call since. Instead, her campaign office boasts that she “led the way to keep our communities safe, take on violent crime and helped lead our nation to a historic drop in violent crime.”
Unsurprisingly, Harris also moved quickly from praising the Biden administration’s past to describing a sunny American future under her leadership. When she launched her campaign, she promised to champion a familiar, contemporary Democratic Party policy wish list:
- “No child has to grow up in poverty.”
- Everyone “can buy a house…start a family…build wealth” and get “affordable health care”
- Workers are “paid fairly.”
- Old people can “retire in dignity.”
She also launched attacks on Trump for having appointed Supreme Court judges instrumental in undoing a previous high court decision that had declared abortion a national, constitutional right.
In foreign policy, Harris fully backed two signature Biden policies: sustained military and economic support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and the efforts to shore up alliances in East Asia to confront perceived threats from China.
On a third key issue, one that has strong echoes within US politics, Harris’s opinion about relations with Israel seem chilly compared with Biden’s.
After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, Harris hardened her tone when referring to Israel’s tactics in prosecuting the Gaza war and focused heavily on Palestinian civilian deaths.
“Israel has a right to defend itself,” she said, mimicking a standard US position. Referring to the Palestinians, he added that, “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”
The language appeared aimed to mollify a faction of Democratic Party representatives and voters who sympathize with the Palestinians over Israel.
Her reference to not being “silent” echoed a defiant statement last year made by Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American member of Congress from the Democratic Party. In answer to Congressional criticism of her pro-Palestinian stands, she said “I will not be silenced.”
In advance of abandoning his own campaign, Biden did a couple of direct favors for Harris. One, he endorsed her as his replacement and skirted the issue of whether he was forced out in an unseemly political coup engineered by party leaders. He insisted that he is retiring only to focus on governing and “saving democracy” until his term ends next January.
That explanation ignored the intra-Democratic Party campaign against him after his clumsy performance in a televised debate against Trump in June.
In the days leading up to Biden’s July 21 retirement announcement, wealthy donors who had backed him in 2020 announced they would not finance his campaign this year. Top party leaders also withheld their endorsement.
A warning delivered by influential California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, a formidable fundraiser and former leader of Democratic Party congressional legislators, provided the final “et tu Brutus” moment.
Pelosi, 84, told Biden, 81, he had to go amid criticism he was too old for another four-year term. If not, Pelosi said she would persuade prominent party officials “to go public” and “push the president to end his campaign,” according to an account by Politico.
Pelosi’s threat was delivered in the language of Hollywood gangster movies, said one Democratic operative. “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” the source told Politico. “It was about to be the hard way.”
Biden took the easy way out making it possible for Harris to ignore the abnormal inception of her candidacy. Speaking in Delaware shortly after Biden’s withdrawal, she gushed, “I love Joe Biden.” It had been the “honor of my life truly to serve as Vice President.” In short, nothing to see here.