(AFP) – Kamala Harris may already be the Democrats’ presumptive White House nominee, but she now faces a race to forge a distinct identity after years playing second fiddle to President Joe Biden.
Biden’s decision to endorse his vice president after exiting the race — and the flood of party support that followed — all but guarantee Harris will lead Democrats in their fight to prevent Donald Trump’s comeback November 5.
But the unprecedented switch of candidate this close to election day leaves Harris little time to emerge from Biden’s shadow — or to preempt Republican attempts to brand her as a stereotypical liberal lightweight.
In a first informal campaign speech Monday, she gave a preview of the next four months as she contrasted Trump’s criminal conviction and anti-abortion stance with her record as a prosecutor and campaigner for women’s rights.
“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said in her speech from campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she enumerated, before adding: “I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Harris faces few obstacles to securing the nomination on August 7 in an online vote of delegates nearly two weeks before the formal Democratic national convention in Chicago. And she comes backed by the apparatus of the old Biden campaign and floods of donations.
But to introduce herself to voters nationwide, she’ll need all the help she can get.
– Unknown quantity –
Harris’s last run at the presidency in 2020 ended in failure as she struggled to connect her personal story to policy positions. She got the consolation of a place on Biden’s ticket, but the vice presidency is a notoriously unrewarding job in US politics.
Her approval ratings in office have been almost as bad as Biden’s, although allies hope they will improve once she pitches herself.
Her candidacy is set to be historic by any measure: the first Black woman and the first South Asian woman ever nominated for the presidency by Democrats or Republicans.
But while Harris’s positions on a whole host of issues are well known in Washington, she remains something of an unknown quantity to the wider public.
She will be able to claim credit for popular Biden accomplishments, such as unprecedented government investment in infrastructure. However, she will also have to answer for the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and initially high inflation in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.
Trump’s intense focus on illegal immigration may inflict real damage on Harris, who early on in the Biden presidency was given the unenviable task of working with Latin American governments to address the root causes of a record surge in migration over the US-Mexican border.
Harris will be on stronger ground when it comes to another hot button election issue: abortion.
She became the face of the White House’s efforts to target what she called “Trump abortion bans” in more than 21 states after the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion access.
– Referendum on Trump –
On foreign policy, she toes Biden’s pro-Ukraine line but has been tougher on Israel — delivering the administration’s harshest language on the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza conflict. She was the first senior Biden official to call for a ceasefire. Another top issue that Harris will boost — differentiating herself from fossil-fuel-champion Trump — is climate change.
She has a record as a California prosecutor of going after oil companies to curb pollution and has been to the left of Biden on environmental issues.
And she initially advocated for an end to fracking — although these days she is closer to Biden, who favors the technology.
Seasoned political strategist Rick Wilson, a prominent “Never Trump” former Republican, said Harris should avoid being too granular about policy with so little time left.
“I mean the kind of campaign where she says things like, ‘Refer to my 687-page plan on climate or health care or whatever,'” he told the Talking Feds podcast Monday.
“This race is a referendum about Donald Trump — top-to-bottom, stem-to-stern. It was about Joe Biden. Now it is entirely about Donald Trump.”
– Frankie TAGGART
© 2024 AFP
