Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“Joe Biden named California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate on Tuesday.” AP News
The right is critical of Harris.
“Harris’s track record as a ‘pragmatic moderate’ includes supporting late-term abortion, co-sponsoring both Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and calling for repeals of tax cuts. The senator even tried to impose a religious litmus test on Catholic judicial nominees. And this is to say nothing of Harris’s long record of prosecutorial abuses. If Biden’s running mate is a ‘moderate’ with a ‘relatively centrist record,’ I would hate to see what the New York Times and the Associated Press consider ‘liberal.’”
Becket Adams, Washington Examiner
Yet “Trump can also target Harris from the left. After all, Kamala supported ICE targeting illegal immigrant students and separating them from their parents, threatened to lock up the mothers of truant children and put prostitutes at greater risk as attorney general of California, went out of her way to target transgender prisoners, pushed to apply the state's ‘three strikes’ law against nonviolent offenders while district attorney of San Francisco, and refused to prosecute child molesters in the Catholic Church.”
Tiana Lowe, Washington Examiner
“Unlike Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris poses no threat to Big Business… All of her left-wing vigor, both as a vice-presidential candidate and in whatever her promising future brings, will be directed at social conservatives. The fact that Wall Street considers her to be a ‘moderate’ tells you everything. Joe Biden has made a choice that is safe for Woke Capitalism…
“I doubt that she will be significantly more progressive than any other Democrat that Biden could have picked, but the fact that she is so relatively young, and so stylistically vigorous, means that the Democrats in power are going to be very aggressively anti-conservative on social issues for the foreseeable future.”
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative
“Harris is the perfect embodiment of the centrist Democratic establishment, a politician with equivocal views on crime and drugs but rock-solid pro-abortion credentials, undeniably woke but totally uninterested in the progressive economic policies…
“Harris' selection will probably not have much of an effect on the outcome of the race in November. If there are any remaining undecided voters, they are suspending their judgement for other reasons. She will not bring disaffected progressives back into the fold, but neither would any candidate Biden would have considered selecting. Instead, what Harris represents is what the Democratic Party sees as its future: the lite-libertarianism of centrist economics, open borders, and social liberalism.”
Matthew Walther, The Week
“[Biden’s] campaign has made no secret of his strategy to win back white working-class residents of battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who left the Democratic Party to vote for Donald Trump. It’s hard to see how Ms. Harris will help him with those voters. Barack Obama won them over in 2008 by playing down racial differences on the campaign trail. Ms. Harris’s most memorable moment during the primary was to suggest that Mr. Biden was a racist for expressing opinions about forced busing in the 1970s that turned out to be nearly identical to her own…
“The inconvenient truth for progressives is that primary voters bypassed several female and minority candidates—including Ms. Harris—to nominate Mr. Biden. If having a woman on the ticket were a priority for most Democrats, why did Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar flame out? In addition to Ms. Harris, black voters might have opted for Cory Booker if race was a top concern, yet they overwhelmingly went for Mr. Biden. Perhaps liberal elites and their media allies care more about a presidential ticket that ‘looks like America’ than the average Democratic voter does.”
Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal
The left is generally supportive of Harris.
The left is generally supportive of Harris.
“Harris is a distinguished public servant with a résumé — U.S. senator from California, state attorney general — unquestionably suited to this exhilarating and daunting opportunity, which she has earned. She is also an agent of contrast, emphasizing the difference between the Republican ticket and the Democratic one, between Trump’s politics of division and Biden’s politics of inclusion…
“But even as she affirms Biden’s orientation toward the future, she reflects his appreciation of his own past. She enables him, for a second time, to be part of a presidential ticket that sets a precedent and blazes a trail. It’s almost as if he’s trying to recreate the established magic, to repurpose the victorious script.”
Frank Bruni, New York Times
“Some may view this vice-presidential decision as merely strategic, a play for turnout of African-American voters. I would contend this is the nature of politics, like choosing a vice-presidential candidate because that person lives in a swing state. Ms. Harris was selected through the same vetting process that other candidates have gone through. And what’s more, she is at least as qualified, if not more so, as previous running mates.”
Chryl Laird, New York Times
“Since Harris was the obvious pick, one might think that the Trump team would have an elaborate game plan ready to roll out as soon as she was announced. Instead, Trump merely called her ‘nasty’ for her questioning of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings (horrors), and the campaign rushed out an uninspired ad about ‘Slow Joe and Phony Kamala.’ (Admittedly, even a president as proudly amnesiac as Trump may have a difficult time explaining why he donated $6,000 to Harris’s campaign fund as attorney general. And why Ivanka kicked in another $2,000 in 2014.)”
Walter Shapiro, New Republic
Some note that “[Harris] repeatedly and openly defied U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in California prisons while serving as the state’s attorney general… Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population…
“At its height, [California’s prison system was] stuffed to some 200 percent of its designed capacity… In one prison, 54 prisoners shared a single toilet. Preventable deaths due to substandard and overstretched medical care occurred every five to six days. Suicidal inmates were locked in telephone-booth sized cages for 24 hours at a time… [In fighting to continue this status quo] Harris, of course, was acting on behalf of the state’s governor, who preceded her as state AG and was notorious for his posture on this issue as well. But she might have chosen not to defy the Supreme Court.”
Alexander Sammon, American Prospect
“As D.A., she angered the San Francisco police union by refusing to seek the death penalty for a young gang member who killed an officer. But she also angered criminal-justice reformers with aggressive tactics, such as threatening to prosecute parents whose kids were chronically absent from school…
“As attorney general, she went after big banks and the pharmaceutical industry, for-profit colleges and oil companies. She refused to defend the voter-approved Proposition 8 banning gay marriage… But she also backed down from many fights, declining to endorse ballot initiatives that would have reformed the three-strikes law and ended the death penalty… Prominent Black Lives Matter activists say her prosecutorial record is more complex than the caricature.”
Molly Ball and Charlotte Alter, Time
