Kamala Harris’s campaign has been impressively disciplined at saying very little about her potential policies as president. This has left commentators scrambling to discover what her intentions might be. In foreign policy, for example, analysts have been reduced to sifting the published writings of two senior advisors, Philip Gordon and Rebecca Lissner. But writing a book and making policy are radically different activities. Harris’s economic policies, as outlined this week, are much more articulated, but they are essentially continuations of Biden policies or, in the case of keeping tips free from income tax, borrowed from Trump. Her social policies are also continuous with Biden’s. Her biggest departures from Biden have been in her refusal to participate in “identity politics” or to position Trump as an imminent danger to democracy. At the same time, she has made it clear that she is running against Trump and not against Republican voters. The lack of discipline in her first presidential campaign has been overturned. How does that happen?
First, it would be very difficult for a sitting vice president to run against the policies of her own administration. Second, depriving the Trump campaign of policy specifics to criticize could provoke it into making more personal attacks, which Harris seems to parry much more easily than Biden did. (She is unlikely to be baited into an argument about golf handicaps, for example, as Biden was.) Third, Harris did relatively little as vice president, as compared to recent holders of the office such as Al Gore or Dick Cheney. The one policy she was associated with was not really a policy so much as a hopeless errand: to address the ”root causes” of migration to the U.S. on a two-day trip to Central America.
Fourth, Harris’s four years as a junior senator from California were not strong on policy innovation. Rather, she was noted mainly for her ferocious attacks on the Trump administration, its policies and its nominees for office. She demonstrated a composed fearlessness, and a precision, that made her stand out. These qualities led her famously to attack Biden on the second night of the first Democratic debate in June 2019 after distinguishing herself by attacks on Trump. It was focused confrontation that built her national-level political career.
That might be expected from someone whose earlier career, from 1990 (when she was 26) to 2017, was almost entirely that of a prosecutor. As San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general, both elected positions, Harris was innovative as well as forceful. But that was in the context of the legal profession, where there are many guardrails on innovation, and where a prosecutorial manner is a valued skill rather than a personal characteristic. It can be turned off as well as on.
This may help explain how Harris was able to go from being very forceful as a senator to being a loyal lieutenant as vice president.
Now she is having to shift again, potentially to a position of profound leadership that has to be creative as well as confrontational, and emollient as well as combative.
The debate on September 10 will be an opportunity to see whether Harris is able to hit these different registers.
From an investment point of view, the key thing to bear in mind is that Harris, while demonstrably unafraid of the power of the private sector when she was a prosecutor, does not have any known radical views or declared positions on reorganizing the existing distribution of economic power. Her declared policies are directed at expanding the middle class in the sense of providing a stronger floor for working people (especially with health care and child care) and increasing opportunities for small businesses, to be paid for with moderately higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and to a modest degree on capital gains. These are essentially small-c conservative policy positions aimed at the aspirational working and middle classes, understood to be the core of the American economy and polity.
In many ways the candidate Harris most resembles is Bill Clinton. Clinton used to refer to “doctrine” as “the D word.” Over eight years as president he resisted developing anything that could be called a Clinton Doctrine. Commentators are now searching for a Harris Doctrine. There is not likely to be one.