Kamala Harris has one fight

After the joy comes the reckoning. These are treacherous days for Kamala Harris as she tries to wrest the White House from Donald Trump, who seemed headed for an easy victory in November.

So far, the Democrats have run Harris as a kind of avatar. She is everything to all Democrats. Potentially everything to all Americans. At the Chicago convention, I noticed how the so-called “new media” influencers were given preference over the regular hackers: they even had their own “creators” lounge. I don’t know what they were doing there: I wasn’t allowed in.

And the candidate himself did not give interviews to anyone who might ask a difficult question. Creation was in, cross-examination was out.

There’s an argument to be made about new ways to reach the public, especially the young. There’s no law against friendly banter with your own supporters. But even her most ardent supporters don’t believe the avatar can win. Harris herself needs to take shape in the minds of Americans. In a vibe contest, she needs to sound convincing—she needs to project power, competence, and confidence. She needs to show up.

She must also dodge, neatly but firmly, the uncomfortable fact that she is part of the Biden administration. Joe Biden is an unpopular president. She can hardly tell the nation that she has never met him. But she can shift subtly and make the shift count.

And most Democrats would accept that she needs a fight. Her main opponent in this fight isn’t Trump, it’s herself. It’s Harris vs. Harris. When she ran for the Democratic nomination in 2019, she was on the left: hostile to the idea that more police would reduce crime, hostile to those who wanted to close the southern border, hostile to fracking, hostile to private health insurance. Now she’s enthusiastic about police, has even signed on to provide more funding for Trump’s border wall, supports fracking for oil and gas, and is happy to let the U.S. health care system continue unimpeded.

Can she explain the change?

This week we saw the first tentative steps towards Harris the avatar growing into Harris the person, with (new) positions you can agree with or object to, attitudes you can appreciate or abhor.

The venue was an interview with CNN. No holds barred, but a slight lack of real danger, her detractors pointed out: taped, not live, and Harris not alone but accompanied by a comfort animal in the form of her “America’s father” vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

Read more

The version that aired was brief and, troubling to some Democrats, not as sharp as it could have been. The crucial question, “Why did her views on the southern border change?” was answered this way: “My views on what we need to do to secure our border, they haven’t changed. I spent two terms as Attorney General of California prosecuting transnational criminal organizations, violations of U.S. laws governing the passage, illegal passage, of guns, drugs, people across our border.”

She was not pressured as she would have been on the Today program – to answer the real question. That is unlikely to satisfy many voters, including Democrats and independents, who will want to be sure that their own change of opinion about the border, from not being overly concerned about the border to feeling threatened by the millions of undocumented people who have come across in recent years, has been matched by the candidate.

She did go to the center in one respect: She said she would appoint at least one Republican to her cabinet if elected. In the past, it was customary to have someone from the other party, but neither Trump nor Biden did that. Harris promises normalcy in that regard, and that’s important.

But when it comes to specifics, she seems to want a pass. At one point in the interview, she said three times in one minute, “My values ​​haven’t changed.” Her values ​​may not have changed, but in many areas her policies have, and she could perhaps be pressed a little more to explain why.

The impact of this first real interview will likely be small. The dirty secret of this entire campaign is that no one really knows what’s happening. Too much is unknown. Too much has happened too fast to properly represent it in the established minds of voters. But Harris is running as herself now, and in the days ahead she will sink or swim. At this point, any outcome seems possible.

Justin Webb presents the American podcast on BBC Sounds