The Perils of the Good-Enough Candidate

In four days, the coin will land, and half of the country will either exhale with relief or shudder in terror. I have no predictions for what will happen, nor do I have much of an idea about what will ultimately swing this election. What I want to offer instead before next Tuesday is an honest assessment of the candidates and the stakes. These, of course, are two very different things, especially given that one candidate has talked openly about prosecuting his enemies and turning the military against American citizens who oppose him, and just held a rally at Madison Square Garden, which, in future generations, could be written about as the moment when America’s violent authoritarian impulses were set out in full display to the public. Donald Trump has always relied on racism and xenophobia to stir up his base, but things have got uglier in the past few months. The attack on the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio; the ad blitz about trans people that ends with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”; the unhinged, and in some ways liberated, energy of the New York City rally should not be read as theatre but, rather, as direct threats to vulnerable groups in America.

On Tuesday, millions of Americans will vote for Kamala Harris because they see Trump as a direct threat to the future of the country. But I imagine most of those voters don’t have much of an idea about what Harris has planned, nor do they care as long as she isn’t Trump. After a very strong start to her campaign that included packed rallies and innervating stump speeches, Harris mostly regressed back to the ultimately unknowable candidate whom Democratic voters rejected back in 2019. On immigration, she chose to mostly repeat the same talking point about Trump’s actions to tank the bipartisan border bill. If it’s true that immigration will decide this election, then Harris more or less decided to punt on the issue. Simply pointing out that Trump would rather play politics than address a problem doesn’t really clarify what Harris and a Democratic executive branch would actually do about the border. She didn’t spend much time explaining what, exactly, that bill did or why she thought it was a good idea, either.

In her speech at the Ellipse, in Washington, D.C., this past Tuesday, she spent a little more than a minute on immigration and once again reprised her line about how her former job as the attorney general of a “border state” (California) gave her a look at the “chaos and violence caused by transnational criminal organizations.” She did say that “we must acknowledge we are a nation of immigrants,” but, just as she has throughout the campaign, she failed to outline a strong case for legal immigration, nor did she object much to the truly horrific language that both Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have used. The closest she got to showing real empathy for immigrants came in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, but even then she bizarrely turned a question about school closures in Springfield, Ohio, into one about American racial politics. Harris cited the Trump family’s racist housing policies and his villainization of the Central Park Five, which, though disgusting in their own right, were entirely beside the point. It is true that the Harris campaign and the various PACs that support it have put out positive visions of immigrants in television ads in swing states, but it’s been rare to hear Harris herself say anything about immigration that doesn’t involve the words “Trump” and “bipartisan border bill.”

This has been her campaign’s approach to sensitive topics—take the line of least resistance, repeat talking points, and then offer lip service to their own voters on the left who might desire an immigration policy that welcomes refugees and asylum seekers, or, even those who desire intensive economic redistribution or a less interventionist foreign policy. What does it mean to acknowledge we are a nation of immigrants? What does she plan to do about legal immigration? Harris has had little more than three months to develop an answer. As for another issue that she has addressed by repeating evasive punch lines and platitudes, the words “Gaza” or “the Middle East” did not appear once in Tuesday’s closing speech.

Such sentiments are hard to capture in polls but Harris’s enduring avoidance, or, perhaps, lack of imagination, may have dampened much of the enthusiasm about her campaign among many liberal voters. There is an emerging maxim that the only liberal Harris skeptics are the terminally online. Supposedly, we, the self-proclaimed commentariat who have to watch and dissect every interview, every tweet, and every rally, are perhaps the only ones who regard her as a friend who dropped in unexpectedly for a visit but then perhaps stayed on a little bit too long. People with normal media-consumption habits, we are told, are actually very enthusiastic about Harris. This usually would be a good guess—the mainstream media, especially those who are addicted to social media, tend to be out of touch. But, in this election cycle, the bias almost certainly runs the other way: the people who are insisting on a groundswell of popular support for Harris based on her own charms and merits are part of an online echo chamber, and the majority of liberal voters, I imagine, have decided that Harris is just the person they vote for instead of Trump. This doesn’t mean that they believe Harris is a terrible option—we are still far from the 2016 election in terms of two deeply unlikable candidates—but it does mean that Harris did not define herself in any meaningful way.

I’m also not sure if another outcome was possible. Harris was thrust into the spotlight under galling circumstances and did what she was supposed to do: look like a credible candidate and deliver talking points. At the outset of her campaign, I called on her to do more media appearances, because the public deserved to know a bit more about why she had changed her stance on core issues such as fracking and Medicare for All, and also because I thought it was reasonable to expect a person running for President to answer some questions. After some notable hesitation at the start, Harris went out and did the media rounds, appearing on popular podcasts such as “Call Her Daddy,” radio shows like “The Breakfast Club,” and on storied television shows including “60 Minutes.” Observing her in these interviews is like watching a band play the same song for a variety of audiences. There’s the fiery “Trump killed the bipartisan bill” reserved for Fox News and then the more thoughtful “Trump killed the bipartisan bill” for long-form podcasts. One can expect a certain amount of dodging from a politician, but the talent, in many ways, is to do so with grace and dexterity.

Does this matter? Probably a little more than the head-in-the-sand Democrats who cheer on her every media appearance might believe, but also not all that much more. Harris, as I’ve noted before, has been a politician in my life since I moved to San Francisco in the two-thousands, and I’ve always been struck by how she never really seems to be able to just plant her feet and directly answer a question. Perhaps this might contribute to some sense of distrust among undecided voters, but, in that same period of time, Harris has gone from her former role as the district attorney of San Francisco to a tight contest for the Oval Office. If responding to questions with feigned but believable thoughtfulness was all that mattered, Lindsey Graham would be President.

Harris’s wishy-washiness on the trail, however, might carry into her Presidency if she wins. Faced with a probable Republican Senate and a thin majority in the House, she will likely be stymied from passing any substantive legislation. I do not think she will undo the entirety of Biden’s more left-leaning economic politics, and I believe she will commit herself to boosting the care sector and abortion rights. Whether she gets any of this passed is another concern, and, though I don’t think it’s particularly fair to blame the President for the obstructions of other parts of the government, Harris also was the Vice-President for the past four years, a fact that she seems to want the American public to selectively forget. If we’re hoping for strong executive action on abortion and the border and we’re being told by Harris that the country is facing a crisis on both fronts, it does seem reasonable to ask why the Biden-Harris Administration didn’t take more action, especially given that Harris has not really explained how she will be any different than her former boss.

So that’s where Democrats stand a few days before the election: Trump is worse than ever and Harris will just have to do. The anxiety of the past few weeks in liberal circles doesn’t feel like a response to the polls, which haven’t changed in any significant way, but, rather, to the realization that Harris just isn’t the candidate we thought she might be just a few months back. It’s fine for everyone to just admit that Harris doesn’t represent anything other than four more years without Trump. Even her own unofficial campaign slogan—“We’re Not Going Back”—admits as much.