By David Freddoso
“Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record.”
The speaker was Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a long-shot presidential contender who had already made herself something of a pariah in Democratic politics. In a prior Democratic presidential debate a month earlier, Sen. Kamala Harris had broken out with a couple of viral moments — among other things heavily insinuating that former Vice President Joe Biden was a racist for working with segregationist senators to oppose busing. (This mau-mauing would ultimately pay off in ways that even she could not have possibly anticipated.)
This time, however, on July 31, 2019, Harris was the one being roasted.
“There are too many examples to cite,” Gabbard went on. “But she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence — she blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”
Harris really should have been prepared for all of these allegations. Instead, she appeared flabbergasted and flat-footed. From the stage, she delivered a lengthy boilerplate answer about how proud she was of her work as attorney general of California, failing to respond even to a single point Gabbard had raised. Asked about the allegations afterward — and not all of them were completely accurate, by the way — Harris dodged their substance entirely, instead punching downward at the messenger.
“This is going to sound immodest, but obviously I’m a top-tier candidate,” Harris said, “and so I did expect that I’d be on the stage and take some hits tonight. When people are at 0% or 1% or whatever she might be at — so I did expect to take some hits tonight.”
This single event marked the beginning of the end of her 2020 campaign. Harris peaked in July, and it was all downhill from there until she ended her campaign in December 2019, before a single primary vote had been cast.
The Peter principle seemed to be asserting itself. Kamala Harris, prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general, senator, had finally found the upper limits of her competence. Who could have guessed that, in the most improbable way, Harris would fail upward yet one more tier — and perhaps two if she wins the presidency this November?
In 2024, no Republican can credibly level at Harris anything like the allegations that Gabbard rattled off that night. Those worked in a Democratic primary in an era of social justice activism. It cannot work in a campaign where law and order is certainly going to be a central GOP message through Election Day.
No, Republicans won’t fault Harris for being too tough. Rather, they will attack her for being too soft. They are likely to train their sights on Biden’s “border czar” who used her influence to raise money to help bail out violent criminals — her post supporting the Minnesota Freedom Fund is still live — and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who cheered as criminals burned down Minneapolis in summer 2020, killing at least two people and causing hundreds of millions in damage.
Even so, these Republican attacks are less interesting than Gabbard’s when it comes to understanding who Harris really is. Indeed, the ease and accuracy of such attacks from all sides is itself revelatory, a by-product of the malleability of Harris’s political principles throughout her career.
In recent weeks, former President Donald Trump has allowed himself to be baited into alleging that Harris had shifted her ethnic self-identifcation, from Indian to black, for political benefit. But this would be irrelevant even if it were true. The more important transformation in Harris has not been racial but political and ideological.
Harris began her career in politics as a tough-on-crime — or rather, as her campaign put it in 2003, “Smart on Crime” — prosecutor. She upset Terence Hallinan, a bleeding-heart, soft-on-crime incumbent San Francisco district attorney with the help of former boyfriend Willie Brown’s political machine. Seven years later, Harris was amassing a conviction record not much better than Hallinan’s. To give an example, her refusal to cooperate with national immigration authorities in 2003 even resulted in the failure to rid the Bay Area of Salvadoran gangster Edwin Ramos, who after his release went on to murder a man in a road rage incident, long after she could have easily had him deported. This was a direct consequence of Harris’s position, a popular one in California at the time, that “criminal justice policy should not be conflated with national immigration policy.”
Despite such failures and the violent crimes that resulted, Harris managed to move up another rung, barely squeaking by in the statewide race for attorney general in 2010.
As attorney general, Harris was not especially tough on crime either, but she did bolster her reputation for toughness through a combination of harsh rhetoric, high-profile gimmicks (most famously threatening to prosecute the parents of truant children), and serious ethical breaches that violated the rights of defendants. These were among the incidents to which Gabbard was referring, including Harris’s office withholding exculpatory evidence and arguing that prisoners were too valuable as a source of labor for California to be released over something as trifling as a Supreme Court ruling requiring their release.
That was the old Harris: cautious, calculating, ambitious, happy to call herself California’s “top cop.” She took political positions that were popular and safe — in California, that always included gay rights and unrestricted abortion — and felt no need to stick her neck out for edgier causes such as criminal justice reform or Black Lives Matter.
The new Harris, who first appeared about six years ago, is an entirely different animal — not just a lot more progressive but someone always eager to prove just how far left she could go. This Harris wants to show that if you’re woke, she’s even woker, the first to jump on every leftist bandwagon.
As a senator, she threw her weight behind the so-called Green New Deal when that proposal was little more than the butt of jokes about bovine flatulence. After winning her Senate seat in 2016, she amassed a voting record that made her the second-most left-wing senator to serve this century.
By the time this new Harris was running for president in 2019, she was “trying to be all things to every radical leftist activist in the primary,” as Charlie Spiering put it in his political biography of Harris, Amateur Hour. She tried to memory-hole her prosecutorial past while working to push her campaign down the same far-left lane as rivals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She backed “Medicare for All,” including taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants. She called for a climate-driven, not health-driven, of course, adjustment of government nutritional guidelines to make people eat less meat. She advocated the decriminalization of illegal border crossings and of prostitution, something she had opposed as attorney general, but also bans for plastic straws and fracking.
This ideological transformation, and her current attempts to backpedal from many of these positions she took up just a couple of years ago, exposes Harris as someone whose political ideals change easily to suit the political situation. Sure, she is a liberal — that hasn’t changed — but she was opportunistically willing to swing much further leftward in 2020 and back to the right now, if that’s what it takes to convince voters.
Given this lack of core principles, it is almost impossible to guess what a Harris administration would look like, beyond “generic Democrat.” This is especially so because her campaign has been carefully hiding her from media and other unscripted appearances since Biden dropped out of the race.
In the absence of other good information, there is no reason to believe Harris won’t just carry on as Biden has, along the same path of least resistance she has always followed. She will likely continue Biden’s sabotage of border enforcement, his undermining of judicial independence, and his amusing push to force more electrical vehicles onto the road than the nation’s grid can support. She might even call for the same tax hikes as Biden has.
The irony in Biden’s historic and unexpected withdrawal from the race is that Harris probably could never have come so far, had she not failed so badly in the 2020 primary. Prior to July 31, 2019, the brand-new ultrawoke Harris seemed like a real contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was in a three-way tie with Sanders and Warren as the further-left Biden alternative.
Then came that July 31 debate mentioned above. As I watched Gabbard speak, I knew exactly what she was referring to, and she was not correct in all of the particulars, by the way. Reason, the libertarian magazine, had published a thorough piece on all of these accusations in January 2019, detailing how Harris had defended dirty prosecutors in her own office and appealed a case in which a prosecutor had fabricated a confession. These were all well-known and well-established criticisms of Harris’s record by then, even easier to find in local California news sources.
So how could a “top-tier candidate” be so badly prepared? How could a candidate who had raised $12 million in the second quarter of 2019 melt on live television in such dramatic fashion when asked questions that her staff clearly should have anticipated?
Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight and new information, I believe this mystery has been solved. As the Washington Post put it, her staff has complained anonymously that “one consistent problem” in Harris’s office is that she “would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.”
This is probably not unrelated to her 92% staff turnover rate, even in an office once described by its first inhabitant as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Just imagine a darker version of the hit comedy Veep, in which the boss is much meaner and more unfair, and the data and staff complaints suggest you’re probably pretty close to understanding Harris’s vice presidency.
She showed the same sort of shallow understanding of the material as a senator. In her four years of service, she acquired a unique reputation for grilling executive branch officials in hearings with questions that were excitingly contentious, usually a good thing, but mostly irrelevant in their content. The goal usually seemed to be a viral video clip, from which she could raise money.
The high point of her Senate career, since she never introduced any bills that became law, was probably her attempt to insinuate in a confirmation hearing that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had discussed the Mueller investigation with members of the law firm representing Trump. (This was all before more lurid allegations were raised against him.) Kavanaugh, at first baffled by the question, had to obtain a roster of the firm in question before he could answer “no” with certainty. No one has ever contradicted his eventual denial, but Harris had confidently implied to reporters that she had the receipts. She was apparently just making the whole thing up.
The charge Gabbard leveled against Harris five years ago that hit hardest was the one about marijuana. One need not support drug legalization to think less of Harris, much less, in fact, for putting marijuana smokers in jail, for long opposing its legalization, yet cackling in a podcast interview years later, a context where it would make her look cool, about how she herself had smoked marijuana. The shallowness and moral superficiality of this juxtaposition are perfectly consistent with Harris’s reputation for unpreparedness and cliche-ridden word salads. It is here that one begins to appreciate what is different about Harris from all the other players in this national political drama, whether it be Trump, Biden, or former President Barack Obama. People projected their own hopes and dreams onto Obama, no matter what he was actually saying. Harris just adapts her position to whatever she thinks the audience wants to hear.
This month, when Harris chose Walz as her running mate instead of the more obvious choice, Gov. (and long-ago Israel Defense Forces volunteer) Josh Shapiro (D-PA), Republicans immediately alleged that this move catered to a growing antisemitism within the Democratic Left. There might be something to that, or perhaps there is some undisclosed time bomb in Shapiro’s background. Whatever it is, it must be pretty bad for Harris to have overlooked Shapiro in favor of someone who lied (through staff) about his very high BAC (0.13) drunken driving arrest to get elected to Congress and who on multiple occasions has misrepresented the nature of his military service.
But the other leading explanation for Harris’s snub of Shapiro, that she did not want to be upstaged by the reportedly ambitious Keystone State governor, almost seems worse. If this election finishes close, and Harris’s ego costs her Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, is there any way she will ever live that down?
David Freddoso is the New York Times bestselling author of The Case Against Barack Obama and deputy opinion editor at the Hill.
