Because Democrats closed ranks around Kamala Harris and now project an image of a party united by joy, it’s easily forgotten that their new nominee was not the first choice of those who played key roles in ousting President Joe Biden, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and most especially former President Barack Obama.
Their preferred solution after Biden’s incapacity became undeniable was that Harris should be one among several candidates, and probably not the one who emerged victorious. It’s important to remember that until the day Biden actually surrendered, Harris was joked about as his insurance policy against regicide.
But Biden overturned the apple cart by endorsing Harris as his successor within minutes of announcing that he would quit the race. This defiant last act of real power, giving an insurmountable advantage to a candidate Obama did not want, was inevitably followed quickly by many other Democrats. These were not just grandees from the past, such as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, but significantly far-left Squad members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who spoke out on July 21, plus Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Cori Bush (D-MO), and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). These radicals like Harris because she was the most left-wing senator of all when she was in the upper chamber.
Bigger Democratic guns took somewhat longer to line up behind Harris. Pelosi endorsed Harris on July 22, which allowed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to add their endorsements to the barrage on July 23.
But Obama waited five days, until July 26, before joining the happy throng. This delay would not have happened if he didn’t have doubts about Harris. He is ruthless in working for Democratic victory and for his own influence over the party, which was why he passed over Biden himself to anoint Clinton as his own successor in 2016. And he recognized, as everyone did until five minutes ago, that Harris was not a top-quality candidate or leader. Obama, though, obviously calculated that his influence over the Democratic Party would be stronger if he gave the final and decisive thumbs up to Harris and then sought to manipulate her, rather than standing alone against her avalanche of support.
Once he was in, he was all in. He grafted his former staff onto her campaign and gave her a “hope and change” makeover. He and his wife, Michelle Obama, used their speeches at the Democratic National Convention to put the glossy Obama seal of approval on Harris. This will help them exercise influence over the campaign and the next presidency, should Harris win. Obama would like a fourth term for Obamaism, just as Biden’s first term was substantially Obama’s third.
The former president’s modus operandi was dramatically displayed after Harris rolled out her plan for socialist price controls. Jason Furman, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, immediately blasted the idea, saying, “This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality. There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.” This intervention, echoed by the Washington Post and CNN, declares the fact that the Obama wing of the Democratic Party finds Harris’s thinking clumsy and unsophisticated, and it is determined to try to direct her as best it can.
Behind the facade of unity, however, there is a fight for the direction of the party, and Obama and his former staff are doing what they can to win it.
They are left-wing, for sure, but they are also technocrats who want corporate America and Wall Street on their side. This is of less interest to the average Democratic activist and the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Squad, who have dragged the Democratic Party even further Left in the past eight years. Obama presided over bailouts for Wall Street and the auto industry, and he helped big insurers and hospital chains consolidate the healthcare industry. It was he who forged the ideological and policy alliance between Democrats, big business, and big media, and he wants to keep that alliance in place.
This will mean reining in Harris every time she goes along with the revolutionary instincts of the party’s extreme Left, to which she is obviously susceptible. It will mean manipulating her to maintain an alliance that is comfortable with corporate power as long as those corporate allies and their money serve “progressive” causes.
During Biden’s administration, we’ve seen both a corporate/Obama influence on policy and a more radical leftist influence. On the one hand, there was the Inflation Reduction Act, which was nothing more than a package of corporate giveaways to empower politically favored industries such as renewable energy and tech companies. On the other hand, there are proposed price controls for groceries, as touted by Harris, and a rent control plan the nominee adopted from Biden.
This socialist revolutionary wing goes for broke, whereas the Obama wing goes exclusively for power. Obama and his adherents want to push Harris away from her cloddish radicalism and use her to retain the dominant Leftist alliance that has been in place for 16 years.
