Most of the reactions I have encountered so far are about you’d expect—kneejerk condemnations from diehard Trump supporters, equally kneejerk enthusiastic declarations of support from those who probably would have said much the same things whoever Biden picked. The reaction of the editors of the Washington Post is typical of the latter:
When she entered the presidential race, many handicappers picked her as the likely winner. The campaign that followed was something of a disappointment. Like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who also had served as a prosecutor before joining the Senate, Ms. Harris found herself somewhat wrong-footed by the Democratic Party’s turn toward criminal justice reform. She wavered on how much to embrace her own law enforcement record, as she did on Medicare-for-all and a few other fraught issues.
None of that is all that unusual in a first-time presidential candidate, and she exited the presidential field with her integrity and reputation intact. She showed herself to be a tough debater, including when she challenged Mr. Biden; it’s to both of their credit that they are ready to move on from that. She also exited as a plausible ideological soul mate for Mr. Biden, who has worked hard to accommodate the left wing of his party without acceding to all of its wishes.
Running to replace a president who has celebrated incompetence and elevated incompetents, Mr. Biden needed to choose a running mate who respects public service and has served well. In Sen. Kamala Harris, he has found such a partner.
while that of Kevin Williamson at the National Review characteristic of the former:
Harris’s self-serving prosecutorial abuses have been directed at political enemies, but they also put hundreds — maybe thousands — of people in jail or at risk of prosecution on wrongful grounds when it suited her agenda.
[…]
In the context of Harris’s political vendettas, that eagerness to engage in “systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights†is particularly terrifying.
In choosing this corrupt prosecutor as his vice-presidential candidate, Joe Biden has made a serious error, one that highlights his already substantial deficiencies in judgment.
I did, however, encounter a handful of insightful observations.
The first was from Jonathan Last at The Bulwark:
Her selection suggests that the campaign believes their position is very strong. They think that the progressive wing of the party is with them and did not need to be tended to. They believe the heart of their coalition in November is going to be African Americans and college-educated suburban whites, both of whom should respond well to Harris.
It also shows that this is a steady, well-managed campaign that has the discipline to not get cute and out-smart itself.
But the biggest thing the Harris pick says is this: They think they’re going to win.
I thought the obserations of the editors of the Wall Street Journal were worth considering:
Mr. Biden may have backed himself into the corner of having to choose Ms. Harris. He limited his choices by promising to select a woman, and the black Democrats who saved him in South Carolina pressed for a black woman. Then the Sanders wing pressed for a progressive, and Ms. Harris is a safer choice by far than Elizabeth Warren.
In this sense the choice is revealing about the unusual nature of Mr. Biden’s candidacy. He won the nomination as the last-ditch, anti-Trump alternative to what would have been the suicidal selection of Bernie Sanders. More than any recent nominee, Mr. Biden is a party figurehead, more than a party leader. In adding Ms. Harris to the ticket, he has underscored that a vote for Mr. Biden isn’t merely a vote to oust Mr. Trump. It’s a vote for the coastal progressives who now dominate the Democratic Party.
while those of Ted Rall in an op-ed there fly in the face of the views of those who think that the young people who have taken to the streets in protest over the last few months can just be taken for granted as Democrats have been taking the votes of blacks for granted over the period of the last 75 years:
By choosing Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden is sending a message to the progressive left base of the Democratic Party: Drop dead.
The choice indicates that Mr. Biden’s centrist establishment handlers view Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 as historically anomalous rather than evidence of a flawed strategy. Democratic conventional wisdom remains mired in the 1990s of Dick Morris and Clintonian third-way triangulation. Donald Trump proved that presidential elections are now about energizing the base to increase turnout. Defying convention as usual, the president has governed the way he campaigned, with red-meat policy and rhetoric unlikely to appeal to Democrats. It’s how he’s running for re-election.
Democrats are challenging him the same way they lost to him in 2016. Determined to put Bernie Sanders’s bruising primary challenge behind her, Mrs. Clinton circular-filed suggestions of a party-unity ticket, and sidelined Mr. Sanders in favor of Tim Kaine. Traditional corporatist liberals twisted themselves into knots trying to convince progressives that he was one of them.
“Kaine has an extremely progressive record overall,†Paul Waldman argued in the American Prospect in July 2016. “He was one of the first Virginia Democrats to turn his back on the way members of his party had traditionally campaigned in the state (bending over backwards to show conservative white voters that they were good ol’ boys); instead, Kaine won races for lieutenant governor, governor, and senator by putting together earlier versions of the Obama coalition, based on African Americans, immigrant groups, and white liberals.â€
But building an identity-politics coalition isn’t the same thing as embracing progressive policies. In the end, according to one analysis, less than 80% of Sanders primary voters voted for Mrs. Clinton, and 12% supported Mr. Trump.
Ms. Harris’s backers are repeating the same error. “Joe Biden’s top priority in selecting a running mate will be to choose somebody who can help unite and energize the sprawling, restless Democratic coalition,†Errol Louis said last week on CNN. “At a time when demands for racial justice and inclusion are surging, Harris would be a camera-ready voice from the black base of the party.â€
That assumes that being black is good enough for Black Lives Matter. BLM learned from Barack Obama that race didn’t equate to policy. As president, he failed to act meaningfully against police brutality.
It’s hard to believe that younger black voters will look past Ms. Harris’s record as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general. “That ‘top cop’ thing has just stuck—she built such a strong brand on it as an AG, as the DA—and it’s hard for people to erase that in their memories,†Chivona Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, told the New York Times. Kevin Cooper sits on California’s death row in part because Ms. Harris refused to allow him to obtain advanced DNA testing to demonstrate his innocence. Prosecutors withheld potentially exculpatory evidence in the case of George Gage, and Attorney General Harris fought to keep him in prison on a technicality. He’s 80 and still behind bars.
Mr. Biden probably won’t enjoy much of a boost from a running mate primarily chosen to appeal to the older black voters who would have turned out for him anyway. He has certainly alienated progressives.
What I think is emerging for the 2020 election is a battle of the bases, with President Trump doing nothing to expand his base beyond his hardcore supporters and the Biden campaign confident that there are enough voters in enough states who will vote for anyone who isn’t Donald Trump to win in the general election. Historically, that has not been a winning formula but 2020 is a year like no other.
