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From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
If Joe Biden steps aside, which is still a very big if, the favorite to replace him is Vice President Kamala Harris. She is quite literally next in line.
There are reasons that are obvious for this and reasons that are a little bit more subtle. Like, here’s one. She would make the transfer of money a lot easier. A Harris-led ticket could use all the money that the Biden-Harris campaign has raised, whereas because of how campaign finance law works, if anyone else is a Democratic nominee, that money has to be transferred to the D.N.C. or to a PAC, which would make coordination a whole lot harder.
But there’s been this longstanding belief in Democratic circles that Harris is a lot weaker than Joe Biden, that he can win the election and she can’t. The big evidence for this used to be that she polled beneath him. That’s no longer true. I was looking at the FiveThirtyEight polling averages, and she has a very slightly higher approval rating and a significantly lower disapproval rating. There’s a new CNN poll that found Biden losing to Trump by six points, Harris losing by only two points. Other internal Democratic polling has been leaked, including by a group called Open Labs. Looks there, too, like Harris is now outperforming Biden against Donald Trump. In polls before now, she’s performed similarly, sometimes a point or two worse.
So far, the conventional wisdom has held that Biden may be weak, but Harris is also too weak. But why?
There are ways in which Harris seems perfectly suited for this moment. She’s a former prosecutor who would be running against a convicted criminal. She’s the administration’s best messenger on abortion by far, running in the aftermath of Dobbs. She’s a Black woman with a tough on crime background, running at a moment when crime and disorder have been big issues in American politics.
And unlike Joe Biden, who I think has very little room to improve from here, the American people don’t really know Harris. The opportunity for her to make a different impression if she was speaking for herself, rather than for the administration, is real. Now, that doesn’t mean she’d be able to pull that off. That’s a hard political job. But she’s a lot sharper in interviews and debates than I think people are now prepared for.
She has a résumé and some skills quite well-suited to this moment. It definitely doesn’t seem impossible that she could rise to the task. There is a reason she was considered so strong in 2019 and in 2020. Wouldn’t you want to see her debate Donald Trump?
But that still leaves a question of how she ended up with this reputation in the first place, how she went from this meteoric rise, winning a Senate seat in 2016, being taken seriously as a top tier presidential candidate just four years later, getting tapped, then, for vice president, to being really quickly, after that, considered a political underachiever, the reason Joe Biden needs to run again rather than the successor he was building that bridge to.
Elaina Plott Calabro is a staff writer at The Atlantic who previously covered politics at The New York Times. And in October, she published a really big, really interesting profile of Harris — about what had happened during her vice presidency, how that differed from the reputation she had before. And for that, she spent quite a lot of time with Harris and the people who worked with her. So that’s to come on the show, to unravel the puzzle, maybe even the paradox, of Kamala Harris with me. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
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Elaina Plott Calabro, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
So I want to begin with a clip of Vice President Harris defending Joe Biden right after the first presidential debate in this interview with Anderson Cooper.
Listen, people can debate on style points, but ultimately, this election and who is the president of the United States has to be about substance. And the contrast is clear. Look at what happened during the course of the debate. Donald Trump lied over and over and over again, as he is wont to do. He would not disavow what happened on January 6. He would not give a clear answer on whether he would stand by the election results this November.
He went back and forth about where he stands on one of the most critical issues of freedom in America, which is the right of a woman to make decisions about their own body. He has been completely ambiguous and all over the place about where he stands on that issue, despite the fact that he hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade.
And that’s exactly what they did. And just three years ago, we commemorated the two-year anniversary of Dobbs, wherein women across our country have been denied emergency health care, have suffered miscarriages to the point that —
All that may be true, but the president of the United States —
But these facts are very important.
— was not able to make that case to Donald Trump on the stage tonight.
So there’s something grim there about Cooper basically saying, great, that was a great debate answer. Why wasn’t the president able to say what you just said?
I think, honestly, a lot of people who have followed the vice president closely the past three years were, in some ways, surprised by that answer.
One of the huge reasons for her struggles and her, in my opinion, lack of popularity among many Americans is that she’s a very poor communicator when the parameters are quite wide. And what do I mean by that? I mean, when she’s on a stage and she’s asked about the American experiment, democracy, the state of it, things like that, she really gets lost in the woods when she talks.
But a moment like this, when the parameters are quite narrow, when she needs to — and it’s such a cliché with her at this point to say it like this, but making the case against someone or something is where I think her confidence truly shows and when she is actually communicating in a way that doesn’t feel instantly clippable for a Republican ad.
I want to get at this idea of her as a poor communicator, because, in some ways, what has happened to the reputation of Kamala Harris between, let’s call it 2019 and 2020, when she’s a huge rising star, and she’s running for president and considered in maybe the top tier of the presidential candidates, nobody’s saying, well, this is going to be a disaster. Kamala Harris is a terrible communicator.
And then something happens. And the whole conventional wisdom in Washington on Kamala Harris undergoes this devolution to, she’s not a way above replacement politician, but a way below replacement politician. One of the reasons Joe Biden has to run again, no matter how old he is, is she can’t carry the load. Why does that happen?
Having spent more time than I’d like to admit combing through every aspect of her career as a public servant, you have to think about, OK, what was she before she ran for president in the primary? She was a senator from California. She had not been in office long at all before she launched her primary bid.
Before that, she was attorney general of California. Before that, she was the D.A. in San Francisco. Let’s think, then, about the D.A., because I think this elucidates the point pretty well. When you are running for D.A., you are not necessarily trying to capture the imagination of voters. It’s very just sort of metrics-driven, dry even.
And she ran the campaign that way. She said, my opponent, the incumbent, has a very low conviction rate for felonies. I’m going to raise that conviction rate. And because she was so often the first, or always, rather, the first, in the jobs that she held, whether that was because of her gender, being South Asian, having Black heritage, a lot of times, in the era she was running, you’d want to minimize those facts.
And I think in San Francisco in particular, in that D.A.‘s race, what she wanted to show voters was that she kind of wanted to blend in like background music, in a way. Like, I’m the guy that you currently have, but I’m just a lot more competent. And it’s sort of that very kind of systematic, practical appeal that works in an office that’s really close to the ground in that way.
Nobody is looking to their D.A. to give soaring and inspiring speeches about democracy, and nor are they looking to be sold on a story of someone’s life. I mean, I’m sure most Americans in this country couldn’t tell you the origin myth of their local district prosecutor or what have you. And she sort of ran her campaign for attorney general that same way.
I remember talking to one of her advisers on that campaign, and she said they did, in fact, urge her, you know, share more about your biography. Make your personal story more of an aspect of this campaign. And she was resistant to that idea.
But she definitely does it more now. She talks about the friend who was molested when she was growing up, and she brings that friend into her home. And that’s part of why she becomes a prosecutor. So when she does tell her story, what is the story she tells?
It’s interesting that you brought up that story in particular, because I remember an aide coming to me in the midst of reporting my profile on her, saying, I just found out a key reason why she became a prosecutor, and I’m going to set up an interview so she can tell you about it. So I thought it was quite telling that this person who had been on her team for a while is only now learning this pretty important facet of her path to her career.
So, she is inherently resistant to trying to sell herself in such a way. But again, with attorney general, that is not the worst thing ever. Governor — it would have been a different story, of course. She gets into the Senate, runs for president, and what you see happen is that her background and her skill set, in being a prosecutor, prosecuting the case against Donald Trump, collides with a moment when the national sentiment toward police and law enforcement, in general, is quite grim.
And you have those around her, like her sister, Maya Harris, who say, you kind of drop the prosecutor thing. This is not something that voters want to be reminded of. She wrote a book when she was in California called “Smart on Crime,” which really — you read it, it sounds more like a tough on crime book. But that was no longer relevant, as her advisers told her, to her interest in the presidential campaign.
And so what happened was her communication became so clearly reflective of someone that she herself didn’t recognize, if that makes sense. When she is able to kind of step into that mode she feels comfortable, where she feels more like a district attorney again, like you saw in hearings with Brett Kavanaugh or Jeff Sessions, when her star really started to explode —
When you and I met, I brought up the incident in Charlottesville, where, as you know, there was a rally by white supremacists that left a young woman dead. You will recall that the president who nominated you described the incident by saying, quote, “I think there is blame on both sides.” So I think this will be a simple question for you. Do you, sir, believe there was blame on both sides?
Senator, we did talk, and I enjoyed our meeting and to talk about the history of this country. And we talked about that at some length and talked about discrimination. I appreciated your opening statement yesterday, where you talked about your experience. One of the principles I’ve articulated throughout this hearing is the independence of the judiciary.
And, sir, I’d appreciate if you’d answer the question.
I am, Senator. So one of the principles I’ve talked about throughout this hearing is the independence of the judiciary. And one of the things judges do, following the lead of the Chief Justice and what all the judges do, is not — stay out of current events. Stay out of commenting on current events, because it risks confusion about what our role is. We are judges who decide cases and controversy. We’re not pundits, so we don’t comment on current events. We stay out of political controversy.
With all due respect, I only have limited time. But are you saying that it’s too difficult a question, or it’s a question you can’t answer, which is whether you agree with the statement that there was blame on both sides? We can move on, but are you saying you cannot answer that simple — pretty simple question?
I think that’s the flavor we’re starting to see again. But the interim has — I mean, it’s just been a struggle because that’s never been how she thinks of politics.
You open your profile with a kind of very telling story that I’ve also heard from others about getting a tour of the art in the vice president’s residence. Do you want to talk through that?
Yeah, so I went to meet with the vice president at her residence for about an hour and a half. And when I got in there, she gave me a tour of the residence. So, like past vice presidents, she’s completely redesigned it, hired someone to come in and help her effect her vision. And she wanted to show me all of the artwork that she’d included.
And what I found pretty interesting right off the bat was that as she was describing these pieces, she said nothing about what it made her feel, what attracted her to it. The artistry itself is probably a better way to say it.
She would just point to it and say, this is by a Japanese American artist. This is by a gay artist, and sort of took me through an identitarian walk-through of the art on display in her home and never said anything else about it. And she ends it with, so you get the idea. So you get what I’m going for here, was the meaning of that. And, yeah, it was telling. I think there was a reason I started my piece with that anecdote.
But I also think, to me, it’s the sort of thing that reflected, I think, her desire, at times, to say what she thinks the base of the party wants to hear, which is where a lot of her communication fumbles, I think, come from. I think a lot of times that she is very scared of saying something wrong and going counter to the base, as opposed to just saying rather forthrightly how she feels about something.
You’re not the only person who’s gotten that exact tour and had that exact reaction to it. And it’s why focus on this. It’s obviously a very small thing, but there is this way — maybe it’s because it’s not actually her politics, right? I think it’s a really interesting argument you’re making here and that I think might be true, right, that she’s actually speaking this era of the Democratic Party with an accent, to use that metaphor.
That’s a nice way to put it. Yeah.
That, in fact, the reason the symbolism is a little bit blunt force is it’s not her natural politics. She’s not just running to be the first. She doesn’t come out of that era in Democratic Party politics. She comes out of this era when it made sense in SF to be a kind of smart on crime, tough on crime prosecutor, to brag about your conviction record, to say that the people you’re running against don’t have enough convictions, right? To say that you have compassion, but you also have steel to you.
And that as she tried to refashion herself for an era that did not allow her to make that set of arguments in an era in which there was extraordinary excitement about a Black, Indian American woman after Obama, I mean, people wanted her to pan out. They wanted Kamala Harris to be the next chapter in the history that seemed to be happening when the party elected Obama in 2008 and 2012.
And I think she tried to shape herself into that. And I guess what you’re saying here, which is interesting and maybe speaks to why that’s sort of an awkward tour she gives people, is that it’s an awkward fit, not just for the person on the tour, but maybe also for her.
To me, that’s absolutely the case. And I’ll return, again, to her presidential primary bid, which is where I think this theme sort of crystallized. I remember talking to aides on that campaign or former aides — this would have been after the fact — who said that when she started getting advice from people closest to her saying, this is a different moment in the Democratic Party, your background should not be your selling point, that her response was essentially, but I am a prose — that’s what I’ve done.
That is who I am. So what story do I tell instead? It’s not like I had a detour at some point where I went from smart on crime to, actually, just kidding, I changed my mind — here’s the new book. There wasn’t really an authentic pivot for her to make.
So when she’s sort of advised and takes that advice to heart that who she is, is not what that iteration of the party wants, she tries to reshape herself. And that’s why — I mean, let’s talk about the question of authenticity. That’s something that I think is really fraught, often, with racist and, quite often, sexist stereotypes, things like that.
But voters really did pick up on something about Kamala Harris that just felt inauthentic when she spoke. I think it was David Axelrod in my story, who just said, voters can pick up on that when it doesn’t feel — honesty is not even the right word, I think, telling a lie about your record or something, but just misrepresenting who you are or what it is that you really want to be saying.
She has reminded me of something that was true about Hillary Clinton, which is both of them struggled with this question of authenticity, struggled to seem like they were themselves, giving a big speech. And then when you would meet them privately, I don’t know that I’ve ever met a politician where I felt there was a bigger gap between the sort of charisma on the stump and the charisma around a table than Kamala Harris.
Clinton had that dimension to her, too. But Harris is like — she’s extremely warm and magnetic and profane, much more so than a lot of politicians who I know. You actually would want to have a beer with her. You’d want to go to the barbecue or the party she hosted. But you don’t see that version of her out in public all that often. And I don’t blame her for why, right?
I think there’s a long history of seeing this, whereas Joe Biden or Donald Trump can just go, like, let it all hang out, and then they seem authentic. But this feels to me like a place where there is a real — I mean, there is something lurking behind the public persona that if she were able to unleash it, at least from what I’ve seen, I think would be actually quite compelling.
And what I will say is that having traveled to so many events with her and actually seeing her interact with voters one-on-one, you do see that person. And this goes back to something I feel pretty strongly about, which is that when she is on a stage in front of a big audience and is expected to talk about gauzy questions of democracy and things like that, she just doesn’t do well, even broad questions like, what does this administration see as the future of climate change?
It’s something that I think once she gets in a smaller group and she’s able to really level with the person that she’s speaking to and has eyes on them, she, I think, becomes a completely different person. She’s far more comfortable.
And that’s what I experienced in the residence. I mean, this was someone who I found to be almost maternal. At one point she says to me — it’s not even a question — you’re newly married. I said, yes, Madam Vice President. And she just said, pay attention to your marriage, your relationships, because life has a way of sweeping you up.
And it was just something I had never seen from her on the stage, I think is the important distinction, that aura around her. Where I had seen it was one-on-one with voters.
And when I spoke with Hillary Clinton for this story, she said specifically, Kamala Harris is not a performance politician. I didn’t take that to be a criticism. She’s not a performance politician either. But her point was that— she said, when I was running for Senate, I did a lot of these really small round tables with voters all across New York. The media had no interest in that.
And this is a complaint you will hear a lot from Kamala Harris’s aides. She is, in fact, out there. Yes, she does travel a lot — I’ve gone with her for a lot of these stops — and is talking to people, interacting with voters. But they’re like, nobody’s coming with us on Air Force Two. We can’t get any of these major outlets to come do it.
And so, Kamala Harris, she said to me, my career was not about giving lovely speeches. It was about working with my constituents in whatever capacity I was in. And that’s great. But on a national stage, there’s simply no way that the media can package that fact and sell it for you. Lovely speeches is a large part of the ballgame when you are in the White House.
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You mentioned that book “Smart on Crime.” You mentioned it reads from maybe our current perspective as tough on crime. What does she say in that book? How would you describe it?
Well, think about her record in California. She was not shy about prosecuting people for marijuana usage. And it’s one of the reasons you saw quite the backlash — I don’t know if you’ll recall, Ezra — the moment when she’s asked — I think it was on a podcast — have you ever smoked marijuana? And she starts laughing and says something to the effect of, what kind of question is that? You know, I’m Jamaican.
And that might have been funny. But what a lot of people, I think, correctly pointed out is that, well, the thing that you’re laughing about is the thing that you were quite eager to move against in your positions of power in California, that today is not something that she’s going to want to talk about again.
But I remember talking to David Axelrod for my profile. This was last fall, and he said there’s such a tidal shift, in a way, where there’s a vacuum for somebody to step in and say, I am a progressive, but the Democratic Party can have the answer for crime. And he was sort of astonished that she hadn’t stepped in to kind of claim that role.
This, to me, is the paradox of her — it might ultimately be the tragedy of her — because Harris runs in 2020 at this exact moment when her precise political profile is disastrous for the Democratic Party, right?
Exactly.
It’s post-Ferguson. It’s post-Black Lives Matter. George Floyd is yet to come, but we’re already in this moment where what you want to be is not a smart on crime Democrat. It’s a criminal justice reformer. But when I go back right now — because preparing for the show, I was reading a bunch of older political profiles of Harris, and I was reading this one from The New Yorker in 2019. And they described her then as, quote, “a Black female law and order Democrat.”
And when you imagine the candidate Democrats would want to run this year amidst concern about crime, concern about disorder at the border, running against a convicted criminal in Donald Trump, at the moment that the Supreme Court is saying that the president can functionally do almost anything they want, like a Black female law and order Democrat is the profile that you would grow in a lab.
And it’s not clear to me. Like, can she reinhabit it? Can she find that again? Does she still believe in any of that? But it seems very — rather than Harris, in some ways, seeming ill-suited for the moment, most of her political history seems perfectly suited for the moment.
I agree with that so strongly. And another thing I feel so strongly about is that her perhaps not inhabiting that role, that should seem so natural and so intuitive in this moment in particular, I think is a failure of President Biden.
I’ve thought a lot about how, when they came into office, they really didn’t have a vision for her vice presidency. And part of that was by virtue of how she was chosen. She was not selected as a governing partner. People like Jim Clyburn, who has known Biden for quite a long time, is quite close with him, urges him expressly to pick a Black woman as vice president. And that’s great, but coming into the presidency, the White House, you have to take time to set out, OK, what role do you actually want the vice president to fill as a governing partner?
There are some reasons that are understandable for that not happening immediately. One was Covid. They came into office. It was all hands on deck. But another thing that I found pretty fascinating is that the role that vice presidents have typically been asked to fill — when I say typically, I mean, the past 20 years or so, 25 years — is a liaison to Capitol Hill, a kind of anchor to Washington for the outsider-ish president.
So you think about Dick Cheney for George W. Bush. You think about Joe Biden for Barack Obama, I think, most notably. Barack Obama was quite candid that he did not like the task of going on Capitol Hill and trying to negotiate to push his legislative agenda forward. Joe Biden loves that.
And so you had sort of this paradox that Kamala Harris comes in as this person who was, like, 10 years old when Joe Biden ran his first campaign for the Senate. There’s no world in which it makes sense to try to frame her as the Capitol Hill whisperer of the Biden administration.
But in fact, that’s what they tried to do at first. And I think it was just because they saw the historical pattern. They didn’t know what else to really do with her because they hadn’t really put enough thought into it. And she failed quite miserably in that role.
Again, as I mentioned, she was in the Senate a rather short time before she launched her primary bid. She had not built up the relational capital with lawmakers to be someone who could come in and really make things happen. And so you saw, which I think was quite embarrassing for her, that early on, Joe Biden said, OK, I’m going to go with you to these meetings, almost like a chaperone, to the point that it became just Joe Biden going to meet with someone like Senator Sinema or Senator Manchin to try to get them on board on his voting rights package.
So that fizzled out quite quickly. And I think you were then left with a vice president drifting in the wind. And, to me, it was so interesting about how probably Joe Biden’s worst answer, one of the worst kind of moments of the debate that we saw, was his inability to speak coherently about abortion. And it is that exact fact that indicates why we even have some sense of what Kamala Harris’s profile of her vice presidency has been.
In anticipation of the overturning of Roe, Biden, who does not feel comfortable talking about abortion, certainly not hitting the campaign trail in talking about it, suddenly, that was the vacuum for her to fill. And it was by happenstance, in many ways, right?
So the lack of planning, I think, has sort of brought Kamala Harris to where she is today. The West Wing has never really cared to think strategically about how to present her to the American public. And what I found in my reporting is, unfortunately, one reason was that when you ask Joe Biden’s aides, is she ready to step in and be president, they don’t want to engage the question because they feel that in doing so, they would legitimize the implication that she might, in fact, need to step in for Joe Biden, which just goes back to what everybody is talking about today, that those around him have sort of gaslit and bullied reporters who dared bring up the fact of his age. And I think that has translated directly to how people have tried to cover the vice president or understand the vice president.
But Biden has wanted to serve a second term. I have heard many people say that it was almost a stroke of genius for them to choose a weak vice president, because if they had chosen a stronger vice president, the pressure on him to step aside would have been much greater.
But if they had had a serious strategy to bulk up Harris’s profile, to make her seem presidential to people, to give her victories, to say, maybe you don’t want Joe Biden out there doing a lot of adversarial interviews and YouTube shows and podcasts, but you could send Harris out there. She’s a good interviewer. She makes mistakes like everybody, but she’s actually quite strong, in my view. I’ve listened to a bunch of her interviews. But they didn’t want to do that.
I’m not saying this was all a strategy, but in terms of their incentives and Joe Biden’s incentives, he didn’t want people coming to the conclusion that he’d done a great job in the first term, but he had this excellent vice president. And given that most Americans thought he was too old for a second term, he should step aside. He wanted people to feel that he was the only one who could beat Donald Trump.
I think that’s right. But what people, I think, latched on to pretty quickly, and correctly so, I think, is Joe Biden positioned himself publicly as wanting to be a bridge to the next generation of Democratic leadership from the outset of his presidency. So however he felt privately, he was on the record saying that this is not about me. This is about the country. This is about saving democracy, all of the things we would expect a politician to say.
But the fact that, particularly when it came to that bridge comment, that that was followed up by really not much of a cursory effort to promote a fuller and more successful portrait of Kamala Harris to the American people, I think that dissonance is partially responsible for what we see now.
I want to zoom in on the moment he picks Harris. So as I remember the veep stakes, you had a couple of people who were really in contention towards the end — Tammy Duckworth, who they really liked, who’s a senator, a wounded war hero. Elizabeth Warren was in contention. Karen Bass, who’s now the mayor of Los Angeles. Amy Klobuchar was in the mix at different points.
I mean,........