What the Right Gets Wrong About Kamala Harris
And why Liz Cheney knows that Harris is America’s only chance.
THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE, I THOUGHT, as I listened to Republican stalwart Liz Cheney introduce Kamala Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican party.
“I have never voted for a Democrat. But this year I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” Cheney said at Ripon College. “Vice President Harris is standing in the breach at a critical moment in our nation’s history. . . . I know that she loves our country and I know that she will be a president for all Americans. As a conservative, as a patriot, as a mother, as someone who reveres our Constitution, I am honored to join her in this urgent cause.”
Her clarity—and words like “proudly” and “honored”—were so welcome. This was not “the half Liz” practiced by Nikki Haley, described by the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio as wanting Donald Trump to win while wishing he’d keep his horrific conduct in check to improve his odds. By contrast, he writes, “‘The full Liz’ wants Trump to lose because it doesn’t want America governed by a proto-fascist sewer rat.”
There is another contingent you might call “the three-quarters Liz.” They are conservatives who see Trump for what he is, a plague on the Republic and on true conservatism, and who say publicly that (a) they will vote for Harris, or (b) strongly imply they will because they want to banish Trump from public life. Their public support should be welcomed by anyone who wants to see Harris elected, Trump defeated, and wider recognition of Trump’s unique unfitness. That said, their support comes with public reservations—and I would argue that they are mostly if not entirely getting it wrong.
George F. Will, for instance, writes that the preferred outcome for conservatives like him is a President Harris tempered by the (conservative-packed) Supreme Court and a Republican Senate. This is necessary, he says, because she’d be a president “full to overflowing” with progressivism, “whose current persona is obviously synthetic,” because she’s too weak to resist the pull of the Bay Area where she was “incubated,” and who is in need of regular reminders “that most Americans disagree with most of what she believes.” Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, offers “an anguished but emphatic endorsement” of a candidate he views as vacuous, mediocre, vaguely leftist, “extremely cautious, deeply insecure, and out of her depth.”
No one can predict exactly what kind of president Harris would be, but she has shown many signs that it would be nothing like what these prematurely disappointed conservatives anticipate. Their judgments about her seem based largely on geography (she’s from San Francisco) and on her first run for the presidency five years ago—a ten-month presidential primary campaign in a field of nearly thirty major candidates.
When Harris entered the 2020 race on Martin Luther King Day, January 21, 2019, the New York Times reported that liberals were skeptical about her. She ended her bid in December of that year. “Sen. Kamala Harris of California never settled on an overarching narrative and rationale for her candidacy that encompassed her life, her record and her plans. And she mismanaged her campaign,” I wrote in a March 2020 assessment of the many dropouts.
As a career prosecutor, gun owner and “top cop” of the nation’s largest state, Harris could have tried to carve out a moderate lane. Instead, she competed for progressive votes against a crush of progressive hopefuls, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, former Reps. Beto O’Rourke and Tulsi Gabbard, then-Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, and former housing secretary Julián Castro.
Fair or unfair, both the right and the left judge her by the climate, energy, and health care positions she took in 2019—positions she left behind a few months later when she became Joe Biden’s running mate. Since then, she’s been what I’d call a solidly center-left politician, by all appearances very much like Biden in her policy preferences and her openness to bipartisan compromise.
Harris reinforced that point Monday night on CBS’s 60 Minutes. As vice president, she said, “I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus.”
Is she a socialist, or even a progressive? Not even close. She calls herself a capitalist, she’s courting Wall Street, and she would increase the $5,000 tax deduction for business startups to $50,000. She has welcomed support from Republicans like Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, the former defense secretary and vice president, and has said she’d put a Republican in her cabinet. Harris has also pledged to make sure that “America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” (a convention speech line that some in her family did not appear to love).
Progressives back home didn’t like her much in 2020 and didn’t want Biden to pick her. In fact, she took so much heat as a prosecutor that public defender Niki Solis said she “grappled” with writing a column praising Harris. “There are many who will criticize me for this piece, but I feel compelled to speak out,” Solis wrote. The pioneering work she cited, on marijuana cases, diversion programs, human trafficking, and other projects, now seems more like bipartisan common sense than progressive excess.
Do most Americans disagree with Harris on most things? Actually, polls suggest the opposite is true. Majorities agree with her on reproductive rights, gun restrictions, and support for Ukraine. On paid family leave and affordable child care, reducing health care costs, and banning price gouging on food and groceries. On raising taxes on wealthy people and corporations to pay for much of her agenda instead of adding trillions to the national debt (as economists say Trump would do with his tariff proposal). On her promise to sign the bipartisan border security bill that Trump tanked.
Is she weak and in over her head? Again, not even close. This is a woman who prosecuted transnational criminal gangs and, according to Slate’s Fred Kaplan, came up with the idea of sharing U.S. intelligence to convince Ukrainian leaders that Russia was about to invade—then traveled to Kyiv to tell President Volodmyr Zelensky.
Is she “synthetic”? That depends on whether you think the real Harris was the 2019 Harris, or the one we see today—defending constitutional norms, comfortable with the America’s global leadership role, supporting our allies, reaching across political lines at a moment that demands it, and perfectly capturing the moment, from Ukraine to reproductive rights, with the one-word slogan “freedom.”
Do Democratic presidents need a Republican Senate to keep them in line? The record of the last few years makes clear that they need only fellow Democrats. Seriously, with Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who needs outsiders to force compromise? Yes, those two are leaving the Senate this year, but the point remains: Democrats are so fractious within their giant tent that tough negotiations are the norm, whether they’re internal or with the GOP.
The contrast with Cheney and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (a Bulwark contributor), both former members of the January 6th committee, is dramatic. Both are working to help Democratic Rep. Colin Allred of Texas defeat Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the congressional “objectors” to the 2020 election who tried to keep Trump in power after he lost. Cheney and Kinzinger obviously care more about character than which party controls the Senate.
In Ripon, Cheney did not paper over her conservative views—limited government, low taxes, a strong national defense, the primacy of family over government, the private sector as the growth engine of the economy. But neither did she insult Harris or dwell on their differences. She focused instead on the task at hand, urging everyone listening to her “to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump” and help elect Harris.
“I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law. And I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children—and if I might say so, especially our little girls—to do great things,” Cheney said. “So help us right the ship of our democracy so that history will say of us, when our time of testing came, we did our duty and we prevailed because we loved our country more.”
That is the full Liz. She gets that this is not the time to publicly question what Harris might or might not do about abortion or energy or the national debt. It is a moment to accept and embrace a simple fact: Harris is not just our best hope to vanquish Trump. She’s our only hope.
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