A random White governor with none of those advantages is supposed to be introduced to the American people, galvanize the party and defeat all competitors — all while displacing the first African American and Asian American female vice president? Beltway pundits can spin all the scenarios they like, but if Vice President Harris is not the nominee, a Democratic Party meltdown is nearly certain.
So let’s assume that Harris would head the ticket. What then? She could make this a very different race in multiple ways.
First, the 59-year-old, fit, energetic Harris would shed the party’s burdens of Biden’s age and health. Nearly 20 years younger than Trump (who would be 82 at the end of a second term), she would finally move the country past the baby boomer generation and embody a fresh, younger generation of Americans. Without Biden attracting questions about his physical and mental fitness, perhaps the media might finally focus on Trump’s unhinged rants, compulsive lying and utter lack of policy knowledge.
Second, instead of a referendum on Biden personally, Harris would shift the campaign to being about making a choice: between the Biden administration’s successful, economically productive, forward-looking, inclusive record, and the scary, paranoid and authoritarian vision set out in Trump speeches and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which might guide a second Trump administration. Harris could ask whether Americans want:
- Technical experts in the departments and agencies who have served under presidents of both parties undertaking research, making rules and enforcing regulations on everything from safe drugs to securities law to clean air and water or a government in which 50,000 handpicked loyalists, not hired for expertise but for fidelity to Trump (taking a loyalty oath to him) make critical life-and-death decisions?
- Strong democratic alliances that provide support in defending U.S. national interests against tyrannical aggressors or someone who will prostrate himself before Vladimir Putin and other dictators, abandon Ukraine and leave Taiwan possibly to fend for itself?
- An independent Federal Reserve that has the dual mandate to preserve full employment and keep inflation low or, as Project 2025 envisions, a central bank subject to the whims of politicians and shorn of its role as a “lender of last resort”?
- A government that protects access to reproductive health care, does not discriminate against LGBTQ+ Americans (or any other discrete group) and aggressively enforces voting rights or one that wants to go beyond the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, take the abortion drug mifepristone off the shelves, literally write out of all laws and regulations terms such as “gender” and “abortion,” and infuse government policy with a Christian, male-dominated vision of the family?
Third, Harris is far more articulate and succinct than Biden, as she demonstrated in dissecting the Trump agenda during an appearance in North Carolina on Thursday. In the same vein, the vice president has been a passionate and compelling advocate for reproductive freedom (a topic Biden seems uncomfortable discussing), evidenced in dozens of her speeches and public appearances. She wields her experience as a prosecutor who handled sex crimes to excoriate forced-birth advocates for telling rape and incest victims they “have no right or authority to decide what happens” to their bodies. (She says flatly: “That’s immoral.”)
Fourth, Harris is uniquely capable, given her prosecutorial background and her role on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to run against a radical Supreme Court that is at the lowest level of approval in history. She has the verbal acuity, for example, to denounce the wide grant of criminal immunity to presidents, the evisceration of voting rights and the substitution of a judge’s discretion for experts’ judgments in the administrative state.
Fifth, to the extent that Biden saw erosion in his support among younger voters (including non-White voters), Harris offers the energy to engage and excite them, as seen on her college tours, where she has spoken to standing-room-only crowds on issues that affect their generation in particular (e.g., gun violence, climate change, abortion rights).
And finally, Harris can inherit the mantle of international leadership (having toured the world, met with leaders and represented the U.S. at international conferences) without Biden’s burden of personal criticism, deserved or not, on some hot-button issues, including the war in Gaza. (On Israel, Harris has been a stalwart supporter of the Jewish state, outspoken along with her Jewish husband about the abuse suffered by Israeli women at the hands of Hamas, and yet willing to draw cautionary lines with Israel’s truculent prime minister.)
Yes, it is impossible to gauge how a candidate will fare before she gets into the race. Prospective polls will not tell us definitively whether Harris gains more votes than she loses. But for Democrats despondent about the constant defensive crouch in which they find themselves, she offers excitement, eloquence, effectiveness on key issues and, most of all, the power to turn attention back on Trump’s substantial character flaws, criminal record and disturbing plans for the future.
What do you think President Biden should do with the rest of his time in office? Share your responses with us, and they may be published in The Post.
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