Kamala Harris Has Two Superpowers, and That’s All She Needs

People will start sizing up Kamala Harris as a possible presidential candidate here in the next few seconds, and I imagine we’re going to hear some version of this sentence a lot on cable news this week: Well, she ran for president once before, and she ran such a bad race that she didn’t even make it to Iowa, withdrawing before a single vote was even cast.

That is true. She did run a bad race. There are a couple of lessons to be learned from it. For starters, she should make sure her best debate zinger—aimed, remember, at Joe Biden—is not a defense of a deeply unpopular 50-year-old policy (busing) that, a few days after the debate, her aides could not defend. So there’s that.

However, I’d argue today that that race is largely irrelevant to this one, assuming she’s the candidate (which I’ll discuss a bit below, but which I do believe we can assume). There are a couple of key reasons why.

First of all, she doesn’t have to build this campaign from the ground up. The Biden campaign has a staff of thousands in place. Some of them won’t want to work for Harris, but I’d imagine most of them will. Granted, she’ll need to bring in her top people, and that’s an important job. But she won’t have to hire, say, a whole fundraising staff. She won’t have to execute contracts with vendors. All that’s done, and I hope we can presume that the people in those jobs are experienced and reasonably competent.

And second, and actually more important, this is not a primary against 17 like-minded people where you have to strain to stand out. That was a marathon where it was hard to get attention. This is a sprint where the attention is going to be automatic and intense. To the extent that she isn’t now, she’ll be nationally known in a matter of days, and assuming the polls are correct and Harris is as close to Donald Trump as Joe Biden was (or even closer), she already has 75 million votes in her pocket. She just needs to win those final seven or eight million.

So no: She’s not one of 100 senators scrambling to generate buzz in a crowded primary field. She’s the likely Democratic Party standard bearer. And two other things: She’s not 81, and she’s not Trump. For a lot of people, that’s all she needs to be.

But not, of course, for everyone. Here there are two main groups of concern. The first, I wrote about last week: the Biden die-hards who wanted the president to stay in the race. They were as of last week an angry bunch, and they’re probably angrier still this week. It will be largely up to Biden to calm them down and tell them to follow his example and do what’s right for the country here. But it will also be the job of all the leading Democrats to lavish praise on Biden and turn this moment—which, let’s face it, holds great potential for chaos and disarray—into a moment when the party finds a surprising and extraordinary unity.

The next group consists of those who want an open primary process. That includes me, at least in my dream world—one in which Biden had made his decision in time for a six-week mini-primary before the convention, which starts on August 19. But Biden demurred, and now it’s too late for that.

And Biden has endorsed Harris. Can anyone else still get in? Sure, of course. And maybe some will. There may be statement candidacies of some sort from both the center and the left. But it’s unlikely that any of the big governors are going to jump in. So the open-process devotees are just going to have to come to terms with this. It’s going to be Harris.

It’s going to be Harris, and it’s going to have to be a galvanized and unified effort like none we’ve ever seen. I have my reservations about her. So do you. So do we all. She has pretty high negatives. She might prove to be a bad campaigner. She doesn’t, as I’ve written, appear to have a natural passion for economic policy. I could go on.

But we just need to wrap our heads around this right now. It seems 90 percent likely that she’s going to be the Democratic nominee. And the Democrats need to embrace it and line up and move heaven and earth to make her a winner.

And the man who can be the Leonard Bernstein of that orchestra is of course the man who just became the second American Cincinnatus. Joe Biden stepped forward to save the country from Trump in 2020, and now, in 2024, he steps back, willingly giving up power, to save the country from Trump again. Tuesday at the Democratic convention had better be Joe Biden Day, and they better put on the show that the man deserves. His decision Sunday will go down in American history, and, if Harris (or a different Democrat) ends up winning in November, it’ll be worthy of a painting in the Capitol Rotunda someday. Perhaps unveiled by the first Black woman president.