With the election fast approaching, Kamala Harris has settled into a safe pattern of talking a lot and saying little. Harris’s goal for these last weeks, it seems, is to avoid calamity and focus most of the attention on her rambling opponent.
By Matt Bai
What, exactly, should it be?
This is something I’ve been thinking about since a recent conversation with my friend Ken Adelman, who was Ronald Reagan’s director of arms control and was for many years a fixture in Republican policy circles, before he broke with the party during the 2008 presidential campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama. He also wrote one of my favorite modern history books,“Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War.”
Adelman was telling me that, many years ago, he specialized in helping some of his Republican mentors, namely Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, prepare remarks for their Senate confirmation hearings. And what he found, when he researched the testimony of previous Cabinet members, was that they were seldom asked very much about the things that would ultimately come to dominate their time in office.
For instance, as Adelman recalls it, Robert McNamara wasn’t prodded at all to talk about Vietnam when he testified as the defense secretary-designate in 1960, and yet history judges McNamara almost entirely on his prosecution of the war. Nobody asked Jimmy Carter’s choice for the job, Harold Brown, about Afghanistan, which the Soviets would invade on his watch. Rumsfeld wasn’t grilled about stateless terrorists in 2001, nor was Cheney pressed on Iraq when he became defense secretary in 1988.
The same usually holds true, of course, for presidents. Carter couldn’t have known that he would be forever linked with hostages in Iran. George W. Bush didn’t expect to spend his entire presidency at war or to have his domestic failings symbolized by a hurricane. Donald Trump probably didn’t spend five seconds thinking about a pandemic when he ran, and Joe Biden wasn’t answering questions about Ukraine.
We really have no idea what crisis will consume the next presidency, but you can bet that it’s not something we’re talking about now. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, it is a known unknown.
This is something Harris should embrace. If we’re being blunt, Harris really isn’t offering much by way of a governing vision. What she’s done is to marry vague phraseology (“the opportunity economy”) to a bunch of small-bore proposals for tax credits and the like, which I guess are supposed to hint at some hidden iceberg of specificity. Partisan commentators can call this a serious policy agenda, but either they’re being wishful or they don’t remember what an actual agenda looks like.
(And yes, I know, Trump has nothing by way of policy, other than a bunch of pandering slogans.)
To her credit, Harris has run an excellent tactical, day-to-day campaign free of drama and dumb mistakes. When it comes to the overarching strategy, however, she’s left a void; it’s never been clear why she thinks she needs to be president, other than to keep Trump from winning.
For that reason, it seems unlikely at this late date that voters are going to see Harris as a visionary thinker. But maybe that’s beside the point. Instead of trying to pretend she knows exactly what she would do as president, she might be better off crafting a closing argument about the policies we don’t yet know we need.
If there’s one place where Harris holds a clear advantage over Trump, it’s in her character and steadiness. So if I were Harris, I think I’d spend the last few weeks making a closing argument that goes something like this:
You can ask me about all the policies you want, and I’m happy to answer. But if history tells us anything, it’s that the thing that will most affect your lives in the next four years will be something none of us can foresee. And the most pressing question you need to ask yourself is which candidate you really want sitting behind that desk when the crisis arrives.
Who’s going to think more about you in that moment? Which of us do you trust to gather experts and make sound decisions? Which of us will hold the country together, rather than split it apart?
Anyone who ask themselves those questions and doesn’t answer “Harris” was probably never going to vote for her anyway. And like the best political arguments, this one has the virtue of being true.
None of us — including Harris — knows what her presidency will really be about. And embracing that reality isn’t just a way of acknowledging the shortcoming in her campaign.
It also happens to be the strongest case for why she should win.
