What happened? Harris tripped over her own two feet trying to dance to the clashing beats of the Democratic Party’s many restive factions. Trying to appeal to all of them, she ended up appealing to hardly any.
Harris could have run as a proud prosecutor out to throw criminals in jail and enforce norms of law-abidingness, making her an ideal spokesperson to take on Trump’s lawlessness. And she did exactly this. Sometimes. But at other times, she seemed ashamed of her own tough record as DA and AG, preferring not to talk about it or to talk around her reputation for harshness.
She did the same thing during the times in her campaign when she shifted gears and tried to run as an economic populist competing directly against Sanders and Warren. It was probably a desire to throw them off their game and make a play for their voters that led her to (at least sound like she intended to) endorse Medicare-for-all, including the abolition of private insurance. But it was probably a fear of alienating more centrist and older voters that led her to back away from those statements and release a health-care plan that included a role for private insurance. What inspired her to flip back and forth between these contradictory positions several more times is anyone’s guess.
She even got tripped up about busing, making a point a few days later after her confrontation with Biden of clarifying that she didn’t favor federally mandated busing — which was pretty much Biden’s exact position on the issue back in the 1970s.
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