Kamala Harris Is Trapped

Kamala-mania is here. In a matter of days, Vice President Kamala Harris has not only locked up her party’s nomination, but become a cultural icon among Democratic partisans.

To Republicans or those who have followed politics closely for the past decade, this sudden development may seem confusing. It is easy to feel as if one hit their heads after falling out of a coconut tree.

The cringey nature of Kamala-mania – where ten-minute speeches in which Harris avoids falling over are treated akin to the works of Cicero – may recall some of the wilder excesses of Hillary’s campaign in 2016. Who, for instance, can forget the five painful minutes when a gaggle of C-list celebrities graced the Democratic convention with their rendition of Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song”? It takes a lot for Stephen Colbert to mock a Democrat running against Donald Trump in front of his audience of MSNBC wine moms. Yet somehow Hillary’s team managed it.

But Kamala-mania has yet to face such mockery, and that is because it is driven not by what is, but what can be. Kamala is the candidate of possibility. For those weighed down by what has been, they can project their hopes and dreams onto her.

Anti-Israel activists see a woman whom they hope is prepared to join in their protests of the Jewish state. Pro-Israel Democrats, meanwhile, take solace in the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Jew, joining the ticket. The left sees a socialist from California. The tech industry sees the sister-in-law of Uber’s general counsel, who intervened repeatedly against labor when it threatened the interests of her friends.

To mock Kamala right now, when she represents all of what can be, is to mock the hopes and dreams of those, who, for a brief moment, have embraced Robert Mugabe’s farcical slogan from his 2008 reelection bid in Zimbabwe: “You and I know that with me, all good things are possible!”

Deep down, even the most deluded of Harris acolytes understand that it would take a miracle to get real change from Kamala, and few careers have been more bereft of achievement. Yet Harris, unlike Hillary, has pulled off one miracle which allows millions to dream that maybe, just maybe, she can do it again.

And just what is that miracle? Harris has liberated Democrats from the burden of what has been, more specifically the burden of Joe Biden. Harris’s appeal is that she is not Joe Biden, and that she has freed the party from Joe Biden.

Since the disastrous June 27 debate, where Biden wilted in front of a national audience, Democratic politicians and activists have inhabited a living nightmare in which they turned their fire on one another. Donors went on strike, the Biden campaign all but ceased to operate, and Donald Trump surged. Providence itself seemed to have deserted to Trump’s side as he miraculously survived an assassination attempt and ran one of the most disciplined conventions in recent history.

In the space of 24 hours, Harris ended this long nightmare. She made it stop not just by ending the extended death agonies of the Biden presidency, but also by ending three weeks of seemingly endless positive news cycles for Donald Trump. In gratitude, Democrats, alongside their allies in the media and cultural left, have given Kamala Harris, or at least, to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle, a certain idea of Kamala Harris, their devotion.

It is impossible to grasp how Harris was able to lock up the nomination without understanding the sense of desperation among most Democrats. While party elites, from Barack Obama to Aaron Sorkin, gamed out scenarios for an open convention in which some swing-state governor would come riding in on a white horse, they offered the masses of the party a process, rather than what they really wanted: a candidate. Whatever the merits of Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom, or Gretchen Whitmer, they could only be nominated through a process that would end in mid-August. By contrast, the moment Biden stood down, Democrats realized they could have a Harris nomination immediately.

Once finality, not electability or policy, became the concern, the tidal wave became unstoppable. One by one, potential opponents opted out of the contest. Whitmer did so early in the day, as did Shapiro. Gavin Newsom’s team made a show of circulating polling showing Harris’s weaknesses, only to find there was no appetite for reflection. The California governor folded at 7:30 PM, less than six hours after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race on X, followed a few minutes later by Pete Buttigieg.

The problem with this sort of enthusiasm is that it has nothing to do with anything Harris has done or what she is. Rather, it has been generated by what other people have done, and who she is not. Kamala Harris is the nominee instead of Joe Biden because Joe Biden was forced out of the election. Any other vice president would be receiving the same sense of relief in the same circumstances.

Harris’s speeches are being praised because Joe Biden was unable to deliver any, not because they are any good or for what they say (if they say anything at all). No one knows what her platform is, other than that it is both the same as Joe Biden’s but also different. The money she is receiving is money that Joe Biden’s campaign failed to raise since the debate. It has poured in not because donors like Harris or believe she can win, but because they believed Joe Biden could not.

Kamala-mania represents a vacuum. The limitless potential and total lack of substance can be expressed in Harris’s trademark phrase: “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” For the moment, and just this moment, Kamala Harris does not represent a career politician from California or Joe Biden’s Vice President, but rather, what can be, unburdened by what has been.

The problem is that what can be is definitionally limited by what has been. That is life. And any limitless potential of a Kamala Harris campaign is limited by the limitations of one Kamala Harris, and the circumstances that brought her to this moment in time.

That is not to say Harris and her allies will not try to unburden her of the past, aided by the media. Efforts have been made to erase any reference to her role as Biden’s border czar, and GovTrack has deleted charts showing her as the most liberal member of the Senate. Those efforts, likely to be futile, show that even as they revel in what can be, Harris and her fans are well aware they are burdened by what has been.

Those contradictions are likely to come to the fore over time, and Barack Obama may yet be vindicated in his doubts about the wisdom of putting the Democratic party’s eggs entirely in Kamala Harris’s basket.

For one thing, Harris has been vice president under Joe Biden for the past four years. Her current support is based upon not being Joe Biden. Her very existence and candidacy is solely due to having been by his side.

Furthermore, the certain idea of Kamala Harris that is currently so appealing is at odds with the laws of physics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines entropy, or a gradual decline into disorder, as a constant principle of the cosmos. Time, by definition, causes decay. Every choice made closes off other avenues, narrowing the scope of possibility. So too with Harris.

Take Israel. Harris currently enjoys the support both of those who believe she will cut off all aid to the Jewish State and those who think she will elevate Josh Shapiro to the White House. A decision to choose Shapiro will undermine the newfound enthusiasm among young activists on the far left who had deserted Biden, a prospect their loudest voices are already warning of on social media.

Not choosing Shapiro solely on the basis of his Jewish faith, meanwhile, will send a clear message to moderates, who will suddenly remember the years Harris spent as the most left-wing member of the Senate. Attempting to have her cake and eat it too, calling for a cease-fire while endorsing Israel’s right to defend itself, and meeting with Netanyahu only to then publicly rebuke him, may appear like leadership in the moment to those in a state of cult-like rapture, but will, upon, reflection, reveal a figure more concerned with maintaining her substanceless popularity than with taking actions which would provide a basis for it.

Political history is replete with examples of leaders who came to power on a wave of emotion and then learned the hard way the old cartoon cliché that you can only walk on air until you make the mistake of looking down. Leaders who treat their popularity as an asset to be husbanded and desperately avoid any actions which might lower their numbers by a single percentage point tend to find themselves in an accelerating dive toward universal contempt. Universal popularity is a mile wide and an inch deep, because voters have disparate views or interests. If you are offending no one by siding against them, you are also failing to win the loyalty of anyone by siding with them.

The leaders who succeed tend to be those who understand popularity is a resource to be spent to accomplish things, and those accomplishments can then be translated to the actual long-lasting political currency: loyalty. Harris is crippled in her ability to take this path by the fact that she is not president and cannot turn temporary enthusiasm into actions that can win concrete loyalty. Even if she were so inclined, to do so would require openly breaking with the legacy of the Biden administration, in which she served. She would also be implying that she had promoted for four years the very policies she now sought public favor through repudiating.

Harris is trapped. She may be trapped in a powerful position, but it is still a trap. She is popular because she represents the removal of Joe Biden, but she cannot repudiate his policies without repudiating herself. She commands the provisional support of every element of the Democratic coalition, but even if she were willing to incur the difficulties of breaking with Biden to solidify the backing of one element of that coalition, doing so would offend others. Her best bet is to bask in Kamala-mania, embrace her memes, and watch has her popularity ebbs away, while hoping the leak will be slow enough to last her through November.

There is no question this path will end in universal revilement, perhaps on a scale beyond that facing Joe Biden. A leader who becomes defined by a refusal to take any positions or to say anything of substance will transform into a figure of mockery.

The only question is the timescale. Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand managed to last through one landslide election before being chased out by a public ready to resort to pitch forks before she had time to face another election. Kim Campbell, who took over as Prime Minister of Canada in 1993 from a predecessor who had outworn his welcome, was, for a moment, the most popular Prime Minister in Canadian history. Then, in October 1993, a little over four months after taking office, Canada’s most popular prime minister in history led her party to the greatest electoral defeat in Canadian history, losing her own seat.

Harris’s  enemy is not Donald Trump or Barack Obama, but time itself. Eventually the burden of what has been will catch up with and consume what can be. Her hope, the only one, is that she can hold the past at bay for another few months. In rejecting Joe Biden, Democrats have traded a man whose time has passed for a race against time itself. History and physics indicate that time will always win.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.