Rising to the occasion
By 
Kamala Harris was always going to be the Democratic nominee if Joe Biden stepped down when he did — no other candidate was going to assemble a majority in three weeks — but it was not inevitable that it would go as smoothly as it has. Many people deserve credit for this, but the person who deserves the most credit is Kamala Harris:
President Biden had informed Ms. Harris earlier that morning that he was withdrawing from the race. The vice president had assembled her team so that the exact moment Mr. Biden formally quit, at 1:46 p.m. — one minute after the president had informed his own senior staff — they were ready to go.
Time was of the essence. A sprawling call list of the most important Democrats to reach had been prepared in advance, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The vice president, in sneakers and a sweatshirt, began methodically dialing Democratic power brokers.“I wasn’t going to let this day go by without you hearing from me,” Ms. Harris had said over and over, as day turned to night, according to five people who received her calls or were briefed on them.
She phoned past Democratic presidents, many of her potential rivals — including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — the Democratic congressional leaders, Senator Bernie Sanders, the heads of the various influential caucuses and other top Democrats, a person with direct knowledge of the call list said.
The blitz demonstrated exactly the kind of vigor and energy that Mr. Biden had lacked in recent weeks. Mr. Biden had reportedly made 20 calls to congressional Democrats in the first 10 or so days after the debate, while his candidacy hung in the balance. Ms. Harris made 100 calls in 10 hours.
At the same time that Ms. Harris was dialing, a new whip operation was set up to wrangle delegates who will ultimately select the nominee, integrating her team and the pre-existing Biden-Harris campaign’s delegate operation.
Within 48 hours, Ms. Harris had functionally cleared the Democratic field of every serious rival, clinched the support of more delegates than needed to secure the party nomination, raised more than $100 million and delivered a crisper message against former President Donald J. Trump than Mr. Biden had mustered in months.
She was very well-prepared and organized, she was persuasive, and she acted quickly. In a situation in which an ambitious challenger might have jumped and created some drama had she shown weakness or hesitation, she didn’t. It’s a superb performance. And it didn’t just start when Biden stepped down — without her nearly flawless time under a microscope after Biden’s disastrous debate performance led to an intense intraparty debate about the nomination, Biden would probably still be the nominee. Even some writers who clung to the idea of an open primary well after it was even remotely workable have had to concede that Harris dispelled a lot of doubts in the last month. She deserves all the credit in the world for this.
There were reasonable arguments and bad arguments for maintaining Biden as the head of the ticket. One of the most dangerous of the latter were a type of fake-sophisticated defeatist cynicism that can be summarized as “nothing can ever work so there’s no point in ever trying anything.” I don’t think we need to address “the Supreme Court will just force the Democrats to put Biden on the ballot even though he had never been chosen as the nominee in the first place,” which for obvious reasons seems to have evaporated. But some people argued that the extent to which the campaign was dominated by stories about Biden’s age and cognitive fitness wasn’t a reason to change, since any Democratic candidate would get the same treatment. The problem here is that this just isn’t true — campaign coverage was not dominated by negative stories about the Democratic candidate in 2020 or 2012 or 2008, with 2004 being worse than those years but not as bad as 2016 or 2000. And we’re seeing this now — positive stories like this about Harris, and a lot more attention being given to negative stories about Republicans (especially the selection of Vance.) I have no illusions that the honeymoon will last forever and some dumb negative stories about Harris are inevitable, but this is clearly an opportunity for the Democratic Party to change the trajectory of the race. And it wouldn’t be happening had Harris not shown her presidential mettle.