Misunderestimated

It’s interesting that we’re now getting much more positive coverage about Harris’s tenure as vice president:

The court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision eliminating a constitutional right to abortion proved to be an issue on which Ms. Harris could take the lead, one that Mr. Biden, a churchgoing Catholic, did not feel as comfortable addressing. She found her voice as the administration’s champion of abortion rights, changing some minds among Democrats who had harbored doubts about her. And she paved the way to the moment when she will accept her party’s nomination for president this week.

Ms. Harris’s record as vice president is complex, as described in interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials and allies, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating her or the president. She has done the dutiful things she has been asked to do. She led a labor task force and a gun safety office. She traveled to places the president had no time to visit. She has been sent to deliver private messages to the leaders of Poland and Germany and to break key tie votes in the Senate.

She rarely took positions at odds with the president’s, at least not in meetings attended by others, but she made her mark quietly at times. She pushed him to pick Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court when he was getting advice to the contrary. Her candidate was selected for the head of the World Bank.

She developed arguments to make Mr. Biden comfortable with approving expansive student debt relief when he hesitated. She lobbied him to endorse an exception to the Senate filibuster rule to push forward voting rights legislation. And she advocated speaking out early on the impact of the Dobbs decision on in vitro fertilization despite resistance from some in the West Wing.

But she was also saddled with no-win assignments, most notably tackling the root causes of illegal immigration from Central America, exposing her to Republican criticism. Stung by an early television interview that went awry, she became skittish about mistakes, asking whether an appearance or a line in a speech might produce another vicious viral clip. And her allies believed the president’s staff often clipped her wings, appropriating her initiatives for him to announce without building up her own public profile.

Sounds pretty promising!

It was always odd how many of the pundits who understood before I did that a Biden being the 2024 nominee was probably going to go very badly not only refused to accept that Harris was the only viable alternate nominee but decided that she would be a weak one. In particular, I never really understood how “Biden gave Harris mostly thankless jobs” somehow became conflated with “Harris is bad at vice presidenting,” whatever that even means. There was also the argument that her only election victories were in blue states. Well, as of 2007 Barack Obama had lost his only remotely competitive election and his one statewide win was in a deep blue state against a joke candidate, and if I recall that worked out OK.

Harris’s early exit from the 2020 primaries represented a more serious cause for concern. But I think it’s worth noting that she was the only candidate other than Biden/Bernie/Warren to get any kind of national traction, which perversely meant that her flaming out attracted more negative attention than the Betos and Bookers and Gillibrands whose campaigns were essentially stillborn. It was a negative factor to consider, but on the other hand to pick a random example Joe Biden’s first two primary runs were a lot worse.

None of this is to say that Harris’s launch was obviously going to go as well as it has, and nor is this to say that problems and flaws won’t emerge over the next 11 weeks. But the idea that she was such a weak candidate that she needed to replaced with some midwestern governor to be named later despite the inter-coalitional and procedural issues this would pose were never well-founded.