Veep Harris is now front and center
The truth is that for a certain percentage of Americans, Vice President Kamala Harris simply disappeared.
Now, this isn’t an entirely unexpected phenomenon. Most vice presidents, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney under George W. Bush, dwell in a kind of backwoods limbo. Back in the day, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, as robust a personality as American politics has produced, was portrayed as a person of no particular importance. A famous comedy album of the time had Johnson ringing the White House front door and asking if 5-year-old Caroline Kennedy could come outside to play.
We all know how powerful and popular (for a time) LBJ became.
Is the same thing about to happen to Vice President Harris? We are about to find out. The now presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Harris will be taking on the menacing, unapologetic one, Republican Donald Trump, in November. At stake, both Democrats and Republicans say, is the soul of America.
Is Harris ready? Once again, we are about to find out.
At 59, the vice president, hailing from Oakland, California, comes from a diverse background: her mother was Indian, having immigrated to this country in 1958; her father was a Jamaican who moved here three years later. Both were academics: mother Shyamala was a biologist, father Donald was an economist.
Kamala came along in October 1964, which was at the time, incidentally, that LBJ was roaring toward a landslide victory over conservative Barry Goldwater later that fall.
Her parents divorced when she was in second grade. (At this point, Richard Nixon was in the White House and Spiro T. Agnew was his No. 2 man. Several years later, of course. Agnew would be exposed as a crook, which triggered his resignation and Gerald Ford’s elevation to the office. The rest, as they say, is history.)
In 2004, Harris won her first elective office, the district attorneyship of San Francisco. In 2011, she moved up, becoming the attorney general of California. In 2017, Harris was elected a U.S. senator from California. On January 20, 2021, she became vice president.
As you can see, Harris has spent a considerable portion of her public career as a prosecutor. This fact alone excites some Democrats, who anticipate that Harris will press the case against Trump, a convicted criminal who may yet face two, possibly three, additional trials.
As tempting as it may be, the vice president should resist becoming Trump’s full-time accuser-in-chief. Oh, a little here, a little there won’t hurt. Trump has earned his time in the dock. But voters will want to know about Harris’s plans for the future – not in specific detail, of course; the last thing Americans could bear to hear is a mini state of the union message at every campaign rally.
Instead, it’s imperative that Vice President Harris convey something of her governing spirit to voters, as well as something of herself. It’s a given that she’s intelligent and articulate, but does she talk down to people, or talk up? Is she sincere? Is she believable? Is she comfortable in her own skin? Does she exude confidence and cheer? Is she a person of common sense? When voters look at her, do they see a person big enough and emotionally centered enough to bear the weight of the office and its awesome responsibilities?
Voters are frequently drawn to a candidate’s incidentals: Dwight Eisenhower’s grin, Jack Kennedy’s smile, Ronald Reagan’s warmth and good-humor.
This, in part, is why running for president is so hard. There are intangibles that aren’t involved when the office is a seat in Congress or a governorship. It’s why more than one candidate who looked good on paper has fallen flat on the biggest of political stages.
The list is substantial: John Glenn, Bill Bradley, Scott Walker, Ron DeSantis, to name just a few of the more recent candidates who promised much but who couldn’t perform under the bright lights of a presidential campaign.
Running for president is hard. On a scale 1 to 10, it’s a 10.
All sorts of obstacles stand between Kamala Harris and the presidency. There are political puzzles to solve, or at least to mitigate, including inflation, the border, and the war in Gaza.
In some ways, Donald Trump is the least of it. The other day he called the vice president a lunatic while butchering the pronunciation of her first name. For sure, this rouses his devoted fans, but to other voters it makes him appear unhinged and more than a little desperate. Better for her that he continues to scream his head off. How many people really believe she’s in favor of the “execution” of babies, for instance?
The veep and the viper. The race is on.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.