The New Yorker asks, “How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be?”

The New Yorker:

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been circling around this question: Does it actually matter if Kamala Harris standsfor something? The days that have passed since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President have been filled with palace intrigue, the occasional stirring speech, a bounce in the polls, and a Vice-Presidential pageant that, frankly, got a bit boring, as a handful of perfectly fine candidates tried very hard to be nice to one another.

[…]

Harris has shown more talent for giving speeches than the last time she ran, in 2019, and her campaign and her fellow-Democrats deserve credit for her rise in the polls amid heavy skepticism from many, including me, that they could pull off a candidate switch. But we should also be honest about what we are dealing with here. In tennis, a “pusher” is a player who safely returns the ball over the net, again and again, waiting for an increasingly frustrated opponent to make a mistake. This appears to be Campaign Kamala’s strategy: don’t make any unforced errors, keep things vanilla, and eventually Trump or Vance will implode. Harris—as Vance has repeatedly pointed out on Twitter, with the hashtag #wheresKamala—has taken almost no questions from reporters, and has spent most of her time giving stump speeches at rallies. She has not explained what, exactly, happened in Washington after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate; or why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for All, which she once supported; or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is said to be unpopular among some of Harris’s wealthy donors; or much about how a Harris Administration would handle the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

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On the Democratic side, there’s an energized, good feeling about Campaign Kamala—to a degree not felt, on a Presidential level, since Barack Obama’s last race—and nobody wants to mess that up with debates about policy. Harris is popular; Biden was not. Harris gives the Democrats a shot at beating Trump; Biden most likely did not. Most of the liberals I know seem to be enveloped in a pleasant if thin fog in which concerns and criticisms melt away.

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This is not the type of column in which the writer leans in and gives advice to the Democratic Party. If it were, I would simply point at the positive signs: the raucous crowd at Walz’s introductory speech, in Philadelphia; the enthusiasm for Harris that I’ve seen across the country; the renewed belief among Democrats that maybe they can stop Trump for good. But I wonder how the mainstream press will respond to a scandal, or even a hiccup, in the Harris campaign. If it turns out that Harris has been maintaining an idiosyncratic and not entirely secure approach to e-mail, or if a relative dropped off a laptop filled with salacious images for repair and they were shared with the New York Post, how would the media handle the story? More plausibly, if Campaign Kamala sticks with this strategy of keeping the candidate on message through speeches and answering few questions from the press corps, will reporters just shrug and let it go? Should we care that she has not done a sitdown interview or had to answer a substantive policy question in weeks?

The answer is that reporters should care but shouldn’t expect voters, or even their audiences, to follow suit. This may be a minority view, but I don’t think that journalists are ethically bound to stop Trump and “preserve democracy,” nor do I think that every criticism of or investigation into a liberal candidate needs to be balanced with a cursory statement about how Trump is a lying felon. If Harris is running a campaign that’s full of energy but short on specifics, we should say that[.]

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A generic candidate who promises nothing on the campaign trail and is unburdened by any past might be the dream of electoral-politics nerds, but it’s the job of the press in a healthy democracy to make sure that voters know whom they’re supporting. An unexamined candidate can become anything, and can work under the influence of anyone, when they assume power. This week, Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland, suggested on CNBC that a Harris Administration would change course from Biden’s more restrictive regulatory economic policies and create a friendlier atmosphere for “our large industries.” Was he speaking on Harris’s behalf? Does he know something that Harris has declined to share with the public herself?

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On Thursday, not long after Trump conducted a strange, rambling press conference, Harris finally took a few questions from the travelling press pool. She said that she was looking forward to debating Trump, on September 10th, and that she hoped to “get an interview scheduled before the end of the month”—which is still, of course, three weeks away. The press, it seems, will have to persist in the thankless task of demanding answers, even if we risk disrupting the good times.

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