Kamala Harris is a problem for Trump, but her politics are a problem for America

Like Starmer, she sees her legal work as the model for what she wants to do in politics. The Right has no real answer

Those in President Biden’s entourage who persuaded him to hold that TV election debate with Donald Trump in June, months before such a thing was required, are unsung geniuses.
By revealing to the world that their principal was not up to another four years in the Oval Office, they fooled Trump into thinking that he had won already. His triumphant party convention in July proceeded on the false premise that Biden, no matter how enfeebled, would be the Democratic nominee.
Days after it, the Democrats had Biden out. Trump’s selling point had been that he could stop Biden. Now the Democrats had done the job for him, making him seem semi-redundant (and suddenly old).
I admit that I may be wrong about the cunning of Biden’s advisers. It is possible they had fooled themselves that the president would be all right on the night and did not plot against him. If so, they fell far below the normally high standards of American political guile.
But, in terms of the consequences, it matters not, as lawyers like to say. The wind has suddenly dropped from Trump’s sails.
What now confronts the greatest negative campaigner in American political history? Kamala Harris. She is a problem for him.
On the basis of her acceptance speech in Chicago on Thursday night, I would say she is placing herself well, and I write that as someone who had never before noticed anything much to be said in her favour.
First of all, the speech was quite accomplished. She managed the crowd well, with the right pauses, gestures, facial expressions and changes of volume, and without that famously inane laugh.
She knows how to make her voice husky with emotion. She was confident, but not arrogant. She looked elegant, but not showy or too rich.
Her words were carefully chosen. Take, for example, her praise for Joe Biden. His presidency had been “inspiring”, she said, “as history will show”. Clever to get in the point that the poor man is now history.
Take also her avoidance of the Hillary Clinton message eight years ago that it was America’s duty to elect a woman (her) as its president. Ms Harris seems to prefer the Margaret Thatcher tactic of rejoicing in her sex but not claiming political power as a female right. Such a claim still puts off many male electors and some traditionally minded women ones too.
In a similar spirit, Ms Harris praised America’s armed forces as being “the most lethal fighting force in the world”. That choice of the word “lethal” surely contained the subliminal message that she, a woman, can be the tough guy. She was strong against Vladimir Putin and for Ukraine. On Gaza, she described Hamas as “a terrorist organisation” – which may be why the BBC, which cannot bring itself to use the T word, seems rather underwhelmed by her speech.
American politics is obsessed with the idea of having “a story” and “a journey”. Kamala Harris related hers in an interesting way.
She played the ethnicity card, but with restraint. Trump has said, nastily but accurately, that she is not black. She did not say she was, only that her mother was “brown” (her word) and her father Jamaican. Her mother had refused an arranged marriage in her native India and come to California with the dream of improving women’s health.
On immigration, for which Ms Harris has been so much criticised, her rhetoric was conservative, promising a Border Security Bill and praising the “earned pathway to citizenship”, rather than any automatic right.
Her mother’s was the journey and Kamala’s story, one might say, is the proof of arrival as an American. Ms Harris’s thirst for justice, she explained, took the very American form of becoming a lawyer. She played with the fact that all her prosecuting cases were expressed as “Kamala Harris, for the People” (the equivalent of the British legal formulation of “Rex” or “The King”): “I only had one client – the People.”
Adapting the old phrase “from log cabin to White House”, Kamala the prosecutor said she was moving “from the courthouse to the White House”.
It was a bold attempt – especially as she has not yet reached the White House – to romanticise her own little-loved profession. It is also, of course, her way of attacking Trump. In the great American republic of laws, she was implying that he is the outlaw. She is “Kamala Harris, for the People”: he is Donald Trump, for just Donald Trump (and “his billionaire friends”).
She believes in “the peaceful transfer of power”: he, when he lost last time, “sent an armed mob”. She advances the legal rights of women, veterans, home-owners etc against banks, cartels and other villains: he has been found guilty of fraud and liable for sexual abuse.
She, using a phrase very like that often used by Sir Keir Starmer during our general election, puts “country above party and self”: Trump is the favoured candidate of the world’s dictators because, she says, “he wants to be an autocrat himself”.
Trump’s supporters are “out there every day denigrating America”, said Ms Harris. And she? “I love our country with all my heart”. She is the future, he the past. She invited her audience to write “the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told”.
I am not saying that everything in her speech – or even most of it – was true. It involved a very artfully worked out avoidance of her more Leftist and sectarian positions on many social issues and her extreme vagueness on taxing and spending. It was a shameless pitch for respectability – even praising working-class people who “tend their lawns” – silently departing from the woke preoccupations of her failed candidacy in 2020.
Kamala may well be Shamala.
But I am saying that her arrival and her speech make life harder for the Republicans.
Until last month, Trump’s party thought that they would be fighting an election against the tired, old candidate – rather gloomy, borderline sleazy – of a tired, old Democratic establishment. Now they have to explain why America needs a 78-year-old president with what the Old Bill used to call “a record as long as your arm”, when they could have a much younger, more optimistic woman with a social conscience.
Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again”, but his attitude to the state of his country is better expressed in the phrase he repeated in his 2017 inauguration address, “American carnage”.
It is notable, in both the United States and Britain, that the current leaders of the Left are former prosecutors. Both see their legal work as the model for what they want to do in politics.
All my instincts tell me that is a bad model because it implies the false possibility of a perfect society in which rightly-guided politicians hunt down their opponents as malefactors. It is essentially intolerant. In love with the purity of law, it wrongly assumes the purity of lawyers.
But when Kamala Harris takes her stand on the almost uniquely central position of the law in the life and spirit of America, conservatives need to find a way of answering her. It is extremely hard to see how Donald Trump can be that answer.
Even in Britain, where the law has traditionally been at a greater remove from political contestation, the same trend is observable. Whoever is to lead a conservative, or Conservative, revival needs intellectual depth and political subtlety to escape this trap which the Left is trying to set.