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The stories that matter about money and politics in the race for the White House
Yes, they are both 60 years old. And they were both prosecutors. They both gave the impression of being leftist or leftist before embarking on what I suppose we should call a “journey.” In these anti-elite times, both represent places with elitist connotations: California and that area of London that contains the Eurostar terminal, Google headquarters and UCL. (That Britain is led by the Bloomsbury MP, after all the pitchforks waved at intellectuals in the last decade, is one of the best jokes of our age.)
Given these parallels, it is natural to present Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer alongside Clinton-Blair, Reagan-Thatcher and even Kennedy-Wilson, as one of those symmetrical pairs of American and British leaders. But first it has to be chosen. This is less certain than two months ago. Part of the problem is that she’s not like Starmer in one important way.
There is a difference between caution and ambiguity. There’s a difference between a political platform that’s not radical enough for some tastes and one that’s hard to decipher in the first place. Starmer can disappoint and even bore, but he does not tend to confuse. This is not true of Harris, whose central flaw is confusion of both content and expression. Of these problems (being too timid and too opaque), his is a much harder sell to undecided voters, as it requires them to assume an unknown amount of trust. And he asks them to do it about a candidate who is well known for having previously served one term in the White House.
Has there been a more mysterious major-party presidential candidate three weeks before Election Day? Whatever we think about it, Joe Biden’s economic statism was exposed well in advance. Likewise, if Donald Trump goes on a wave of deportations and tariffs, no one can claim that he has been misled. In any case, American presidential candidates offer too many details at the campaign stage, since many of them will not survive contact with Congress. The point is to give voters a sense of their instincts: their likely gut responses to unexpected events, like Covid or the war in Ukraine, that tend to determine a presidency.
What are Harris’s? Even in general terms, do you defend continuity? It would be better not to, since Biden’s ratings — or change? Is that change less economically interventionist or more? Is it based or based on your procedural record? Republicans make a big deal of their changes on immigration, but that is not the only issue on which they have taken various positions and none at all.
The problem is not just their “word salads,” which circulate with much amusement online. Many presidents with clear instincts struggled to articulate them, like George W. Bush or even his father. The difference in Harris’s case is that the outward confusion seems to reflect a deeper vagueness. Undecided voters must decide if she is empty – the classic “sphynx without a secret” – or a leftist who hides it. The former is more likely, preferable and eligible, but doubt can be fatal.
Starmer allowed no such doubts. Despite the widespread pretense that he was a Hamlet-scale enigma, he let us know who he was: a social democrat who was going to raise taxes a little, offset the damage to incentives with deregulation in some areas, let the Brexit lies, talking well about public sector reform but not making it the central obsession it needs to be to overcome Whitehall and the unions. Above all, his approach to the far left has remained gratifyingly consistent for four years: it hits them.
What is Harris’ approach? Is your priority to keep the Democratic coalition together or confront the strident fringe to shore up the undecided center? California politics train the first skill. National policy demands the latter. Undecided voters are people who, by definition, have no absolute objection to voting for Trump. He has to do more to cultivate them than not be him.
Of course, his lack of clarity isn’t the only reason the Democratic ticket has lost some of its late-summer momentum. Something structural in American politics seems to turn every presidential race into a toss-up. Tim Walz’s usual masculine language has become overstudied, as if he had attended a course called How to be a normal boy. The decision not to choose Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor who has high approval ratings in that swing state, as his running mate, is one of those obvious follies (like running Hillary Clinton in 2016 or pretending that Biden had another term in office). ) that Democrats seem to just put up with, as if it were an act of God.
In fact, ambiguity can be an advantage for a normal candidate, since it doesn’t offend anyone. But Harris finds himself in an abnormal position. It is linked to an administration that is sensationally unpopular. If she doesn’t define herself, it’s reasonable for voters to confuse her with a second Biden term. He still has three weeks to elucidate, if not in detail his government plans, at least his instincts and general direction. The question is how much of either one you’ve ever had.
The laziest reflex in journalism, the latest in hacked writing, is to describe someone as a man or woman “of contradictions,” as if no one in the world were not. (Who have you met who is completely of one piece? And why would you choose such a rigid character?) There were countless such pronouncements about Starmer in the opposition. Occasionally, it must be said, the phrase fits a theme too well.