After Donald Trump’s surprising win in 2016, the Democratic Party was panicked into abandoning the Obama model as a failure. Earlier this month, I examined Kamala Harris’s political challenge through the lens of Obamaism. Could Harris rediscover a winning formula her party had discarded? The convention gives us a clear answer:
Yes. She. Can.
The Obama recipe has several key components, all of which were vividly present in Chicago. The most obvious may be novelty. Obama promised to turn the page, leaving behind frustrating and tiresome debates of the past, rather than overpowering the Democrats’ adversaries.
The convention, accordingly, presented Harris to the country as if she was an outsider. Speaker after speaker hammered this theme. Michelle Obama told Democrats she saw a “feeling that’s been buried for far too long. It’s the contagious power of hope … Hope made a comeback.” Colin Allred, the Texas Senate nominee, promised that “we will turn the page and write a new chapter for this country.” Tim Walz urged Americans to “turn the page on Donald Trump.” Yusef Salaam, New York City Council candidate and exonerated former target of one of Trump’s earliest racist fearmongering campaigns, told Democrats, “When they see us, we will finally say good-bye to that hateful man.”
Harris herself has employed the slogan “A New Way Forward” and the chant “We’re not going back!” because, presumably, “No Country for Old Men” was rejected as too subtle.
This assumption that Donald Trump is the sitting president of the United States managed to simultaneously infuriate both Trump and the actual incumbent president. Biden’s loyalists have grumbled at the disrespect implied by her messaging, and they are not wrong to detect an insult.
In a literal sense, it is a feat of propaganda to turn public discontent with the status quo into an argument for a member of the administration and against his challenger. But as much as it may invert the current power arrangement in Washington, it feels true. Biden has never managed to grasp public attention, and this year his presence has shrunk to the point of near invisibility. Trump’s presence on the national stage has grown. His sycophants even address him as “Mr. President.” Trump’s plan was to use that appearance of strength versus weakness to overpower his presumed opponent. Harris has used it against him like jujitsu. Trump has been the loudest voice in the room for eight years. Making him go away, she promises, will give a greater sensation of change than switching party control of the executive branch.
One gauge of success is the apoplectic reaction this has produced among Republicans. “The strategy is to pretend that Kamala Harris has never existed until this very moment,” wails Ben Shapiro, “That the Biden-HARRIS administration was never a thing. That she somehow was handed the nomination without a single vote WITHOUT owning Biden’s record. The audacity of LIES.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page laments, “Mr. Trump has let Ms. Harris claim the mantle of change, though she has been Mr. Biden’s sidekick all along. This is political malpractice.”
If you recall, the Trump message involved reminding people how well the economy was performing in 2019, pretending he wasn’t president in 2020, then blaming the global post-pandemic inflation surge on his successor. Biden was too hapless to disrupt this narrative. Harris isn’t.
A second element of Obamism relies on carefully navigating the explosive cultural forces unleashed by Harris’s novel identity. Winning elections means gaining the approval of voters who hold moderate or conservative beliefs and cultural assumptions. Not all those fears can be assuaged by rolling out a white-haired former football coach who enjoys hunting more than spicy food. It entails carefully curating the nominee’s biography and platform.
Harris depicted her life story as “working class” — she does not come from the affluent part of the Bay Area, nor was her family dependent on income support. (Yes, there are still winnable voters out there who hold bigoted assumptions in their minds about the work habits of the urban poor.) The story she gave the country was of a striving, tight-knit upwardly mobile immigrant family, which Americans regard with pride.
Harris cast her lot firmly on the conservative side of social questions like criminal justice, border enforcement, the military, and patriotism. Democrats waved American flags and chanted “U-S-A!” with gusto and frequency. Harris presented her own plans as responsible, common sense, and potentially bipartisan. She cast her opponent, not herself, as the driver of radical change — somehow without undercutting her depicting of him as old news. Trump’s angry rejoinder that Harris is serving in the White House right now, along with his desperation to disavow himself from Project 2025, which he has previously touted as his master plan for a second term, is another sign of how well this is working.
This was a complete abandonment of the progressive assumption that Trump won because the working class had grown alienated by neoliberalism and desperate to overthrow the system. The transformation could also be traced in the party’s platform, as political scientist Matt Grossmann noticed. The word border, which appeared just eight times four years ago, received 49 mentions this year, while invocations of the term “systemic racism” fell from nine in 2020 to zero.
Harris’s choice was to focus relentlessly on targeting the voters she needs to win 270 electoral votes, at the expense of fan service for progressives. This has naturally created some dismay among the fans. Left-wing activists, who were initially thrilled with Harris’s nomination and her choice of Tim Walz as running met, met her speech with icy sarcasm, especially its embrace of the defense establishment and promises to bring together labor and entrepreneurs. (“The reference to ‘founders’ there is ominous,” observed David Dayen of the left-wing American Prospect.)
Alienating the left is not the point of these moves. It is simply the inevitable by-product. If you are targeting your message to the beliefs of the median voter, you are necessarily going to leave voters at the 99th percentile of the right-to-left spectrum feeling cold. The bitter complaints from the right that she is a fraud, and from the left that she is a sellout, are indications that Harris has calibrated her campaign perfectly.
Unlike Obama, Harris is almost certainly not going to have a Democratic Congress and an opportunity to expand the welfare state and new regulation. There is little point in selling the public on new liberal programs that a Republican-led Senate would ignore. If Harris does enjoy a historically consequential presidency, it will not run through the traditional channel of passing giant liberal laws through big Democratic majorities.
The question is will Harris become president at all? The evidence from Chicago all points to the conclusion that she knows exactly what to do.
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