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What is going on in the Democratic Party? Party leaders are about to squander a great opportunity to field a candidate with an excellent chance of beating Donald Trump.
I'm not talking about a specific potential nominee from the Democratic bench, which is very strong. My point is rather that after all the pain involved in getting President Biden to step aside on the basis that he could not beat Donald Trump, why are the Democrats about to coronate Kamala Harris, who is clearly the weakest Democratic nominee to put forward?
Over the last several months, I've talked to countless Democrats and others in the media about Joe Biden's age problem. The universal reaction was that the problem was exacerbated by the fact that the Republicans would point to Kamala Harris as someone likely to inherit the presidency during a Biden second term. Almost all of those Democrats and pundits would agree that Harris was a liability on the ticket, because she was not viewed even by most Democrats as an acceptable person to become Commander-in-Chief of the United States. It was a given among most Democrats, even though almost no one thought it would happen, that if Biden was going to somehow ameliorate the age infirmity issue, he needed instead a vice presidential running mate who was going to be viewed as a strong, acceptable person to inherit the presidency.
How did we go from there to here?
Why was the perception that her weaknesses outweighed her strengths suddenly transformed over the last week?
There is no excuse for it. There are five key reasons Harris is weaker than the rest of those discussed as possible nominees:
First, it has been abundantly evident around the globe that being an incumbent is a difficult place to be in this political climate. From the U.K. to France to India, incumbents have run very poorly. There is simply no way for Kamala Harris to run and not be tagged as an incumbent.
Second, the big relief for Democrats is that with Biden no longer the nominee, his age issue would disappear. But a Harris candidacy keeps the age issue very much alive: The question being pounded on by both Republicans and the press is how those in the White House in regular contact with Biden covered up the state of his mental acuity. There is simply no way for Harris to escape that issue.
Moreover, with J.D. Vance, the Republican vice president nominee, already calling for Biden to resign on the theory that if he is unfit to run for office he is unfit to currently occupy the office, Harris far more than any other candidate will have to defend the issue of why she should not become president right away. Having said that, the last thing the Republicans should want is for Harris to actually inherit the Presidency right now and have the opportunity to demonstrate her strengths as the nation's chief executive in a way that might actually change current perceptions.
Third, one of the two biggest issues in this campaign cycle will be immigration and the Biden record on it. And again, Harris here is a liability: She was given the assignment of solving the border issue, meaning she can't escape the extremely broad perception of massive numbers of illegal immigrants gaining access to the country due to the Biden administration's border policy.
That is probably the administration's biggest policy vulnerability; putting forward the one person most vulnerable on that issue as the Party's nominee is hard to understand. The best answer the Democrats have on that issue is that the Biden administration reached a legislative compromise on immigration with some of the most conservative Republicans and then Trump scuttled the deal. But Harris was by no means credited with being an architect of that legislative compromise.
Fourth, the notion that the narrative of "the prosecutor versus the criminal" somehow will inure to the benefit of the Harris candidacy is similarly hard to comprehend. The entire focus of the special counsel pursuit of Donald Trump has been to demonstrate that this is an independent, non-partisan effort to show that no man is above the law. To instead turn pursuit of Donald Trump as a criminal into the center of the campaign with the narrative that many will take to be that the person running against him is the best suited to prosecute him, runs totally counter to the notion of blind justice. That campaign narrative is extremely unhelpful in maintaining a public view that the prosecution of Donald Trump on multiple fronts is very appropriate on the weight of the evidence in each of those cases and has nothing to do with partisan motivation.
Finally, the case against Donald Trump being president of the United States again is so overwhelmingly compelling, yet with President Biden's diminished communication skills, that case has not been articulated well to date. Kamala Harris is very good with a teleprompter in front of her, or with scripted questions in a committee hearing. However, she is not a strong contemporaneous speaker able to crisply and clearly articulate the case against Donald Trump, taking advantage of all the earned media she will receive. It is extremely doubtful that she will develop the communications skill set necessary to overturn all the social media ridicule that she has gotten.
None of the other possible Democratic nominees have any of these enormous liabilities. This is not to say that there won't be constituencies motivated by Harris that Biden was unable to light up. That is also not to say she isn't a very strong advocate for a woman's right to choose. I do question though the tribal view that those Black Americans soured by the Biden administration on economic policy issues related to inflation and immigration, are necessarily going to flock to Kamala Harris because she is the offspring of an Indian mother and a Black father.
While some have suggested the most important thing now is a unified Democratic party and getting donors to open up their wallets again as quickly as possible, neither of those is anywhere near as important as putting forward the strongest possible candidate.
Maybe Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump. Maybe her vice-presidential pick will open up another state or two so that the path through the midwestern Blue Wall is not the only one. But count me as scratching my head about why the Democratic Party went through the uniquely difficult exercise of getting an incumbent president to stand down—only to coronate the weakest of the talked-about candidates.
There is one thing that I thought most Democrats agreed on—that the only thing that should matter in this election is putting forward as strong a nominee as possible to confront the immediate existential threat posed by another Trump presidency. I guess I was wrong.
Tom Rogers is executive chairman of Oorbit Gaming and Entertainment, an editor-at-large for Newsweek, the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC, is the former CEO of TiVo, a member of Keep Our Republic (an organization dedicated to preserving the nation's democracy). He is also a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Democracy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
