What The Rise of Kamala Harris Tells Us About Politics in America and in Kentucky

Joe Biden was one of the chief authors of a 1994 bill that among other things increased penalties for certain offenses and provided new federal money for states to build prisons. It is now considered part of a broader American “war on crime” that was overly punitive. In his current presidential campaign, Biden is calling for ending the death penalty, increasing the number of federal investigations of local police departments and other ideas advocated by supporters of a less punitive criminal justice system--in effect, distancing himself from his prior stances. Biden, who was the No. 2 figure in a presidential administration that set records for the number of undocumented immigrants that it deported, has pledged to suspend most deportations for at least his first 100 days in office if he is elected president. 

Kamala Harris, who once proudly defended a program enacted by her office while she was the district attorney in San Francisco that would have allowed parents to be sent to jail if their kids missed too many days of school, has also basically renounced much of her previous record on criminal justice issues. The U.S. Conference of Mayors, under the leadership of Louisville’s Greg Fischer, is calling for the passage of a federal bill that would study various ideas for reparations for black Americans. Daniel Cameron, who closely allied himself with the state’s police during his successful campaign to become Kentucky’s attorney general, met this week with the family of Breonna Taylor, the woman shot and killed by Louisville police in March. 

What do all of these moves have to do with one another? In my view, they show the huge power of activism and movements in shaping politics and policy--and the limitations of spending too much time thinking about individual politicians and their personal beliefs. “What is Barack Obama really like?” was a question I was asked often for about 10 years. (I covered him extensively as a senator, presidential candidate and president.) “Is Politician X sincere?,” or “Is Politician Y taking this position because he really believes it or just for political reasons?” is something I am often asked now. 

The answer to those kinds of questions is often, “It doesn’t really matter.” Some politicians have deep convictions on every issue. But most of them have really deep, unmovable convictions on a few issues, but can be moved or persuaded on the vast majority of issues--at times even on ones where it would seem that they have a fairly set ideology. 

That’s where movements and activism come in. Neither Biden nor Harris is ever going to stand up and say, “I wanted to advance to higher offices. The polls suggested/my political advisers back then told me that being perceived as tough-on-crime was good electoral politics. The media covered that approach positively. Now, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and polls showing Americans aren’t as in love with tough-on crime policies as they used to be, it is politically-safer to take stances like calling for the decriminalization of marijuana. So I have moved. Dude, I’m a politician--I need to do what I can to get elected and then get reelected.” 

But in reality, that is what’s going on. There is now a national movement pushing reparations--so it’s not surprising that a figure who is embattled because of a perception that he is bad on racial issues (Fischer) would join it. Trump’s anti-immigration approach has both galvanized pro-immigration movements in opposition to his policies and resulted in more scrutiny on some of the more controversial elements of Obama’s immigration decisions. So when liberal immigration activists started demanding Biden take that no-deportations pledge, he really couldn’t say no. 

Cameron seemed quite irritated when protesters came to his house demanding that he file charges against the three officers who were involved in Taylor’s killing. But he is acting like a man who feels a lot of pressure to figure out a way to placate the movement demanding prosecutions of the officers---so I would argue that the people who came to his house were ramping up the pressure on him in a way that is having some effect. 

This week, after Biden tapped Harris as his running mate, Biden and his advisers suggested that decision was in part because Harris was friends with Biden’s late son Beau. (Both had been attorneys general at the state level.) I don’t want to downplay that relationship. But I suspect people like Tiffany Cross, Karen Finney and Angela Rye (who you may not have heard of) had more influence on this decision than Biden’s family members. Cross, Finney and Rye were among the group of black political figures who spent months essentially demanding that Biden pick a black woman as his running mate, both to reward black women for their ironclad support for Democrats in general and their specific role in essentially saving Biden’s candidacy during the Democratic primaries. 

So there was a movement to force Biden to pick a black female running mate--and he acceded to that movement’s wishes, even if Biden and his staff won’t really admit that now. 

To conclude, there is a complicated interplay between 1. personal views of politicians 2. media coverage 3. electoral considerations 4. activism and movements 5. ideas from intellectuals and thinkers 6. wealth and power and 7. a ton of other factors that results in political and policy decisions. What that means is that we should probably abandon our norms of thinking of politicians as both super-interesting celebrities worth knowing everything about and all-powerful forces shaping our lives on their own whims. For example, when I was a White House reporter, it drove me crazy that the Obama White House would send reporters a list of books that the president was supposedly reading over Christmas break and we reporters would dutifully write about that list. (This happened under George W. Bush too.) The implication was that the brilliant Obama was shaping his policy decisions based on the complicated books that he and his advisers were reading and debating. Obama seems plenty smart, but many of his decisions seemed shaped by electoral considerations and activism--like all politicians. In fact, my view was that the reading list itself was shaped by these dynamics---Obama’s reading list often seemed to be books that were part of the broader cultural zeitgeist, the kinds of things that a good politician would want to be described as reading. 

Donald Trump would not be president and would have not a decent chance of winning a second term without two movements: the anti-tax, anti-government wealthy people who fund GOP groups and candidates; and the everyday Americans wary of a country that is increasingly less white, less Christian and less dominated by men. Harris changed many of her views in part because of movements like Black Lives Matter, in my view. She became a candidate for vice-president in part because of a movement that pushed for a candidate like her. So if she becomes vice-president, it’s probably less important to figure out if she is really a liberal, a moderate or something in-between than to watch the movements and activism that happen around her--and see how she reacts to those shifts. 

Similarly, here in Louisville, in the aftermath of Taylor’s killing, it’s probably less important what Fischer and Cameron really believe about race and policing and more important how they act in response to pressure. Charges filed against the officers are what will really matter, whether Cameron files those charges based on his reading of the law (as he will claim if he does ) or because one of the most famous people in the world (Beyoncé) called him out and demanded charges and because people protested at his house (factors I am certain he will not cite if he files charges.) 

Some other brief notes

USPS--The vote-by-mail situation is alarming. I have nothing comforting to say. It is not clear if America will have a free and fair election in November. I wrote a detailed piece about some other threats to the integrity of the election here. 

I also don’t fully understand exactly what Trump and the new postmaster general are doing (meaning that I understand that there is an effort to make it harder to implement universal vote-by mail but I don’t fully understand say, the role of removing mail-sorting machines in that effort.) I, like I suspect many other reporters covering this, don’t really use the postal system too much and don’t know too much about it--so I’m struggling to get up to speed. 

Harris--I don’t think the Harris pick will make much of a difference electorally, as I explained here. (The early polls since the pick basically show Biden with the same lead that he had before.) 

Thanks for reading. You can reach me at perrylbacon@gmail.com if you have suggestions for future stories or see a typo/error that I should fix for the online version of this newsletter.