It’s established now that California Sen. Kamala Harris is a great politician, one of the naturals, up there, perhaps, with the Roosevelt cousins, the Kennedy brothers (Jack and Bobby, that is, not Ted), and Ronald Reagan.
They were all skilled at the art of making themselves the heroes of their own life stories, the ones at the center of all of the action, to whom all other people react. Like three of the five, she is stunning to look at (though Bobby could pass as a Steve McQueen hero), and she somewhat resembles the actress Faye Dunaway in the facial expressions, the eyes and the mouth.
Harris has an energy and vitality that seems inexhaustible, and she’s now written herself into our national story as the brave little girl on the bus, awaiting a ride to a great revolution, one of the few school busing stories that was not a disaster.
So, is it time to start making plans for the first woman president, who (thank God) is not Hillary Clinton?
Well, there’s just one thing wrong with this tale. On all the issues, Harris is in tune with her state and her wing of the party. That means she’s at odds with the rest of the country, which she soon may be asking for votes.
Part of the problem may be California, which is where she has lived all her life and which periodically talks about leaving the country. In some ways it already has. California is the state that gave Hillary Clinton her entire popular vote margin over Trump in the 2016 election and then some. Without California, which Republicans wrote off from the beginning, Trump would have won the popular vote by 1.1 million votes instead of losing it by 2.3 million.
California has a Third World economy and social class structure, which consists of the very rich and those who wait on them. Its two greatest cities are now overrun with feces and homelessness. For some reason, the people there elect Democrats almost without opposition as conditions around them get worse. The Republican Party there barely exists, state elections are never competitive, and so politicians aren’t challenged. Or if they are challenged, the opposition will come from the Left.
Harris, like all Democrats, supports abortion access through the ninth month, a view shared by 15% of all Americans. She wants to see private healthcare plans abolished, a view shared by 30%. How much talent will it take to overcome numbers like that in states in the upper Midwest, against a Republican? One day, she may have to find out.
There’s another last test of political greatness Harris has yet to display or develop. Having established the big personality, she has now to build a big coalition around it that is completely and wholly her own. The people mentioned above didn’t just win some elections, they had personality traits that transformed their own parties, leaving them other than they were before.
Theodore Roosevelt and Robert F. Kennedy blended extremes of compassion and toughness; Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were their more polished versions. Ronald Reagan put Franklin Roosevelt through the conservative wringer (see Henry Olsen), and emerged with his own special blend.
If Harris can merge her prosecutorial side with her Earth mother image, she could pull this off, but it might take some doing. Meanwhile we may all get to see how far talent can take you when, in the eyes of the public, you’re so wrong on all the issues.
