If elected, Kamala Harris is going to go for it.
Forget the flip-flopping to try to get to the center, the irenic DNC address, the moderate tone and emphasis on a New Way Forward crafted to be wholly unobjectionable.
All of that will be instantly inoperative as of January 21, 2025, if not right after Election Day.
We’ve all seen the movie before — a Democrat runs on a centrist or centrist-sounding platform, then governs to the left as soon as he assumes office. Bill Clinton, who cut his political teeth in cultural conservative Arkansas, did it. So did Barack Obama, who swathed his program in gauzy generalities. So, of course, did Joe Biden, who was supposed to be a unifier above all else.
The recent history suggests that it is impossible for a Democrat not to run this play, or, put another way, it’s the only play they’ve got.
The limiting factor on a President Harris would be control of Congress, especially if the Montana Senate race goes Republicans’ way. Unless something goes disastrously wrong for them elsewhere, Republicans should have a Senate majority if they win the state, where Republican Tim Sheehy has been running ahead of incumbent Jon Tester lately. But if something does go wrong somewhere else or Sheehy stumbles, Harris easily could have control of Congress.
What would check her then?
Whatever the limits of her capabilities as a politician or leader, she is presumably not aware of them, or wouldn’t be inclined to let them stop her. People who are elected president always develop a healthy self-regard, if they didn’t have it already, since they have attained one of the most exalted positions on the planet and one occupied by only several dozen fellow Americans over the course of our 250-year history.
Harris won’t even have to believe her own press releases; she’ll just have to believe her own press, which will be all about how historic she is, how joyful she is, how impressive her victory was, and how she saved democracy.
If you think the coverage is over the top now, just imagine what would happen if she got to 270 electoral votes and vanquished Donald Trump, perhaps bringing a final end to his presidential aspirations (although that would remain to be seen).
Although Harris has been jettisoning her positions from 2019–20 and sounding as reasonable as possible, the fact is that what she and her party are actively proposing is not exactly modest. Getting her tax-and-spending plan through, on its own, would be huge. And her party is committed to bypassing the filibuster for purposes of imposing a nationwide, pro-abortion regime and passing sweeping “voting rights” legislation.
Once the legislative filibuster is significantly breached, the irresistible temptation will be to find exceptions for every other progressive priority, too. Notably, Harris is on the record supporting “court reform,” which could entail de facto Court-packing. Certainly, if this comes to pass, statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., will be part of the conversation, too.
We will be told that “history” demands nothing less, and we — and, more important, Kamala Harris — will be told that by historians.
Inevitably, a President Harris would meet with presidential historians, and inevitably, the presidential historians would tell her she can only meet the moment by being as transformative as possible.
You aren’t a presidential historian who is invited to a dinner at the White House to talk about a Democratic president’s prospects unless you are inclined to advise that he or she is the next FDR or LBJ.
No one says, “Madame President, this whole thing was an accident. You ran against a deeply flawed opponent who had lost the prior national election, too, and your team kept you under wraps for fear you would too flagrantly demonstrate that you aren’t up for this. I’d just keep your head down, pursue a consensus agenda, and hope for the best.”
No one told Joe Biden that after he won the White House in 2020 by default.
Axios reported at the time, “Hosting historians around a long table in the East Room earlier this month, President Biden took notes in a black book as they discussed some of his most admired predecessors. Then he said to Doris Kearns Goodwin: ‘I’m no FDR, but . . .’”
Oh, the lack of realism and trillions of dollars weighted on that simple conjunction.
“The chatty, two-hour-plus meeting,” Axios continued, “is a for-the-history-books marker of the think-big, go-big mentality that pervades his West Wing.”
In another report, Axios noted of Biden, “The historians’ views were very much in sync with his own: It is time to go even bigger and faster than anyone expected. If that means chucking the filibuster and bipartisanship, so be it.”
The report continued, “Presidential historian Michael Beschloss told Axios FDR and LBJ may turn out to be the past century’s closest analogues for the Biden era, ‘in terms of transforming the country in important ways in a short time.’”
It added, “He loves the growing narrative that he’s bolder and bigger-thinking than President Obama.”
Harris would love the narrative that she’s bolder and bigger-thinking than President Biden just as much.
Advice from historians aside, the Democratic mold for governing is always FDR and LBJ, who enhanced the role of the state and transformed the constitutional order, rather than, say, the more cautious JFK. Kennedy is the model for youthful energy and style, not substantive ambition.
It’s also not a crazy calculation to believe that the best approach to the window created by unified control of Congress is to jam through as much as possible, since a president will probably get shellacked in his or her first midterm regardless.
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