Here in the United States today, Democrats of all stripes are flocking to Kamala Harris like a man lost in the desert who suddenly surmounts a sand dune and sees an oasis. As he stumbles forward, the last thing he worries about is that it might be a mirage.
Things are happening fast. It’s less than a hundred days until the presidential election. And since Joe Biden stood down just under two weeks ago, Harris’s contributions from previously reluctant donors have totalled $200 million (66 per cent from first-time donors), with more flowing in every minute. Factually speaking – though facts have become ephemeral – vice-president Harris needs 1,976 Democratic convention-delegate votes to win nomination as the presidential candidate. But that’s a given.
And as for this headlong process being an “orderly and transparent” one, you need to get real. Some 78 per cent of Democrats already want Harris as their candidate, while 61 per cent want no competitors. Nancy Pelosi, both Obamas and George Clooney have spoken. In such euphoria, Democrats are giddily thinking “So, you’re telling me there’s a chance.”
On the plus side – and these are real – Harris represents a scary unknown quantity for Republicans, who hate nothing more than the unknown. Donald Trump, especially. Doubt makes him squirrel-y, prone to even greater extremes of babbling campaign nuttiness and election-losing vitriol. One on one, Harris makes Trump look really bad – jaded and bloated and mean – instead of just being one of two old farts who should never be president again. Bring on the debate stage, the Democrats are boasting. She’ll eat his lunch.
Only, before all these big grins start to crack and fade, let’s acknowledge another view. When candidate Trump was shot in Pennsylvania –how long ago was that? – a well-placed Republican savant observed that by getting shot, Trump had automatically secured victory. By this strange logic, whatever doesn’t kill you – I guess – makes you president. But so it did seem. And it was a claim which released in me a sickening sensation of unreality. The nightmarish worst was just about to happen. I admit I harboured dark thoughts.
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But a commensurate, if decidedly different, unreality now permeates the oxygen Democrats breathe. I’m alas inhaling it, too. The rush to Harris, and the belief that she can win, reflect a disorientation and a lack of crucial discipline the likes of which allowed the party (somehow!) to forgo shouldering the clearly diminished Biden out of the presidential race months ago. “Oh, we can’t possibly do that!” “Oh, we have to do that!” The Democrats are apparently seeking to lead our country in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.
Unquestionably, once the greedy grins start to fade, a Harris victory isn’t going to be easy. It’s possible to argue that the non-process process now steamrolling Harris to a coronation is probably the only way she could get nominated in the first place. She was, after all, a losing presidential candidate in 2020, an uninspiring speaker and campaigner who couldn’t get her message across to voters. A nasty (and possibly untrue) rumour still hangs around Harris that she can’t keep her staff on board because she’s not especially likable. Completely untrue is the suspicion – heard often among even black Democratic voters – that a woman of colour can’t get elected; the toxic “America’s not ready” fallacy. (America most certainly is ready.)
On top of all that, Harris is from California (a separate universe from, say, Michigan or Pennsylvania). She has also unenviably just spent three years as Biden’s mostly sidelined vice-president. And due to Biden’s dithering over finally leaving the race, she’s barely got time now to make her new case to the American electorate. She’s hardly a shoo-in.
And all that’s before the Republicans lay into her with birtherism, DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) slanders, border-czar misinformation and God knows what other calumny Steve Bannon and Alex Jones brew up out of sheer mental illness and free-floating hatred and nihilism.
Yet with all that being said, Democrats – if Biden will just stay out of the way – have assets which could let them claim a win this November. Sure, the country’s gravely divided over its proper course forward and about who should lead. But ideology and core beliefs mean less and less to voters now, and Trump is not a popular candidate except among MAGA nutcases. And again, he’s not going to look exactly awesome on the stage with the winsome, younger and unflappably prosecutorial Harris.
The Biden-Harris record of achievement is, moreover, a solid one. Successes with infrastructure funding, the female reproductive rights debate, the pandemic recovery, student loan forgiveness, environmental and healthcare legislation, and more mean Harris will step easily into the credit for these accomplishments. There’s still the southern border fiasco to navigate. And Republicans will try to hang that ongoing disaster on her.
But Harris has a chance to make Americans – except for the lunatics – understand that the border is a problem both political parties have failed to solve for decades, and in fact is an intransigent geographical and moral dilemma neither party will perhaps ever truly solve, except in boozy bar rooms where all problems are imminently fixable.
And then there’s this. Even with wild Republican vilifications, possibly without unconditional support from Democrats, and conceding Harris’s own liabilities, many Americans are hungry to vote for anybody but Donald Trump. In all elections the reason we vote for candidates is not because we approve of everything they think, and not just so he or she will do our private bidding, but because we as citizens hope and trust the candidate will not go crazy, will do right for the country – relying not just on history or philosophical obedience, but in response to some freshly found, personal dimension bespeaking what? Greater civic responsibility? Expanded appreciation of human possibility? A new vision of goodness which might never have revealed itself or even existed except in the crucible of the sometimes strident debate upon which our country survives?
Harris must perform now, and we will see if she is capable of such growth, of seizing this as her mission. Frankly, what other chance does our country have?
So yes, in other words, yes indeed. I’m saying there’s a chance.
Richard Ford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer
