Harris sticks to ‘vacuous’ generalities

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ first sit-in interview with CNN’s Dana Bush – Harris had been avoiding one-to-one interviews and it was interpreted that her aides are protecting her from the ordeal because they are not sure whether she can handle them – came as a relief to her supporters, though the note of dissatisfaction was quite pronounced.

And there is also unanimity that she held herself without committing any faux pas, or she did not tie herself up in knots because of the many contradictions in her position. She gave evasive, generalised answers and refused to be pinned down. There was a bit of unhappiness with the CNN interviewer, Bush, that she did not press on with the hard questions which she asked anyway, but that she was much too soft and polite.

But the critics again agreed that Bush did not do a bad job, and that she asked all the questions that needed to be asked. With the commentators in the liberal The New York Times and the conservative National Review, the verdict about the interview was that Harris was ‘vacuous’. It would have been a damning comment if not for the unravelling of the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

He was quite focused and aggressive in his campaign against President Joe Biden, but he seems to have lost the sting when faced with Harris, who is a political novice compared to Biden. Trump did assume that Harris was a weaker candidate and that it would be much easier for him to beat her in the November election than it was to beat Biden.

But the Trump calculation has gone wrong. There is an unexpected enthusiasm for Harris in the Democratic Party and its supporters. The party was in emotional dumps as it were when Biden was the candidate until he decided to step aside at the end of June. There has been a burst of energy in the Democratic Party ever since Harris stepped in. People saw a sudden sense of hope in her even as they despaired at Trump’s relentless aggression.

There is a recognition now that Harris has really revived the spirits of the Democrats but there are now the hard questions whether she can state her policy stand on many of the burning issues apart from reiterating the position adopted by Biden, whether it is Ukraine or Israel, whether it is Medicare or revival of the housing sector. Harris has not revealed what her own political convictions are the way Biden was when he spoke out with passion against Russian President Vladimir Putin as posing a danger to democratic values of the Western world.

It appears that Harris is not capable of expressing strong convictions because she does not seem to have them. For her, policy positions are more about pragmatism than that of deeply-held beliefs. But she is deft and clever in getting into a trap about her beliefs.

She was quite emphatic in the CNN interview that she was not fighting for the presidency of the United States on the basis of her gender or race. She said that she was the best qualified person at the moment to be the president, and she would be the president of all Americans.

It might appear too much of a generality, but given Harris, it is the strongest conviction that she can express. And she is likely to hold this thin line which would enable to navigate the campaign shoals between now and November. The fact that Trump is completely at a loss on how to attack Harris, and his criticism has now become a shallow and weak litany of her limitations, gives Harris the elbow room to edge past Trump.