Biden-Harris Offers Personal Diversity but Ideological Uniformity

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After much (and I really do mean much) deliberation and suspense, Joe Biden has announced that his running mate will be Kamala Harris. This is hardly unexpected: for months, Harris had been talked about as one of the top candidates for the slot. Nonetheless, it is a significant choice, in more ways than one. Perhaps the most obvious significance of the choice has to do with Harris' identity: she is the first Black woman to be chosen for the VP spot on a major-party presidential ticket, and would be both the first female and first Black vice president if she and Biden are victorious in November. In this regard, she brings diversity to the Democratic ticket and serves as a balance of sorts to Joe Biden—an old, white man (who, unlike Harris, boasts a long public career and, therefore, "experience"). But when it comes to actual ideology, Harris brings neither diversity nor balance to the ticket. On the contrary, she brings stark uniformity—a reality that Biden and his handlers surely recognized.

To be clear, personal diversity at the highest levels of government is a worthwhile goal. It is better, both symbolically and probably in terms of measurable effect, for the makeup of the government to reflect that of the population with respect to race, gender, religion, and other aspects of personal identity. But it is also undeniably not everything. A government whose composition is as diverse as that of its country can still be a bad government. It can also still fail to represent the populace it's ruling over: people are more than just their race, or gender, or religion, or sexuality. In fact, ideology is more important in this respect than personal identity. While this might seem like a brash or insensitive claim, it's generally reflected in the opinions of voters throughout the country. Most people would rather be represented in government by someone who shares their opinions and priorities (and who they feel is well qualified), rather than someone who shares some aspect of their personal identity. How else can we explain the fact that, for instance, Black voters in the Democratic primary favored Joe Biden over Cory Booker or Kamala Harris? Or that Latino voters were much likelier to support Bernie Sanders than they were Julián Castro? Or that Pete Buttigieg was unable to carry the LGBTQ vote? And, indeed there is good reason for this: while electing a member of a marginalized group to office may be a valuable and inspiring symbolic victory, their ideology determines how they will wield their power—and how they do so may affect the livelihoods of many millions of people. With this in mind, in terms of real-world impact the ideological similarity between Biden and Harris outweighs their differences in personal identity.

From a hardline left-wing standpoint we could, of course, simply say that (like virtually all politicians in the United States) Biden and Harris are both defenders of capitalism and America's sprawling empire overseas, and be done with it. This is true, but even if we get into the finer details the two are often very much in sync. Let's take Medicare for All, for example. We know Biden's standpoint: consistently and unshakably opposed. How about Harris? Initially, she was actually a cosponsor for Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill. But once her presidential campaign got rolling, she pretty quickly abandoned it. The plan she ultimately ran on would, like Biden's, only offer a "public option" while allowing private health insurers to provide competing plans—a weak and inadequate compromise, for reasons I've explained elsewhere. 

When it comes to higher education, the case is similar. Biden has consistently stopped short of advocating for universal free college (which already exists in a number of similarly wealthy countries). He has also shied away from wide-scale cancellation of student loan debt. During her presidential campaign, Harris offered up a student loan debt forgiveness proposal so narrow as to verge on unintentional comedy. As a CNBC article described it, 

Borrowers will have a lot of boxes to check before they can get the $20,000 in student debt forgiveness on the table in her proposal.

They will have to be 1) a Pell Grant Recipient who 2) starts a business in a disadvantaged community and 3) manages to keep that business afloat for at least three years.

When it came to the cost of college going forward, she only promised to "fight to make community college free, make four-year public college debt-free." Incidentally, how to ensure college is "debt-free" without making it tuition-free is something I have yet to hear adequately explained. 

One of the biggest criticisms of Biden from the left is his often-cozy relationship with the finance industry. Harris is similar here, too. As the Attorney General of California, Harris was strongly urged by her own staff to sue Steve Mnuchin's bank OneWest. The bank foreclosed on tens of thousands of homeowners in the state, in possible violation of an agreement with the FDIC. But despite her staff's "strong recommendations," Harris did not file a case against OneWest. Mnuchin, in turn, donated to Harris' 2016 Senate campaign—making her the only Democratic Senate candidate he gave money to in that election cycle. That case seems to be just one instance of a greater trend: the Wall Street Journal has reported that Wall Street is "sigh[ing] with relief" now that Biden has chosen Harris as his running mate, while CNBC notes that "Wall Street executives are glad" about the pick. 

Nor are Biden and Harris far apart on foreign policy. The Times of Israel  observes that "[u]nlike some of the more liberal members of the caucus...[Harris] has not bucked the [Democratic] party’s traditionally supportive posture toward Israel, or called for fundamental changes to the nature of the alliance" and "has also maintained a close relationship with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)." She has tried to outflank President Trump from the right on the issue of North Korea, excoriating him for canceling joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises and daring to meet face-to-face with Kim Jong-Un. While her presidential campaign website promised to "end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and protracted military engagements in places like Syria," she has hardly taken a strong stance against ongoing U.S. meddling in the region, telling the New York Times that "I believe we should bring back our troops from Afghanistan, but I also believe that we need to have a presence there in terms of supporting what the leaders of Afghanistan want to do in terms of having peace in that region, and certainly suppressing any possibility of ISIS or any other terrorist organization from gaining steam."

While Harris obviously can't match Biden's tough-on-crime record, here there are commonalities as well. She played a significant role in pushing for harsher penalties for truancy when she was running for Attorney General in California, resulting in a new law that would punish the parents of truant kids with up to a year in jail. Although (unlike Biden) she has recently voiced her support for legalizing marijuana, her record on that issue offers reason to be skeptical: when running against a pro-legalization Republican in 2014, Harris literally laughed at his stance, and an investigation found over 1,500 people were sent to California state prisons for marijuana-related offenses from 2011 to 2016, during her tenure as AG. Her treatment of California's prisoners when she held that office is also controversial: she's faced criticism for sending a brief that sought to deny sex reassignment surgery to transgender inmates, although she claims to have only been enforcing existing policy even as she worked behind the scenes to change it; and when a man convicted of murder sought DNA testing that could exculpate him, Harris did not act on the request (it was later granted by Gavin Newsom). She additionally faces accusations of being soft on police misconduct, and of having slow-walked an investigation into misuse of jailhouse informants by deputies and prosecutors. 

On the environment Harris does strike a more progressive posture, having teamed up with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push for climate legislation, cosponsored the Green New Deal resolution and voiced support for a fracking ban. But once more, there are reasons for doubt. Her presidential campaign was advised by Michèle Flournoy, "a career Pen­ta­gon offi­cial who has repeat­ed­ly urged increas­ing domes­tic fos­sil fuel extrac­tion as a key part of U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy, and sup­port­ed sev­er­al poli­cies that have helped turn the U.S. into one of the world’s worst car­bon pol­luters, such as Obama’s repeal of the ban on domes­tic oil exports" (in the words of writer Branko Marcetic). A 2019 Washington Post article noted that Harris had "accepted donations from a top attorney at CITGO Petroleum, among others at natural gas corporations, federal filings show. After an inquiry from The Washington Post, Harris’s campaign said it was in the process of returning a gift from a vice president at Consumers Energy, a Michigan-based natural gas and electricity company."

If all of this feels like picking out the most objectionable bits of Harris' record, that is only because—once again, as with Biden—I find it difficult to discern much in terms of a positive agenda or vision that she really stands for. It would be easier to overlook some of these imperfections if they seemed to be mere blemishes, distractions from the true substance of Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, I find myself unable to discern any true substance that can be separated from the imperfections. 

For many, the historical import of Harris' placement on the ticket—and the promise of a return to the "sanity" of the Obama years—will be enough to win not just their vote but their enthusiasm. I find this response misguided, but those people are entitled to their opinion and I won't scold them for it. However, we should at least be able to retire any claims about Biden running on The Most Progressive Platform Since FDR, or seriously adopting any ideas from the Democratic Party's left flank. A nominee's choice of running mate is always important, and especially so in Biden's case (for obvious reasons). Faced with possibly the most consequential decision of his general election campaign—he may have just picked our 47th president, after all—Biden chose someone who is far closer to him, ideologically, than she is to Bernie Sanders (who was, lest we forget, the first runner-up in the crowded Democratic primary field). That he did so is neither a surprise nor a scandal, but it certainly tells us more about how he would govern than any of the words in his platform do.