Obama and Clinton Haunt Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris has brought out the big guns in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, but they are mostly misfiring.

The big headlines from the Democrats’ past White House winners hitting the campaign trail this week were not the ones Harris would want. The former President Barack Obama lectured black men who aren’t yet on board with the current Democratic ticket, bringing all his bitter clinger charm in implying they are sexist despite polling showing they were also out (and in somewhat larger numbers) on President Joe Biden.

Then, former President Bill Clinton suggested that with better vetting Laken Riley might not have been murdered by an illegal immigrant. This does not seem like a glowing endorsement of the Biden-Harris border policy, but Clinton said because of low birthrates we need more immigration anyway. 

All this comes amid new reporting of tensions between the Biden and Harris teams in the waning days of the presidential race. Democrats are freshly relitigating Biden’s ouster as Election Day fast approaches, apparently impervious to the fact he remains the sitting president.

Every one of these men in their prime had more natural political talent than Harris currently possesses, though it’s open to debate how close any of them are to still operating at their peak level. But they all also have made it more difficult for Harris to follow in their footsteps.

The most obvious is Biden, whose conspicuous failures in office alongside his advanced age necessitated Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket in the first place. Harris is culpable in nearly all of these, to be sure, including the concealment of Biden’s dotage. But if the incumbent had delivered on the promises of his 2020 campaign — moderate institutionalist who will make deals and restore normalcy — she would be in something closer to George H.W. Bush’s position in 1988 than Hubert Humphrey’s 20 years before that.

Yet if Obama hadn’t decimated the Democratic bench, reducing it to a left flank of deep blue-state lawmakers in a pair of midterm “shellackings,” the party would not have needed to turn to someone as old as Biden to find a mainstream Democrat with a plausible presidential resume. And Biden’s vice presidential shortlist might have had more names on it besides Harris’s.

Obama to some extent understands the former President Donald Trump’s appeal better than most Democrats of his era. But Obama still doesn’t draw any conclusions about how he could have possibly drawn Trump as his successor beyond the self-serving ones. If Obama’s economy was so great, good enough to extend into Trump’s term, why did it produce so much discontent — even among people who had voted Democratic at the presidential level in 2008 and 2012?

It’s also likely the case that Obama goaded Trump into making good on his threats to enter national politics in the first place to the applause of many who spent the next decade worrying about democracy dying in darkness. But the possibility that so imperfect a vessel as Trump might transform the GOP into a multiracial working-class party is more damning.

The same criticism can be made of Clinton. If he had dealt with immigration while in office, following his own commission’s recommendations, and thought differently about post-Cold War and pre-9/11 foreign-policy challenges, there might have been less of a constituency or opportunity for Trump. Regime change in Iraq and NAFTA became national policy under Clinton, who also flip-flopped on China’s trade status.

Clinton ought to at least ponder why he was able to carry West Virginia twice while the state is now reliably Republican at the presidential level for the foreseeable future.

Yes, it is easier to blame Rush Limbaugh or Fox News than the Democrats’ own complicity in the failures of the bipartisan establishment. But a little self-awareness never hurt anyone. Clinton’s whole political career was premised on learning some of the right lessons about why Democrats kept losing elections to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Harris is nevertheless in a highly competitive race. If she doesn’t make it to the Oval Office, her own strategic decisions will play a big role in that failure. But the ghosts of Democratic presidencies past haven’t made her task any easier. If she wins, it will be at least as much in spite of them as due to their assistance.