“SHE’S DANGEROUS”: GOP INSIDERS FEAR KAMALA COULD BE THE NEXT OBAMA
Rattled by her deft vivisection of Joe Biden at the last debate, Republicans wonder how Harris might do against a real villain like Trump. “She doesn’t come across as a nutjob,” worries one GOP operative. “Kamala is a nightmare,” says another.
About the time Kamala Harris finished slicing and dicing Joe Biden, like Ed Valenti demonstrating a Ginsu knife, my cell phone started pinging with Republican operatives saying, in effect, “I told you so.”
For months I’ve been in contact with a group of senior Republican strategists keeping tabs on Donald Trump and the party’s view of the unfolding Democratic presidential primary. Since the beginning of the campaign, these people have been worried that Biden constituted the biggest political threat to Trump’s reelection. Early public opinion polls certainly lend credibility to their concerns. But a smaller, though equally distinguished group of Republican operatives in my Rolodex, a sort of GOP cult of Kamala, had been insisting for weeks that Harris was being radically underestimated. With her surgical vivisection of Biden in the first debate, it seemed their fears had been realized. Now, as Democrats prepare for a second round of debates next week, these strategists are raising the alarm.
“I think she’s dangerous, and probably maybe the most dangerous, from our view,” a veteran Republican political consultant told me this month. “She theoretically would do very well with African American turnout and end up being positioned as a Vienna Soccer Mom.” In case you’re wondering, that’s Vienna, Virginia, an upscale bedroom community just west of Washington, D.C., that has accelerated its drift from the Republican orbit since a certain former reality-television star secured the Republican nomination three years ago. Suburbs just like it in critical battlegrounds could hand the White House back to the Democratic Party in 2020.
“She made a mistake with private health care,” this Republican operative conceded, referring to Harris’s serial flip-flops on Medicare for All and whether her plans for overhauling health care would lead to the abolition of private insurance. “But she doesn’t come across as a nutjob.”
Harris, 54, is California’s junior U.S. senator and former state attorney general. She might have more natural political skill than any of her competitors for the Democratic nomination. She certainly checks more boxes—African American, woman, racially diverse, a legitimate strength in a party occasionally obsessed with identity politics. Harris also is something of a Washington outsider, or could claim to be, at least, having served in Congress for less than three years. Unlike Biden, she has not spent decades on Capitol Hill making tough choices or agreeing to imperfect compromises.
If any of this rings familiar, it’s because it is. The last Democrat to win the presidency, Barack Obama, was all of those things, save for the obvious. That is why some Republicans take it as an article of faith that by the time the Democrats gather in Milwaukee a little less than a year from now to coronate their nominee, Harris will be the guest of honor. Who else could they possibly nominate? some Republicans have told me, convinced. But in dismantling Biden on the big stage in Miami, Harris showcased how she might earn it—and why next week’s debate in Detroit could be decisive.
Not everyone buys the idea that Harris is the next Obama, superficial similarities aside. “She’s overrated,” says a Republican grandee who still has battle scars from run-ins with the 44th president. “Obama had authenticity. She doesn’t.” Another Republican strategist who doesn’t buy the the hype called Harris “terrible” and “a disaster.”
But some dialed-in Republicans described Harris as a serious threat. “I have long been most concerned about Harris. I think she has an appeal to the Scottsdale soccer mom who is a registered Republican. Between her appeal and Trump’s women problems, she has probably already won those voters,” said an experienced Republican consultant in Arizona, an emerging battleground that sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 2018 for the first time in a generation and is ground zero for suburban discontent with Trump. “But I also think she does better amongst Independents who generally split ideologically in Arizona,” this GOP insider added. “Independents are just sick of everything, and her no-nonsense approach would have appeal broadly, and even to some white Independent and GOP men. She doesn’t have the Biden wimp factor, and that’s probably important in a place like Arizona.”
Harris wasn’t simply declared the winner of the first Democratic debate of the party’s 2020 primary by the punditocracy. Grouped with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Biden, a former six-term U.S. senator and two-term vice president in the midst of his third bid for the White House, each with several big-time debates under their belt, Harris, in her first pressure-packed presidential face-off, put on a clinic. But it wasn’t her win on points that impressed some Republicans who have been watching the Democratic food fight in an effort to game out next year. In nailing Biden to the wall on the matter of his past opposition to federally mandated busing (wildly unpopular at the time), Harris managed to turn folksy Uncle Joe into a villain on the issue of race—perhaps his strongest suit in a contest that could hinge on African American voters. Her flawlessly executed attack on the sympathetic, ex-No. 2 to the nation’s first African American president tugged at voters’ heartstrings without sacrificing the emotional fortitude most Americans want to see in their president.
I observed the wreckage firsthand while on assignment in Iowa for the Washington Examiner. While most of my colleagues were in South Florida for the main event, I decided to hang out with a crowd of staunch Biden supporters at a debate watch party in suburban Des Moines that was organized by the Biden campaign. The Iowa caucuses will kick off the voting in the 2020 primary next February, and this group of likely voters knew they had just witnessed a massacre.
“I don’t think he looks well, and that kind of concerns me,” Carol Crandall, 74, a retired school teacher, told me after a two-hour broadcast that saw Biden looking every bit his age of 76 years old. About as charitable a defense that could be mustered for Biden, until then the undisputed, unchallenged front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was offered by John Olsen, a 49-year-old Biden superfan who moonlights as a substitute teacher: “Kamala put Joe in an impossible situation.”
Imagine what Harris might be able to do against a real villain like Trump, some worried Republican insiders back in Washington were simultaneously telling me via text message. Hillary Clinton, unlikable, clunky, and corrupt, could never do that. “Kamala is a nightmare” for Republicans, one of them told me.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/gop-insiders-fear-kamala-harris
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