Kamala D. Harris leaned into her background as a former prosecutor to attack Donald Trump in her first presidential bid in 2020 \u2014 a message that attracted little support in the Democratic primary as Harris, short on money, ended her campaign before the first votes were cast.<\/p>\n
Now, with the Democratic Party rapidly coalescing behind her following President Biden\u2019s sudden withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, Vice President Harris is getting another chance to make her case in the court of public opinion \u2014 and this time, against a recently convicted felon.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a clear discernment between Kamala D. Harris and what she represents and her background and someone who has been convicted of 34 felonies and still has multiple indictments he has to go through,\u201d said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative and longtime Harris supporter.<\/p>\n
In May, a Manhattan jury found former president Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges of falsifying business records in a case related to a hush money payment to an adult-film star. He also faces three outstanding cases \u2014 including one state case in Georgia involving election interference and a federal case in Washington involving Trump\u2019s role in the events leading up the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A third case on charges of mishandling classified documents was thrown out last week by a federal judge; a Justice Department special counsel has filed notice of his intent to appeal.<\/p>\n
Harris\u2019s team spent Sunday reacting to the news from Biden \u2014 who put out a statement supporting her as the Democratic nominee to replace him \u2014 and preparing her own bid. But in the weeks following the stumbling June 27 presidential debate that sparked Biden\u2019s eventual downfall, former advisers and people close to Harris \u2014 a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general \u2014 said that embracing the role of prosecutor in chief against Trump would certainly be a key part of her message and appeal.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is someone who can clearly and forcefully articulate the case against Trump,\u201d said Jim Margolis, a senior adviser to Harris\u2019s 2020 presidential campaign. \u201cThat\u2019s the prosecutor in her. And she\u2019s someone who in a debate can move with the conversation and strike back hard \u2014 no notecards, just brainpower.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about the prospect of a prosecutor-versus-felon matchup, the Trump campaign linked Harris to the Biden presidency, arguing that Harris is responsible for everything from Biden\u2019s border policy to \u201cBidenomics\u201d to \u201ca weak foreign policy that has led to war and chaos around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one has lied about Joe Biden\u2019s cognitive decline and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years more than Cackling Co-Pilot Kamala D. Harris,\u201d Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Sunshine wrote in a statement. \u201cWhile Biden kowtows to California liberals, Kamala D. Harris actually is one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump\u2019s newly announced running mate, said in a statement Sunday that \u201cJoe Biden has been the worst President in my lifetime and Kamala D. Harris has been right there with him every step of the way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris made the prosecutor pitch during her failed 2020 campaign. Her slogan at the time \u2014 \u201cKamala D. Harris, for the people\u201d \u2014 was what she used to introduce herself in California court. And one of her key ads then \u2014 which has since re-emerged and gone viral \u2014 explicitly drew a contrast between herself and Trump, with the narrator intoning: \u201cShe prosecuted sex predators; he is one. She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans; he was a for-profit college \u2014 literally.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s tearing us apart \u2014 she\u2019ll bring us together,\u201d the ad concludes, noting that Harris is \u201cin every possible way the anti-Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the time, Harris withdrew from the Democratic primary before the first nominating contest. She was roundly viewed as a poor candidate, who churned through staff members \u2014 a problem she also had early in her tenure as Biden\u2019s No. 2 \u2014 and couldn\u2019t articulate an affirmative case for herself as much as she could a case against Trump.<\/p>\n
In the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a subsequent summer full of Black Lives Matters protests, her tough-on-crime prosecutor background also became something of a liability among her party\u2019s more liberal members.<\/p>\n
Now, however, with nearly four years of experience as Biden\u2019s vice president and in a potential matchup with an actual felon, allies hope the message will have more resonance. The Biden campaign\u2019s internal polling has found that attacking Trump as a \u201cconvicted felon\u201d is effective, a Harris ally said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer ability to unpack an argument and understand both sides of an argument and then reconstruct it in a way that the average person can understand is an incredible skill set to have,\u201d said Ashley Etienne, who served as communications director to Harris in the vice president\u2019s office. \u201cThat was the benefit of her being a former prosecutor and how that translated to the job of vice president.\u201d<\/p>\n
Appearing on CBS\u2019s \u201cFace The Nation\u201d this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) anticipated that Biden would probably be replaced with Harris, offering a glimpse of her strengths \u2014 he described her as \u201cvery vigorous\u201d \u2014 but also sharing a preview of how Republicans plan to attack her as farther left than Biden.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s for the Green New Deal. She\u2019s for Medicare for all. She\u2019s more like Bernie Sanders on policy,\u201d Graham said at the time.<\/p>\n
Kellyanne Conway, a 2016 Trump campaign manager and confidante, said, \u201cIf Democrats had confidence in Kamala\u2019s competence, they could have swapped him out for her a long time ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris allies say that her image as prosecutor should be viewed broadly, and that they expect Harris to forcefully make the case on issues including reproductive rights \u2014 an area where Biden, an Irish Catholic, was more reticent \u2014 and an unchecked Supreme Court stocked with three Trump appointees.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s certainly doing that regarding reproductive rights,\u201d said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii). \u201cShe can also make the case for what I would describe as this out-of-control Supreme Court and how dangerous it would be for Trump to get any more nominees onto that court.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the wake of the 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, it was Harris far more than Biden who energetically traveled the country, pressing the case for a woman\u2019s right to make decisions about her own body.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe will give a much more full-throated attack on abortion rights being under assault in this country, and she will also really articulate, in a way that\u2019s really authentic, why this is so important,\u201d said Nancy Zdunkewicz, founder of Z to A Research, a Democratic polling firm. \u201cKamala is a really great communicator on this, and it is our most powerful attack.\u201d<\/p>\n
Abigail Disney, a filmmaker, Disney heir and longtime Democratic donor, announced this month that she was withholding donations to Democrats until Biden bowed out of the race and suggested Harris would be a capable alternative. In response to email questions from The Washington Post after her statement about freezing her donations, Disney hailed Harris as someone who \u201chas been grotesquely underestimated by a Democratic Party establishment that has historically been less supportive of the women of color in their ranks even in spite of the loyalty with which women of color have supported them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of Harris\u2019s most powerful moments came during her time serving as California\u2019s junior senator. From her perch on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she earned plaudits as a tough questioner, with pointed interrogations of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh and Attorney General William P. Barr going viral.<\/p>\n
At the time, Trump described Harris\u2019s questioning of Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing as \u201cnasty,\u201d saying she did \u201ca horrible thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI got such a big kick out of watching Bill Barr squirm,\u201d said Hirono, who served on the Judiciary Committee with Harris. \u201cShe\u2019s very persistent. You can see the prosecutor in her. She\u2019s very smart, she\u2019s funny, she\u2019s caring, she\u2019s witty.\u201d<\/p>\n
More recently, several Democrats publicly and privately pointed to Harris\u2019s comments this month at the Essence Festival of Culture, one of the largest annual gatherings of Black women. Speaking about the Supreme Court\u2019s decision that Trump has absolute immunity for \u201ccore\u201d official acts by a president, Harris simplified the complicated topic \u2014 displaying what allies says is a signature skill \u2014 and laid out why she says a second Trump term, with him largely immune from prosecution, would be especially dangerous.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States Supreme Court essentially told this individual who has been convicted of 34 felonies that he will be immune from essentially the activity he has told us he is prepared to engage in if he gets back into the White House,\u201d she said, warning that Trump has boasted of his plans to \u201cweaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies\u201d and \u201ctalked about being proud of taking from the women of America a most fundamental right to make decisions about your own body.\u201d<\/p>\n
This ability to communicate in plain English will be key for a Harris candidacy, said Etienne, who added that the vice president will be at her most potent if she is not just attacking Trump, but simultaneously offering a unified vision for the nation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the fine line you\u2019ve got to walk \u2014 you can lean in and pull out a lot of adjectives to describe him, but is that really going to grow your base of support?\u201d Etienne asked. \u201cPeople want to be inspired, and adjectives about Trump aren\u2019t inspiring. But asking me who I want to be in the next 20 years and asking me what type of country I want to leave for my daughter can actually inspire me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Kamala D. Harris leaned into her background as a former prosecutor to attack Donald Trump in her first presidential bid in 2020 \u2014 a message that attracted little support in the Democratic primary as Harris, short on money, ended her campaign before the first votes were cast. Now, with the Democratic Party rapidly coalescing behind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6461,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}