In the immediate aftermath of Kamala Harris dropping out of the 2020 presidential race, fellow contender Julian Castro claimed that the media “held her to a different standard.” He’s right. The media gave the California senator a deck stacked firmly in her favor, and she spent it all on Twitter points that cost her a fatal polling plummet.
The media didn’t just rig the game for Harris this year. It’s been going on for nearly a decade.
As early as 2004, the Los Angeles Times fawned over the “striking” then-district attorney of San Francisco, a “rising political star” with a “radiant smile.” She was not yet a year on the job.
Six years later, as she ran for state attorney general, The Daily Beast spent plenty of words waxing poetic over her elegant attire and “exotic” ethnicity but very few on her actual record as DA. Once she won the race, Ben Smith, then at Politico, equated Harris with another “eloquent, telegenic big-city lawyer with strong liberal credentials who catapulted from relative obscurity to the national stage”: Barack Obama.
Just two years into an attorney general tenure characterized by the aggressive incarceration of nonviolent offenders, Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post mused that Harris would be a “powerful” presidential candidate, not due to her wafer-thin record but because she “could well be the only woman and the only African American candidate in the field.”
When she carried a background of criminalizing truancy and vilifying sex workers to a Senate seat, the press debated whether she’d be the next president or vice president. In the chamber, she didn’t have any sort of legislative achievements to speak of, but she did manage to launch incoherent diatribes against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The media fawned over her stunt, and buzz for her 2020 run bloomed.
Harris launched her campaign to media fanfare, with coastal institutions from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times deeming her a front-runner, despite polling at just 6% nationally. She had no answers for her corruption as California’s top cop, so instead, she (literally) dangled shiny jackets in front of the press, and they jumped.
Ultimate #campaignfashionreport as @kamalaharris tries on an amazing technicolor dream coat in a Columbia boutique spotted by @MaeveReston. And yes, she bought it pic.twitter.com/u7yU43p9XD
— Melanie Mason (@melmason) February 16, 2019
We kind of forced @kamalaharris to try on this awesome oversized rainbow sequin jacket … She snapped it up. @alivitali perfectly named it as “the Mardi Gras Jacket” #2020 #SouthCarolina #CampaignFashionReport pic.twitter.com/2G0NFRkKL6
— Maeve Reston (@MaeveReston) February 16, 2019
When Harris decided to attack Joe Biden (vice president to the first black occupant of the White House) as racist for not backing federally forced busing integration, the media ran with the attack on Biden for an entire news cycle. Too bad, because, as it turned out, Harris actually held the same exact position.
Harris managed to reverse herself on every issue from “Medicare for all” to marijuana legalization with virtually no media scrutiny. It took Tulsi Gabbard eviscerating her prosecutorial record with the precision of a surgeon for the media to finally discern that a decade of Harris’s past was built on the opposite of progressivism.
For once, Democrats need to stop absolving bad candidates of their responsibility for their campaign’s failure. Obama managed to win the lily-white early states of the 2008 primary and then the presidency, and Warren has had one of the steepest rises in this primary while Harris has fallen.
The media didn’t punish Harris. They helped her, and she threw her advantage away anyway. That’s her fault, and her’s alone.
