Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that Kamala Harris will be his running mate. Compared with his other rumored picks, Harris was probably the safest choice.
To understand why, it’s important to understand the role a vice presidential candidate must play on the campaign trail. Harris’s primary responsibility will be to fundraise, and as a mainstream Democrat who knows how to appease the Left, this shouldn’t be difficult to do. She’s a well-known figure on the establishment circuit, and her voting record is far more liberal than voters might think, so she’ll be able to work both angles in a way Biden cannot.
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Of course, there are pockets on the Left that dislike Harris almost as much as conservatives do. Her track record as a prosecutor will be a problem for Biden’s campaign, especially now that the country is wrestling with racial tensions and what to do about them. Even so, these factions appear small. Those who dislike Harris are bound to dislike Biden even more, so there was little chance he’d win them over, anyway.
On policy, Harris aligns with Biden pretty well. She avoided endorsing “Medicare for all” during her short presidential bid but remained open to the idea of expanding Obamacare, essentially the position Biden has taken. And like Biden, she supports student loan debt forgiveness and aggressive climate change policies that look a lot like the Green New Deal.
Culturally, though, Harris will be very divisive. She has a history of anti-religious comments that will surely fire up President Trump’s base, and her radical pro-choice views will bring abortion to the forefront of the debate over the next few months. If Biden wanted to avoid the culture war, he chose the worst possible vice president.
But his other choice, former national security adviser Susan Rice, would have been worse. Most voters are old enough to remember the Obama administration’s Benghazi scandal and Rice’s mishandling of it. She repeatedly lied to the public about what happened in Benghazi and then denied any wrongdoing when confronted. She was also involved in the Russian collusion conspiracy, according to recently declassified documents. Talk about handing Trump a gift on a silver platter.
And then there was Sen. Karen Bass, a Democrat from California, whose fascination with Cuba’s communist regime would have confirmed centrists’ worst fears about which direction the Democratic Party plans to take.
Perhaps this says a lot about the state of the Democratic Party, but Harris truly was the less polarizing choice. Even her past antagonism toward Biden works in his favor because he can now say that he is willing and able to work with people who sometimes disagree with him.
There are many reasons to be wary of a Harris vice presidency. But she was the best choice for Biden’s campaign, and he knew it.
