What Kamala Harris Believes

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: Democratic voters have been drawn to Kamala Harris as a messenger, even though her message remains a work-in-progress. Ahead of her debate performance tonight, what Harris herself says she stands for. Plus, last night’s debate.

It’s Wednesday, July 31.

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We just were serenaded with descriptions of snack attacks, sound-centric scenes, and pinot noir. We’ve reached Alex Burns in Detroit, where he’s covering the Democratic debates. Alex, the last time we spoke, it was right after the first Democratic debate, and all the attention had been on this exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden about busing. But then this other interesting thing happened.

Right, there was this more muddled moment for Kamala Harris.

She raised her hand on the debate stage, and then after the debate, clarified that she thought the question was referring to whether she would give up her own personal private health insurance and enroll in a single-payer plan, and that in fact, she did not favor getting rid of private health insurance entirely.

And it feels like this is kind of emblematic of Kamala Harris and her entire candidacy.

That’s right, that she’s somebody who is deeply inspiring to liberals, a lot of people who are on the more progressive end of the Democratic Party. But she has consistently stopped short of fully embracing a lot of the big ideological litmus test issues that tend to define those candidates, that folks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been much clearer about where they fall on the left-right spectrum. And on the other side of the spectrum, folks like Joe Biden have been just as clear. Kamala Harris, somewhere in between.

And Alex, why does that matter?

In a presidential election, we tend to try to sort candidates both in terms of how liberal or conservative they are, but also just in terms of what their overarching vision for the country is. What would the country look like after four or eight years of this person’s presidency if they could do anything they wanted or if they could do a lot of the things they wanted? Now, Kamala Harris has been taking her time to sort of lay out exactly what that would look like. And at this point in the campaign, where she has clearly caught on as a very serious contender for the nomination, a lot of Democratic voters I talked to still feel like they don’t totally have their arms around what the vision is supposed to be.

So what have you been doing in the time since the first debate on that front of trying to understand what she stands for?

Well, we really set out after that first debate to try to get a hold of what that vision was, to try to clarify. To that end, I spent a lot of time talking to people who have worked with her, reading her most recent book, reading columns she wrote over the years, both in San Francisco and nationally, looking at commencement speeches she gave to see sort of what she talks about when she talks about inspirational values. There were some consistent themes that came out of all of that. A number of people — five different people I spoke to about her who have worked quite closely with her said in different ways that she was just not an ideological person. In almost identical language, she’s not ideological. She’s not an ideologue. One man who was one of her most senior advisers as attorney general of California said that he thinks ideology is just not relevant to the way she makes decisions. So all those conversations, all of that reporting was really helpful in getting a broad picture of how she approaches issues, some sense of what goes on in her head as she executes the powers of government. But of course, you can’t really get inside someone’s head without talking to them. And even then, it can be kind of a stretch. So I went to L.A. to actually sit down with her about a week and a half ago. She was out there doing a whole bunch of fundraising, was doing some debate prep. And so on a Sunday afternoon, I trekked out to Century City, to a pretty desolate, corporate part of town where I think she had been doing debate prep. And we sat down at a very, very long conference table in a very, very nice office suite and sort of went right at it.

So right off the bat, she basically endorses that description of her and her approach to policy, that she’s not ideological.

That she thinks about policy in terms of a series of practical tests, but not necessarily trying to fit it into a particular ideological umbrella or even necessarily some big sweeping integrated vision.

You know, for me, that was sort of an interesting statement that she just rejected the basic terms of a debate that a lot of the other candidates and certainly a lot of political analysts want to use to understand campaigns. What it didn’t say to me was if somebody is just a pragmatist, if somebody is just interested in making concrete policy change, well, how do they choose what kinds of policies to pursue and what counts to them as important change? And she talked a lot about less an ideology and more an orientation, that her grounding in thinking about government and in thinking about the role of policy comes from her background as a lawyer, as a prosecutor, as an executive. And when she thinks about policy, asking a series of pretty concrete, ground-level questions to assess whether something is worth doing, not trying to slot it into a bigger picture.

She listed three questions. The first is does it help a substantial number of people?

The second question was whether it affects children, how it affects children. And the third question is how long will it take?

And that one to me was sort of the most revealing, that there are a lot of candidates in this race who are promising really, really big changes because they feel they would have profound consequences on everyday people’s lives. The notion that a fundamental test for Kamala Harris is can this be done quickly, to me, was sort of eye opening.

Alex, when you pushed her on this, did she give you any examples from her own time in government?

Well, she talked about her decision to, when she was attorney general, walk away from the initial settlement with the big banks around the mortgage crisis.

There was a settlement offer of several billion dollars that she ultimately decided was not adequate. And she, along with several other state attorneys general, walked away from the deal until the banks offered them something substantially greater than that.

The question was do you help more people later or fewer people sooner, right? Give less help faster or more help after more time has passed. And she chose the latter option in this case, which, in some ways, is the exception that proves the rule, right? But the notion that the pressure to do something quickly was weighing on her, to me, was a pretty vivid description of how she thinks about making big decisions.

She talked about this real internal tension around whether to push it even further with the banks, which, of course, is ultimately what she did.

It also, to me, explains why, in some ways, she has seemed resistant to or skeptical of some of the really, really monumental policy commitments that other candidates have made, like Medicare for all, because it’s certainly a transformational change. It’s a change that, on a practical level, may or may not be able to happen within the term of one president.

We’ll be right back.

Harris seems to be describing a vision of governing within a system that has real limitations and constraints. But a lot of her rivals in this race and the people that she’s going to be standing next to on stage Wednesday night stand for sweeping change that would kind of swap out a burdened system and replace it with something where they can do more.

Yeah, I asked her about exactly that.

So her argument is if you fix the roads and fewer people have to replace their tires because of these potholes, that ought to be seen as a fundamental change. It’s not getting rid of the electoral college. It’s not reforming the Supreme Court. It’s not creating a Canadian-style health care system, right? It’s infrastructure. Is that fundamental change? That’s a question that other people, I guess, can assess what counts to them. But to me, it’s super revealing that she would say, no, I am in favor of fundamental change. And the example of that is this extremely non-controversial, broadly supported idea of spending more money on roads. It’s not really a dividing line between her and other candidates. What is a dividing line between her and other candidates is that she considers that fundamental change.

I guess one of my big takeaways here is that it’s not just that she resists positioning herself on a left-right spectrum. It’s that she doesn’t necessarily have a thematic vision of all the kinds of change she wants to make that you can just fit all her policies into. What there is is a unifying attitude towards what counts as important policy and how government power ought to be used.

So in other words, she has a clear definition of why something is worth pursuing, why it’s important. But the result can look a little bit like a grab bag — different policies that don’t necessarily all line up.

I think that’s a great way of describing it, that it’s different policies that pass her practical tests, but don’t necessarily have a whole lot to do with each other.

Alex, at the end of this conversation, did you feel satisfied? Did you feel like you had a deeper understanding of this question that you went into the room with about Kamala Harris?

I do feel like after having that conversation, it’s clear to me that her longtime colleagues, her friends, her associates and supporters really had it right, that she’s not an ideological candidate, that there’s not a hidden ideology that she’s declining to articulate or struggling to articulate, that she truly is just not somebody who approaches policy and politics that way. What she did do is explain in, I think, illuminating detail why she makes the decisions she does.

Alex, let’s talk about whether this approach from Kamala Harris can satisfy voters. Does it really matter that Kamala Harris does not want to be defined by ideology? I’m asking that broadly, in terms of what we know about politics in general and in the context of this particular primary and the calculations that the whole party is making this year.

I don’t think it matters that she won’t put an exact ideological label on herself. When I go to campaign events, I don’t hear a lot of voters who say, you know, I consider myself an economic populist, and therefore I’m voting for Elizabeth Warren. I do think it matters that she has resisted this idea of putting her policy under a comprehensive vision, right? An umbrella that people can use to gauge her instincts, even on issues that she’s not speaking to directly. I think there are a lot of people who, if you were to take an Elizabeth Warren voter or a Joe Biden voter, and ask them, what position do you think they would take on issue X? They have a framework for understanding how those candidates approach issues generally and what matters to them and might have at least some gut sense of how Elizabeth Warren would address an issue that she’s never been directly asked about before. I do think it matters that people may not have that same sense for Kamala Harris.

Mm-hmm. Right. I mean, the value of an ideology that people can easily grasp is that it’s a road map. It helps you understand how someone’s likely to respond to a particular set of circumstances, a crisis, any kind of situation. It’s very clarifying. And without it, things feel a little more rudderless.

Right, and you’re asking people to put a lot of trust in your judgment to deal with things on a case by case basis. And if you can win their trust, then that gives you a lot of flexibility to choose your fights and how you’re going approach policy and sort of what methods you’re going to use. If you don’t win their trust, then people can end up feeling like they don’t quite know what your core is. And I think that’s the big challenge for her right now in this race. So the best-case scenario for Kamala Harris is that she gets through this primary by really firing up a critical mass of the Democratic coalition with the kinds of targeted policies that we’ve been talking about and with her identity and political narrative. I think the evidence so far is that Democrats are willing to give Kamala Harris somewhat more room to figure out what she wants her vision to be than some of the other candidates in this race. And then in the general election, she’s not necessarily tied to all of the same economic populist, liberal ideas that some of the other candidates in this race would be.

Alex, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

In Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, the leading liberal candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, fought back against claims by more moderate opponents that their plans are impractical and that their chances of beating President Trump are slim.

During the debate, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, Montana governor Steve Bullock, and former Maryland congressman John Delaney warned of, quote, “wish-list economics, massive government expansions and radical plans” from Warren and Sanders, which they said risked turning off mainstream voters.

Both Warren and Sanders responded with defiance, rejecting the moderate candidates as offering policies that failed to meet the moment and drawing a measure of sympathy from Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who said that Republicans would label any Democratic nominee as radical.

Tonight, a second group of Democratic candidates will debate, including Senator Kamala Harris and former vice president Joe Biden.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.