She’s on the top of everyone’s list to get tapped as Joe Biden’s VP choice….
BUT?
Like Amy Klobuchar and Vall Demings?
She has a law enforcement background….
And so far?
The other two have dropped because of it….
Can Harris survive her past to be the pick?
Or should she take the Attorney general spot which is surely her’s if she wants it….
She is now dealing with the Senate’s police reform effort and it puts her in a politically tough place….
Harris also has to tread carefully as a former prosecutor who had to defend her record earlier this year during the Democratic presidential primary.
Lara Bazelon, a law professor and the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent, opined in The New York Times in January of last year that Harris “was not a ‘progressive prosecutor.’”
Bazelon criticized Harris ahead of the primary for fighting “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions” that the professor said “had been secured through official misconduct.”
She reiterated some of her criticisms of Harris’s record from 2004 to 2015 in an article published in The Appeal in December after Harris ended her presidential campaign
But Bazelon told Politico this month that Harris in recent years has positioned herself “on the right side” of law enforcement issues.
“I don’t think there’s the interest or the oxygen to re-litigate it,” she said of Harris’s work as a prosecutor. “She’s positioned herself in the last couple of years as someone who really is on the right side of these issues and that carries weight.”
She called Harris’s law enforcement record a “net neutral.”
Any bill Harris supports must counter the negative narrative that emerged during the primary and not give critics more ammunition, said Democratic strategist Steve Jarding.
Jarding says Harris needs to “be bold.”
“This is a chance for her to show that she can take the lead and she can be an asset on the ticket,” he said.
“When you’re attorney general and effectively a prosecutor, there’s a chance in this climate that could hurt you. We saw it with [Sen.] Amy Klobuchar,” he said.
Jarding said if he were Harris, “I would be less concerned about getting it passed,” warning that if Harris agrees to water down Democratic reforms to get a bill through the Senate, “then I think she would look worse.”
“It would play into the critics who said she was too harsh as attorney general when it came to people of color,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made clear last week that he has little interest in moving much more in the direction of Booker and Harris’s police reform bill.
“They want to basically … federalize all of these issues,” he said, vowing the Senate-House Democratic proposal “is going nowhere in the Senate.”
The other thing Harris has to be wary of is the likelihood that any legislation passed by Congress, even if it falls short of what advocates of police reform on the left are calling for, would be seized by President Trump as a major accomplishment and touted during his race against Biden….
image..bloomberg.com
It’s interesting that Lara Bazelon has changed her mind on Harris recently saying she has been bolder in her positions. Harris recently said that “Bill Barr will go down in history as having aided and abetted the most corrupt president this country has ever seen”. She is for sure the front runner now unless something changes.
Klobuchar went to the Floyd funeral and memorial service…
But she was forced to drop out?
Harris ok because of something she just said?
The FACT remains Klobuchar , Harris and Demings worked IN Law Enforcement…
It doesn’t make them bad people…
But it sure isn’t gonna look right to some people that some get a pass and some don’t with people going on i the streets about cops and prosecutor’s….
Klobuchar’s record came up because of George Floyd. Harris has been able to distance herself from her mixed record and has taken forceful positions on holding police accountable. She has come into her own with the Congressional response to the coronavirus crisis and the Black Lives Matter protests. Both Klobuchar and Harris are “ready to be president on day one” as Biden has said he wants in a VP candidate. I just think the timing favors Harris at this point.
And of course Harris’s skin color works to her advantage….
We’ll see…
She gets the VP or AG spot I’m sure….
I think James Clyburn has a role in picking Biden’s VP…he delivered a huge win in SC…which ultimately catapult Joe to the easy win…one of the few people that actually can tell Biden who he wants as the VP out of the group of women that are being vetted…
Harris has always been in the running as she ran for President and she had a strong pole number at one point, that fizzled because of nothing she really did, it was just too many people in the race at the time…She won’t be the progressives first choice, she won’t be the conservative democrats first choice, that’s her problem…she isn’t too much of any side…but that also may be a strength as she isn’t seen as to radical or too conservative…
I disagree about the ‘nothing she really did’ part…
She danced with a Sanders/Warren medicare-for-All which went over like a lead ballon…
She went AFTEr Biden hard which went over like a lead ballon…
She was the media favour of week when she declared for a while then lost her mojo….
She has tried to be a progressive after being a ‘law and order’ type as DA and AG….
She WILL either be the VP or AG I’d bet on….
As I just pointed out the RE…
Her skin color IS her advantage
My feeling is Susan Rice would be a better pick FOR Joe Biden to work with….