A look at what we THINK we’ll get with a Harris White House…..
(We have a Good Idea of what a 2nd Trump Chaos would be)
The odd thing about the summer refrain from many in the media that Kamala Harris’s agenda wasn’t detailed enough is that Harris is about as predictable a president as possible: She would be a mainstream Democrat.
No president is perfectly predictable, of course; in particular, unknown events will generate less-predictable responses. There’s also the obvious but underappreciated fact that presidential success or failure may hinge on the political context more than on the president’s decisions, in which “political context” may be any number of things but certainly includes the partisan breakdown of Congress. Moreover, there’s always the open question of the connection between policy intent and eventual outcomes that voters care about, such as economic strength and war or peace.
With all caveats aside, however: Yeah, if she wins, she’ll be an unusually predictable president.
To begin with, Democratic presidents these days are partisan presidents who generally try to carry out the party’s agenda. That was true for Bill Clinton, for Barack Obama, and for Joe Biden, and it’s likely true for Harris as well. It was generally true of Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush as well, and even Donald Trump, the least attached to his party since (at least) Dwight Eisenhower, wound up supporting mainstream Republican policies more often than not.
So in terms of policies, she’ll surely do what the last three Democrats have done and position herself in the mainstream of the party. That does leave some wiggle room on both specific preferences and in priorities – and the president’s choices on both can matter quite a bit. But it’s difficult for a president to move the party much, and there’s not much evidence that Harris considers that a challenge she wants to take on any more than she has to.
One of the reasons presidents stick with the party’s preferences is because of personnel, and Harris seems even more apt to be party-oriented than Biden and Bill Clinton. Governors tend to show up at the White House with their own people, and Biden’s long tenure in the Senate and then as vice-president gave him plenty of time to develop deep personal ties to more than one generation of staffers.1 Harris doesn’t really have those things.
It’s also very much in her favor that Democrats have held the White House twelve of the last sixteen years. That means there’s a deep bench of experienced party governing professionals to draw from in staffing her White House and executive branch departments and agencies. Bill Clinton didn’t have that, and it cost him.2 What’s more, Joe Biden’s astonishing campaign to bring diversity to government means that Harris has a full pipeline for that purpose, something that Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden had to work at…..
image…Deadline…
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.