Kamala Harris Has Nothing To Offer Anyone-- Which Is Why Her Campaign Is Nearly Dead

Having recently shuttered her offices in New Hampshire, Kamala Harris was in Iowa yesterday, desperately trying to keep her faltering campaign afloat... by handing out cookies at a Des Moines senior center. It isn't working. Her RealClearPolitics Iowa polling average is 3.8%. The most recent YouGov poll for CBS News showed her in 6th place. If she wants to save her political career, she should gracefully bow out now and endorse one of the two progressives in the race. I can't see that happening.

Nationally, she's doing about the same-- 3.8% polling average, in a weak and hopeless 5th place. In California she's in 4th place, far behind front-runners Bernie, Elizabeth and Status Quo Joe, struggling with Mayo Pete for first place among the single digit candidates. In fact, she isn't doing well anywhere. In first primary-in-the-nation New Hampshire, she's not even a factor, now having fallen behind Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard. This week's new Emerson poll for WHDH:

To me she's always been a political opportunist from my own state who stands for nothing at all except her own careerism. I never voted for her for anything-- nor would I. She's blowin' in the wind and will never get out from under having set criminal bankster Steven Mnuchin free in return for a campaign contribution. She's not a conservative; she's not a liberal. She's a Kamala-ista, who will say or do whatever it takes to promote herself-- the ultimate garbage political hack.

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Chelsea Janes took a look under the hood and kicked the tires in an aptly titled piece, Harris faces uphill climb amid questions about who she is. She caught up with her in South Carolina where early conventional wisdom was that as a black woman-- kind of black-- she would have a leg up among a Democratic electorate that is mostly black. That hasn't panned out. Back to RealClearPolitics: her polling average for the state is 6.3%-- behind Status Quo Joe, Elizabeth, Bernie and even the young racist Mayo Pete. The brand new Quinnipiac poll of South Carolina voters is worse than that-- 3% and in 7th place! Janes diagnoses her nearly dead campaign as having "displayed a desire to be everything to everyone that has instead left voters with questions about who she is, what she believes and what her priorities and convictions would be as president. As a result, her candidacy is now teetering, weighed down by indecision within her campaign, her limits as a candidate and dwindling funds that have forced her to retreat in some places at a moment she expected to be surging. After last week’s debate in Atlanta, where she won high marks, her advisers were simply hoping she did well enough to inspire people to donate enough money so that she could air a new ad. As of Wednesday, they hadn’t."

At the outset, [lame-brained] party leaders viewed her as one of their best chances to beat President Trump-- a rising female star with a mixed-race background who could rebuild the coalition of voters that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency.

That sense was affirmed at her launch rally in January, when she bounded onto the stage in Oakland and lit into Trump, to the delight of a crowd of more than 22,000 people. Trump, himself, praised Harris at the time for having the “best opening so far” and a “better crowd, better enthusiasm” than the other Democratic candidates.

But Harris has struggled to re-create that level of enthusiasm. While she has consistently sought to be the candidate who could appeal to all parts of her party, she has veered from one message to another in an effort to kindle support.

“If she doesn’t turn it around in the next couple months, what I think we may end up saying what doomed her candidacy is there just wasn’t any clear rationale,” said Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster who has watched Harris’s evolution for years. “She didn’t give the voters-- they didn’t give the voters-- a clear sense of ‘why am I doing this.’

“I think in California, I know a lot of people in the Bay Area and in San Francisco . . . were always a little worried about that,” Maslin said. “Was she up or down, here or there, and it sort of played itself out unfortunately. She’s been the biggest, I think, negative surprise of the campaign.”

Harris staffers and advisers acknowledge that they are not in the position they expected to be two months before the Iowa caucuses. Some say privately that they know Harris likely needs other candidates to falter to regain top-tier footing, but they also point hopefully to polling that shows many voters have not settled on a candidate.

...At first, Harris pitched herself as the candidate “speaking truth” and asserted that she alone would talk candidly about the nation’s problems, including racism, sexism and gun violence. But she tiptoed around specific aspects of her record, which undermined the truth-talk, as did equivocations on Medicare-for-all and other policies.

In June, she decided to embrace her record as a prosecutor more directly in a speech in front of the Charleston chapter of the NAACP, where she explained why she became a prosecutor, why she was proud of her work, and why she decided to try to make change from the inside.

“I knew the unilateral power prosecutors had with the stroke of a pen to make a decision about someone else’s life or death, whether someone will be charged or let off,” Harris said then. “I knew that it made a difference to have the people making those decisions also be the ones who went to our church, had children in our schools, coached our Little League teams and knew our neighborhoods.”

After that speech, which ended months of treading carefully around her record, Harris hopped in the car and told her staffers “that felt good,” they said.

But her approach soon switched again, as Harris built a stump speech and an entire bus tour through Iowa around what she called a “3 a.m. agenda”-- issues she said keep Americans up at night. The message was meant to position her between the more sweeping ideological platforms of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the return-to-normalcy agenda of former vice president Joe Biden. But Harris, so direct in prosecutor mode, never seemed as confident delivering that broader message.

As her message shifted, Harris took further criticism for shifting positions on Medicare-for-all, something many of her fellow candidates have since done, too. Initially, Harris said she “wanted to get rid” of private insurance. Then she released her own version of the plan that included a role for private insurance, a switch she said she made after listening to voters.

Her debate performances also fluctuated. In the first debate, she delivered a blow to Biden when she pointed out she was the product of a busing initiative to end desegregation-- a plan Biden opposed. Biden and his campaign later suggested that Harris’s current position on that issue-- support for busing as one of many potential tools to desegregate resistant localities-- was the same as his then. After an initial bump in the polls, Harris sunk again. Harris’s campaign hoped the attack would paint Biden as out of touch with current attitudes toward racial justice, but many older voters said they found Harris’s attacks opportunistic and off-putting.

Biden fought back in a debate a month later, using Harris’s health-care shift to paint Harris as an equivocator.

“This idea is a bunch of malarkey,” Biden said. “And to be very blunt and to be very straightforward, you can’t beat President Trump with double talk on this plan.”

In response to an up-and-down summer, Harris’s campaign retooled her pitch again. She settled into another version that plays on her past: “Justice is on the ballot.” Harris argues that injustice is at the heart of many of the country’s ills and that she is the candidate best equipped to deliver justice. Her campaign thinks it’s a message that suits her-- following the Liberty and Justice Dinner in Des Moines earlier this month, her campaign signed up 136 precinct captains, covering almost 10 percent of state’s precincts in just hours, according to her Iowa staff.

Harris has also been hindered by the internal dynamics of her campaign, which is run by her sister, Maya, along with longtime advisers and their partners in a California-based consulting firm. Multiple people in and around the campaign described competing power centers and said it’s unclear who, exactly, is in charge.

Within the campaign’s Baltimore headquarters, there continues to be unrest about decision-making, according to several people familiar with its inner workings. They say that Juan Rodriguez, one of Harris’s California consultants who took over the reins midway through her 2016 Senate campaign, holds the title of campaign manager but does not always have the final say, particularly on policy positions and messaging. Often, they said, no one knows who has the final word. None could outline the campaign’s decision-making structure.

...The conflicting visions of Maya Harris and her sister’s other advisers complicated their decision on how to deal with the candidate’s record as a prosecutor in San Francisco and as California’s attorney general.

Maya Harris, whose political leanings developed in liberal activist circles, advocated a more apologetic posture to appeal to criminal justice advocates and black activists-- and has tried to pull her sister further left, according to multiple campaign staffers and longtime Harris allies. Other advisers opposed that approach, wondering what Harris could offer to voters if not her criminal justice résumé, and suggested she trumpet it. Initially, they settled somewhere in between, using her record as a prosecutor to explain her experience but not necessarily leaning on it as a staple of her pitch.

...Staffers and surrogates argue Harris hasn’t gotten the same media attention as her white or male colleagues. Harris has begun talking about “the donkey in the room”-- the fact that no woman, let alone a woman of color, has ever won the presidency before.

That's the messaging before candidates drop out and try to salvage their damaged careers. Kamala's California Senate seat is up in 2022. Let's hope a progressive reformer is smart enough to start building a campaign now.