Kamala Harris Is No Great Mystery

There are some things we don’t know yet about what a Kamala Harris administration would look like. On issues from the economy to foreign affairs, gaps remain in the vice president’s policy proposals—and she has, in some cases, seemed intentionally vague. (Perhaps all the better to maintain a coalition so ideologically broad it somehow includes both Dick Cheney and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.) But the idea that this makes her an unknown quantity is bunk: On the most important matters of this election, we know who Kamala Harris is. And just as importantly, we know exactly who her opponent is, too.

Yet, the notion that Harris is some kind of political question mark seems to be taking root among some critics and undecideds. The Wall Street Journal editorial board branded the vice president a “mystery” back in August, accusing her of telling voters “they’ll have to elect her to find out what she really believes”—a charge the paper’s Joseph Sternberg repeated after her debate with Donald Trump this month. More recently, the New York Times’ Bret Stephens—an anti-Trump conservative—used his column to describe the “unease” he feels about voting for Harris because of her apparent opacity, which he suggested has contributed to a “widespread perception of unseriousness.”

“The problem that a lot of people have with Kamala is we don’t know her answer to anything,” Stephens said on Bill Maher’s program Friday, defending his column.

“But you know his answer to everything,” MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle shot back, noting that Harris is “not running for perfect—she’s running against Trump.” “I feel like you’re the dog we’re trying to get in the car to go to the vet,” Maher quipped.

Stephens—who said he is not voting for Trump—isn’t completely wrong on the merits of his argument: Candidates should earn the support they get, and they should articulate a governing agenda. It’s not unreasonable or unfair to hold candidates—even the ones you support—to a set of expectations.

But Harris isn’t exactly a “mystery,” even if her campaign has seemed to focus more on good vibes than on hammering out the details of her agenda: She was a senator for four years and vice president for the last three and a half. And while some of her positions have shifted in that time, they have all been within the normal range of Democratic conventions. That may not specifically answer Stephens’ query, in his column, about what “limits to American support for Ukraine” she might have, for instance. But she has made clear that her approach would be based on longstanding United States support for the institutions Trump has shown indifference and oftentimes hostility toward. “We understand the importance of the greatest military alliance the world has ever known,” Harris said of NATO during her first—and perhaps only—debate with Trump. That doesn’t quite speak to the nuances Stephens is bringing up, of course. But those details can’t be addressed unless the U.S. settles the broader questions about democracy, decency, and truth that this election hinges on.

Trump—who, it should be noted, is often spared the pesky expectation that his plans be coherent, detailed, or consistent—is running on an authoritarian agenda. His platform depends on the slandering and demonization of immigrants and the promise of “retribution” against those he’s identified as the enemies of him and his movement. His “policies,” to the extent he ever actually talks about them, are a jumble of pie-in-the-sky promises, gut instincts, and contradictory positions mostly meant to provide cover for the program he really cares about: the consolidation of power. That makes the question of what “regulations she’d like to get rid of in her initiative to build three million new homes in the next four years,” as Stephens posed, somewhat incidental to the more fundamental question of this election: What kind of country are we going to be?

Harris’s answer to that doesn’t seem like much of a mystery. Neither does Trump’s, despite the bouts of amnesia that apparently wiped some Americans’ memories of his first four years in office and the ambiguity he has tried to foster about what he’d do a second time around. “We know exactly,” as Ruhle put it to Stephens Friday, “what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is for democracy.”