Who the hell is Kamala Harris?

I don’t write as a conservative, although politically speaking that’s what I am. Nor do I write as someone who might rejoin the Republican Party once Donald Trump no longer controls it, although he might.

I am writing as nothing more than a simple journalist asking a simple question: Who the hell is Kamala Harris?

We know that he speaks in platitudes and that it is difficult to follow his lead when he is asked an inappropriate question. We know that he changes his mind on issues when it suits him politically.

But even now that she is the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, we still don’t know who she is or what she really believes.

Indeed, one could argue, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board recently did, that Harris “is the least-known candidate in modern history.”

She talks a lot about “freedom,” “joy,” and “a new way forward,” hoping that such nonsense, along with a complicit media, can carry her on gossamer wings to the Oval Office.

So the upcoming presidential debate is arguably the most important event of this political season, one that could finally help us understand who this person is who went, in the blink of an eye, from being widely viewed as a political liability to becoming her party’s nominee for president, without winning a single vote in any primary.

We may not know who the hell Kamala Harris is, but we do know that she’s tied with or even ahead of Donald Trump in more than a few head-to-head polls, and that she’s winning in some key states. For a relative unknown, that’s not too shabby.

Then again, maybe she’s doing so well precisely because she’s so unknown. Perhaps the more we learn about Harris, the less we’ll like her.

As for the upcoming debate, conventional wisdom tells us that if Trump sticks to the issues, he can win and increase his chances of returning to the White House. But if Harris pushes his buttons and resorts to name-calling, he’s likely to lose undecided moderate voters, lose the debate and then the election.

The question for Harris is whether she can do more than speak in generalities — whether she can answer serious questions without resorting to the wordy answers she is known for, and whether she can remain unflappable and give the impression that she actually knows what she is talking about.

But, as Rich Lowry wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, Trump “isn’t going to beat[Harris]by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border… It all has to be connected to the deeper argument that[Harris]is weak and a fraud and doesn’t really care about the country or the middle class,” that she “has discarded countless positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will pivot on almost anything when it suits her politically. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to stick to that once she’s in office.”

Whether Trump has the discipline to pull it off is an open question.

Labor Day is over and the campaign season begins in earnest. And most journalists have yet to hold Harris accountable for her numerous shifts in position.

Of course, it’s not entirely their fault, since she’s running a version of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, when his team virtually kept him locked in the basement of his Delaware home, safe from curious reporters who might ask him questions he couldn’t coherently answer.

Yes, he’s been on the campaign trail nearly every day, but reading words from a teleprompter isn’t the same as answering unprepared questions at a news conference — something he hasn’t done yet, and may not do until Election Day.

In her only interview with CNN’s Dana Bash (who, for some reason, didn’t ask many tough follow-up questions), we heard from a Harris who had transitioned from the left-wing progressive she was when she ran for president in 2019 to a newly minted moderate Democrat. But we don’t learn much more than the mantra with which she tried to defuse these questions: “my values ​​haven’t changed,” a line she uttered repeatedly and that sounded rehearsed because it obviously was.

Was Harris sending a subtle signal to the left wing of her party? Was she telling them that, despite her convenient moves to the center, they could still count on her to do their bidding if she won? Is that what she meant by “my values ​​haven’t changed”?

Perhaps the upcoming debate will shed light on the question I posed at the beginning: Who the hell is Kamala Harris?

Four years ago, Biden stayed holed up in his basement long enough to win. If his vice president can stay away from the press and somehow get away with word salad and debate platitudes, lightning could strike again.

Harris hopes voters will remember why they rejected Trump last time. She hopes the remaining undecided voters will put personality over politics this time. And so what she’s essentially telling voters (though not in so many words) is: “Vote for me, I’m not Donald Trump.”

Okay, but we still have one important question left: who the hell is she?

Bernard Goldberg He is an Emmy and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award-winning writer and journalist. Follow him and visit their Substack Page.

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