Culture

Democratic Debate 2019: Kamala Harris Won the Night


“I would like to speak on the issue of race,” Kamala Harris said Thursday night, an hour into the Democratic-primary debate. She turned to Joe Biden, who, less than two weeks ago, had spoken warmly about his work across ideological lines with two of the last segregationists in the Senate. “I do not believe you are a racist,” she began. But. “It was actually very hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two U.S. senators who built their reputations and careers on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing.” Harris looked at Biden; Biden looked straight ahead. She described a little girl who had been part of the second class bused to integrate public schools in Berkeley, California. “That little girl was me.”

The rules gave Biden the chance to respond. “A mischaracterization of my position across the board,” Biden said. “I didn’t oppose busing in America.” But then he started to sound lawyerly. He had opposed only the intervention of the federal Department of Education in busing. In fact, Biden opposed busing, then and now; it was a federal policy, and without federal intervention, Berkeley and countless other places across the country would not have integrated their schools. Harris noted that she was part of her pioneering class “almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.” “Because your city council opposed it,” Biden replied. That remark made Harris’s point for her: a city council should not have veto power over civil rights. It was the first turning point of the Democratic Presidential election.

The essential arguments of Thursday night’s Presidential-primary debate were about the past. The explicit argument between Biden and Harris was over the racial politics of the nineteen-seventies; the implicit one was about which of them could claim the legacy of Barack Obama. Biden invoked his former boss early and often. “Build on what we did,” Biden said, and later he praised Obama for having done a “heckuva job.” But, while Biden may have some claim on the underlying reasonableness of the Obama years, he has little relation to Obama’s political character—on his sense of justice, his introspection, and his transformative promise. Just before the debate began, the cameras had captured nine candidates scribbling notes. Biden was just calmly looking around.

In randomly assigning Presidential candidates to each night’s debate, the Democratic Party did not divide its talents evenly. Thursday night got almost all of the front-runners as well as the personalities: the slightly spacy Marianne Williamson, the interrupting Kirsten Gillibrand. Things got a little shouty, twenty minutes in, when Eric Swalwell, a young congressman from California, challenged Biden to pass the generational torch. The candidates shouted over each other—“As part of Joe’s generation, let me respond,” Sanders said—until Harris, not for the last time, seized the stage. “Hey guys, you know what? America does not want to witness a food fight,” she said.

Harris, long presumed to be a front-runner, was not at her best during the first months of the Presidential campaign, when the candidates began to introduce policy proposals. Hers had a slightly speculative feel: early on, she came out in favor of abolishing private health insurance, though she did little to explain why. But now we are beginning the next phase, perhaps a full year of regular debates, and Harris, a former prosecutor, and the most vigorous interrogator on the Judiciary Committee, stands out. Her language, more than any of the others’, is direct; she has an oppositional energy. What would Harris do on her first day in office? “Release children from cages,” she said. In recent weeks, it was possible to imagine that a three-way contest was emerging, between Biden, Warren, and Sanders. Reread Harris’s statements about race on Thursday night and some of them seem aimed at all three of them. “I will tell you,” Harris said, “that on this subject it cannot be an intellectual debate.”



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