Picture: Erin Schaff/AFP/Getty Pictures
One of many main knocks on Kamala Harris from the far left throughout her failed run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination was that she was a “cop.” The accusation was, in essence, that the previous San Francisco district legal professional and California legal professional normal was not a “progressive prosecutor,” or not less than not progressive sufficient. She locked up too many individuals, for too lengthy, with out embracing the favored criminal-justice-reform proposals of that exact second.
On the time, the New York Occasions ran an op-ed by a legislation professor entitled “Kamala Harris Was Not a Progressive Prosecutor,” which accused her of touchdown “typically on the fallacious facet of historical past.” The accompanying {photograph} confirmed an unflattering picture of Harris, mouth pursed and wagging her finger. An on-line activist accused Harris of “rampant anti-Blackness” and generated tens of hundreds of likes. USA At the moment revealed a piece titled, “Public defender: I labored with Kamala Harris. She was probably the most progressive DA in California.” On the time, the piece was meant as a protection of Harris. At the moment, the identical headline might gas an opposition assault advert.
Certainly, the criticism that Harris was not sufficiently progressive as a prosecutor sounds anachronistic now — weird, even — however on the time, Harris was on her heels. She struggled to parry the “Kamala is a cop” narrative and, at occasions, even downplayed her personal law-enforcement credentials.
However now Harris has taken a strikingly completely different, and much simpler, place on her prosecutorial previous. It has turn into a cornerstone of her marketing campaign as she shifts to the middle, desirous to dispel any suggestion that she was some bleeding-heart liberal, San Francisco flower-child DA who wept for her downtrodden defendants. In one in all her first speeches after changing into the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in July, she jumped proper in: “I took on perpetrators of every kind — predators who abused girls, fraudsters who ripped off customers, cheaters who broke the principles for their very own achieve. So hear me once I say, I do know Donald Trump’s kind.”
In fact, it doesn’t damage her rhetorical trigger that the man she’s operating towards occurs to be a convicted felon — for the second, not less than. The Manhattan hush-money case stands on doubtful authorized footing and can quickly face appellate scrutiny. However for now it’s on the books, and it’ll keep there by means of the election. (The opposite felony circumstances towards Trump are sputtering, and nothing’s going to be resolved anytime quickly, definitely not earlier than November.) Nonetheless, what a present: The DA will get to run towards the defendant.
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Harris’s turnabout appears to be equal elements technique and serendipity. Clearly, she has chosen to lean in and rejoice her prosecutorial background fairly than apologize for it. However the occasions even have modified so drastically, so shortly, that the megawoke days of 2019 and 2020 really feel like one other historic epoch. Not way back, politicians overtly argued in favor of defunding the police, Lego halted advertising of police units, and tv networks canceled extremely rated reveals that adopted cops on the beat. Now, candidates pressure to keep away from any notion that they may not absolutely help legislation enforcement.
The Trump marketing campaign, for its half, has largely whiffed on this difficulty. It’s solid about for a 2024 model of Willie Horton to throw at Harris. However to this point the hassle hasn’t caught in any significant method, partly as a result of Trump’s messaging has been sporadic and scattershot. Among the Trump marketing campaign’s focus (fleeting because it has been) has landed on a person named Edwin Ramos — a multiple-murderer who was prosecuted by Harris’s workplace, convicted, and sentenced to life in jail in 2014. The rap is that Harris wouldn’t search the loss of life penalty within the Ramos case, or in one other involving the homicide of a San Francisco police officer. That criticism simply hasn’t landed forcefully sufficient with the citizens. The truth that Harris’s workplace put each defendants behind bars, for all times, appears to have blunted the adverse influence.
Whereas Trump’s staff flounders on her prosecutorial previous, Harris is boasting on the marketing campaign path concerning the numerous hardened criminals she put away, as any former prosecutor would do. (Youngsters, belief me, if you wish to go into electoral politics sometime, begin off on the prosecutor’s workplace.) She reminds voters that she stood up for crime victims. In the course of the presidential debate, she stated that she would by no means ask victims about their political get together — an odd level, provided that no prosecutor would ever achieve this — however that she at all times would ask them “How are you?” She even has made a degree not too long ago to tout her gun possession and to tie it to her prosecutorial previous: “I’ve a Glock. And I’ve had it for fairly a while. And look, Invoice, my background is in legislation enforcement. So there you go,” she proudly declared throughout her latest 60 Minutes interview. And in her interview with Fox Information this week, Harris successfully brandished her prosecutorial credentials to parry questions that implied she was gentle on border crime, reminding Bret Baier that she had prosecuted transnational cartels.
I think the Trump marketing campaign will strive once more to color her as a permissive, soft-on-crime DA — however the cement has already largely dried on the problem. These “Kamala the Cop” memes definitely damage Harris the final time she ran. However now she wears the label like a badge.
This text may also seem within the free CAFE Transient e-newsletter. You will discover extra evaluation of legislation and politics from Elie Honig, Preet Bharara, Joyce Vance, and different CAFE contributors at cafe.com.
