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Then there is another version of Harris: unsteady when addressing litmus-test questions — the hypothetical or intensely ideological queries like whether a single-payer system should void all private insurance, or whether a convicted terrorist should be able to vote from prison. She is intensely resistant, sometimes to the point of visible discomfort, to her own party’s thirst for policies that would redraw the American economy and system of government.
As a result, she has found herself in a potent but unpredictable position: Democratic voters have thrilled to her as a messenger, yet the content of her message remains a work in progress.
Harris, in an interview, projected confidence in her approach to the presidential race and her theory of governing. She described her agenda as a realistic array of promises that would help ordinary people.
“I’m not trying to restructure society,” Harris said. “I’m just trying to take care of the issues that wake people up in the middle of the night.” Harris also acknowledged that she has sometimes struggled to explain her views on broader subjects, suggesting this reflected in part her limited interest in issues she views as overly abstract.
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At times, her shifts in tone and substance have been abrupt. This month, she laid out a clear and creative plan to lower drug prices with presidential executive powers. Then, hours later, she took a new and confusing stance on “Medicare for All”-style health insurance, endorsing the program but opposing taxes typically seen as necessary to fund it.
That set of instincts — her preference for narrow, tactile proposals over grandly ambitious ones, her facility with procedure and unease with ideology — defines her approach to politics, according to Harris and her closest associates. And her ability to reconcile those inclinations with her party’s mood could determine the fate of her campaign.
Part of the difficulty, Harris said, was her impulse to take any given question and start “running through, in my head, all the scenarios about how it would actually work.”
“It can be, very — obviously — challenging for me as a candidate, because it can be misinterpreted, I think, as being evasive, or, ‘Is she sure? Is she wiffly-waffling?’ Or whatever,” Harris said. “But it’s just, I really do think through these things.”
A ‘Quite Literal’ Approach
A review of Harris’s policies in the 2020 race, as well as her public writings and interviews with more than a dozen of her current and former colleagues and allies, generated a portrait of her as a leader with a clear approach to governing. She sees it as an enterprise of writing careful rules and enforcing them with determination, more than engineering transformational social change.
Five associates observed, in near-identical language, that she is “not ideological.”
“She will often turn policy conversations away from broad strokes, to real-world impacts,” said Daniel Suvor, who was Harris’ chief of policy when she was attorney general of California. “She’s quite literal in the way she approaches public policy.”
A quite literal approach has not exactly been the preferred method of most Democratic presidential candidates. While Harris said her description of her policy goals was not intended as “contrast” with other Democrats, it would be hard not to see her dismissal of structural change as a statement of differences with two leading competitors, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have electrified liberals with plans to overhaul much of the economy.
Harris is proposing nothing of the kind. Nor, like former Vice President Joe Biden, is she pledging to revive a culture of compromise in Washington and deliver the unfinished goals of the Obama administration.
What Harris is offering, instead, is a blueprint for commandeering the presidency and the Treasury to give swift relief to constituencies she sees as especially buffeted by the economy and the policies of the Trump administration. Among those are groups vitally important in a Democratic primary, including women, African-Americans and immigrants.
To that end, she has proposed mandating that companies prove they pay women and men equally, or face financial penalties; that the federal government fund state efforts to investigate rape cases; and that the Justice Department be empowered to review and block state-level regulations on abortion.
Absent from her legislative portfolio is anything as innovative as Warren’s proposed wealth tax, or the “baby bonds” program pioneered by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Harris sounded indifferent to the distinction.
“Policy has to be relevant,” Harris said. “That’s my guiding principle: Is it relevant? Not, ‘Is it a beautiful sonnet?’”
Asked if she saw that more ornate approach as characteristic of Warren, the candidate best known for her policy plans, Harris deflected.
“I don’t know, I think she’s got some good ideas,” Harris said, adding: “I don’t say what I’m saying to contrast myself with her.”
But Democratic voters are in an ambitious mood. Many appear to be seeking not salves but solutions: A poll published this month by NBC and The Wall Street Journal found that a majority of Democrats wanted a nominee who proposed bigger policies that might be harder to pass, over smaller-scale, more achievable proposals.
Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia who is an expert on race and the economy, said Harris had assembled an agenda that places her “where the political base is” but might not add up to a comprehensive vision.
“I don’t see a grand vision, policy-wise,” said Baradaran, who has advised several campaigns on policy. “But I think there is a grand vision, to her — she’s tough, she’s a fighter.”
Speed Over Sweep
For the fights she has promised to wage, Harris prizes two weapons above all: presidential decrees and federal dollars. They are the instruments of an impatient politician — a career prosecutor sensitive to how slow the machinery of government can move, and how unforgiving voters can be.
Harris’ economic agenda involves trillions of dollars in new spending — exact estimates vary, but well over $3 trillion and perhaps more than $4 trillion — with much of it aimed at distributing cash to people in economic distress. Most of the spending takes the form of a refundable tax credit for low- and middle-income taxpayers.
But it also includes hundreds of billions of dollars earmarked for specific purposes: raises for public schoolteachers, tax benefits for people who rent their homes and grants for minority homebuyers. On Friday, Harris’ campaign announced a $75 billion initiative to invest in minority-owned businesses and historically black colleges.
Harris touts those benefits energetically on the campaign trail, alternating between soaring moral rhetoric about building “the America we believe in” and detailing her tailored policy pledges. At times, there is a certain dissonance involved, as she diagnoses a deep social and political crisis and vows to remedy it with well-drafted executive orders and robust tax credits.
At a Brooklyn bowling alley this month, Harris drew roars from a youthful crowd by promising daring action on gun control and immigration, and less-ecstatic applause for her signature tax plan.
“Almost half of American families cannot afford a $400 unexpected expense,” Harris lamented, before describing the tax credit that she said would make the “difference between those families being able to get through the end of the month with dignity.”
The profile of the families Harris considers, in shaping her policies, may be as revealing as the policies themselves. Felicia Wong, president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, said she had gathered from speaking with Harris that she is most attuned to the vulnerability of people who remind her of her upbringing, as the daughter of a single mother in a diverse Oakland neighborhood — not necessarily the shopworn political image of a downtrodden man in overalls.
“My guess is that when she thinks about a working-class person, she thinks about a 55-year-old black or Latina teacher,” Wong said. “I think that is literally what comes to her head first, as opposed to a more Midwestern, third-generation factory worker.”
Of nearly a dozen major plans Harris has announced, about a third have also included a kind of a threat: that if Congress did not resolve an issue with sufficient haste, she would take narrower steps with unilateral presidential authority.
Those steps, according to Harris’ campaign, would bestow new protections on undocumented immigrants, impose new limits on firearm sales, enable the manufacture of cheaper pharmaceuticals and require federal contractors to meet pay-equity standards for women. Together, these plans convey a stark skepticism that Congress can be counted upon to pass important laws — skepticism that other Democratic self-styled pragmatists, like Biden, do not share.
The decrees she has drafted are a statement, too, of Harris’ confidence in her own authority as an executor of the law.
That role, Harris said in the interview, “is my comfortable place.”
The Uncomfortable Place
If wielding legal power is Harris’ natural mode, navigating her party’s most lyrical governing aspirations is not.
In her preference for fast-acting benefits, Harris has sidestepped some of the largest debates in Democratic politics around economic inequality, and she has not yet entirely squared her inner pragmatism with her outward embrace of goals like “Medicare for All.”
As populism convulses the developed world, Harris has proposed no major policies to restrain extreme wealth and corporate power — a contrast with Sanders, who trumpets democratic socialism, and Warren, whose ascent has been propelled by a plan to tax the extremely rich and pour money into vast new social benefits.
Heather Boushey, president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank focused on inequality, said Harris had been quieter on the subject not just than Warren, but also than candidates like Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a moderate keenly interested in regulating corporate monopolies.
“I have been really looking for a more robust agenda around addressing incomes, and especially wealth at the top,” Boushey, who has conferred with a range of candidates, said of Harris. “I don’t see an agenda that addresses those profoundly important questions.”
In the interview, Harris argued that her version of large-scale change was as meaningful as anyone else’s. For instance, she said, she supported a public works program to improve roads and other transit systems — an uncontroversial idea backed by her Democratic rivals across the ideological spectrum. She argued that kind of initiative should be seen as foundational economic reform.
“Do you call that grand systems change, or not?” Harris said. “I don’t know, but I’ll tell you that it will have a profound impact on a lot of people’s lives.”
There are points when Harris appears to miss her own standards for practicality, envisioning trillions of dollars in new benefits without enough new revenue to fully sustain them. Her biggest tax-credit proposal, the LIFT Act, represents “one of the most generous and one of the most expensive” income-support schemes in circulation, said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
But her ideas to pay for it, Gleckman said, were vague.
“She talks about rolling back some provisions of the 2017 tax cut bill, but she never says exactly which ones,” said Gleckman, who assessed the cost of Harris’ plan at almost $3 trillion over a decade. “She talks about raising taxes for higher-income people, but she never says how.”
As to the ideological quizzes that have flummoxed her, Harris said she regarded some as essentially unserious. In other cases, she said they triggered her instinct as a former government lawyer to measure her words carefully because they could leave a mark.
“My orientation, again, is to really want to think through the details of how will this actually play out,” she said.
The most persistent questions have concerned single-payer health care. Harris has endorsed legislation written by Sanders to enact such a system but has gradually distanced herself from core elements of that plan. Most recently, she told a CNN reporter in Davenport, Iowa, that she backed “Medicare for All,” but added a confusing caveat: She also opposed the middle-class taxes that are envisioned as an essential funding mechanism.
She maintained that stance in the interview, saying she had an alternative source of funds in mind. “Stay tuned,” she said.
Harris also said the transition from a private health insurance system to single payer would require much more concerted planning before it became a workable policy.
“This thing sounds great,” she said, “but how are we going to actually get there?”
If Harris’ resistance to ideological sorting has hobbled her at times, her allies do not expect her approach to change. They see it as an essential personality trait. Louise Renne, a former city attorney of San Francisco who mentored Harris, called her a “nonideological” person motivated by “the issues of diversity, honesty and transparency in government.”
“She does have views about how people should be treated, and that is equally,” Renne said. “Does that make her a progressive? Well, I suppose it’s progressive.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.