The Accidental President
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch
There was a time when I felt defensive on behalf of Republicans when liberals accused them of furtive (and not so furtive) racial resentment toward America’s first black president.
My days of giving the right the benefit of the doubt about its good intentions are over. Watching a supposedly principled small-government movement like the Tea Party transform overnight into an authoritarian personality cult intoxicated with populist cultural revanchism will do that to a fellow.
But in case you’re more generously inclined, note that it took less than 48 hours from the start of Kamala Harris’ candidacy for House GOP leaders to have to warn members to stop making racially tinged cracks about her.
The insult of choice is “DEI hire,” which happens to contain a grain of truth. Certainly, Harris’ race and gender were enormous advantages for her in 2020 when the old white man leading the Democratic ticket decided he needed some “balance.”
But “balance” is always a priority when making political appointments in modern America, and not just for the left. Sens. Tim Scott and Marco Rubio ended up on Donald Trump’s vice presidential shortlist because of their special potential to attract black and Hispanic voters, respectively. After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in September 2020, even before he nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed her, Trump declared frankly that his nominee for the vacancy would be a woman.
Insofar as “DEI” is shorthand for pandering to specific demographics by choosing a nominee based on his or her cultural identity, the guy who was nominated last week to be Trump’s running mate is himself a “DEI hire” of sorts.
We can debate whether it helps or hurts Republicans to attack Harris as an affirmative action charity case (you know where I stand on that), but I don’t believe the jabs about her being a “DEI hire” are part of a strategic calculus. I think they’re a matter of the populist id flaring at the thought of being governed by a black woman who’s not part of the ideological tribe.
It’s a preview of the next four years if Kamala Harris figures out a way to beat Trump this fall, I suspect. Unlike any presidency in my lifetime, her term would be wracked by obstruction, paralysis, and public disillusionment.
If you thought congressional Republicans were reluctant to compromise with Barack Obama, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
President by default.
Harris would begin her term burdened by two liabilities that none of her recent predecessors have shared. And I don’t mean her race or gender.
First, to a greater extent than any modern president, she would lack a policy mandate.
Americans have gotten used to general elections devolving into “lesser of two evils” contests. Biden was the lesser evil in 2020, they believed, and Trump the lesser evil in 2016. If Harris wins in November, it’ll be because she too was judged (correctly) to be the lesser of the two evils being offered to American voters, not because they’re jazzed about her platform.
But Trump and Biden could at least say that they had won competitive primaries. In neither case was their agenda the core reason why—Trump prevailed in 2016 by dint of his persona, Biden in 2020 by virtue of his electability—but each could credibly claim that policy was an important factor in their victory. For Trump, it was his ardent hawkishness on immigration that made his opponents seem milquetoast by comparison. For Biden, it was his center-left moderation relative to Bernie Sanders that helped him to sweeping victories in South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states.
Harris didn’t win a competitive primary. Nothing about her policy stances contributed to her coronation this week. The burst of enthusiasm playing out for her in Democratic circles right now is due entirely to the fact that, as between her and Joe Biden, she was the lesser of two electoral evils for left-wing voters who were desperate for a viable candidate in November.
In fact, unlike Biden and Trump, no one seems to have any idea what Harris’ true, heartfelt policy stances are on virtually anything. No doubt she’s about to position herself as a staunch moderate on everything from immigration to foreign policy, but is that the real Harris? Or is this?
No one knows, but it probably doesn’t matter. Winning the Democratic nomination by default and then defeating Trump by a different sort of default—because Americans preferred not to gamble the constitutional order on the civic conscience of a convicted criminal—would make her the closest thing since Gerald Ford to an accidental president.
And an accidental president won’t get far in convincing Congress to move her agenda.
The other unique liability Harris would face by modern standards is that she’ll almost surely begin her presidency with the opposing party in control of at least one chamber of Congress.
Each of the last five men to win the office started their terms with their party holding majorities in the House and Senate, giving them at least two years to put some legislative points on the scoreboard. Well, almost: The Republican Senate majority under George W. Bush was short-lived thanks to Jim Jeffords’ 2001 switcheroo, but Bush finished his first term with a majority in both houses after the GOP gained Senate seats in 2002.
The Senate map this year all but guarantees that President Harris won’t have the same advantage. Democrats are unlikely to flip any Republican-held seats, whereas Republicans are assured of flipping Joe Manchin’s in West Virginia. All they’ll need to secure a majority is one more pick-up and they have numerous plum opportunities in Montana, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan. To a near-certainty, the GOP will control the upper chamber in 2025.
The map doesn’t get better in 2026 either. Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, Michigan’s Gary Peters, New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, and Virginia’s Mark Warner will be in Republicans’ sights; for Democrats the only plausible pick-up will be Susan Collins, and that one’s not very plausible given how comfortably she won reelection in Maine in 2020. If America reverts to form in 2026 by granting the out-party sweeping victories in the midterms, President Harris would be looking at a Republican House and a firmly Republican Senate in the last two years of her term.
In all likelihood, then, she’ll spend not a single day in office with congressional Democrats in a position to help her accomplish something meaningful. Not since the elder George Bush in 1989 has a president faced a challenge like that, and Bush’s challenge was mild given how much more willing the parties were to compromise in his era.
To achieve anything legislatively, Harris will need the cooperation of a Republican Party that’s made “liberal tears” its highest political priority. Think she’ll get it?
Obstruction on steroids.
Consider the circumstances under which she would take office on January 20.
Assuredly, she’ll have won fewer Electoral Votes in defeating Trump than Joe Biden did in 2020. That alone will undermine her argument that she has a mandate to govern.
The smaller margin of victory combined with the circumstances in which she won the Democratic nomination will galvanize Republican claims that she and her party cheated. At a minimum, right-wingers will insist that the bait-and-switch that landed her on the ballot amounted to dirty pool. (Trump is already whining about it.) At worst, narrow Harris victories in swing states with significant black populations like Michigan and Pennsylvania will reignite the same suspicions about chicanery taking place in, ahem, “urban areas” that we heard four years ago.
Scorched by the indignity of losing to a black woman from San Francisco, Trump would ringlead the allegations about fraud and demand that congressional Republicans protest the new president’s illegitimacy by refusing to work with her on anything. Despite his second national defeat, he’d continue to command enough loyalty among the right-wing base that GOPers in the House and Senate would tremble at the thought of defying him.
Meanwhile, with the Justice Department still under Democratic control, Trump’s criminal trials for concealing classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election will continue. The suddenly real prospect of prison time would give him and his acolytes even more reason to bitterly demagogue and obstruct Harris. And as much as she might quietly prefer to pardon him and make all of that go away, it’s unthinkable that she would. The left would never forgive her for denying them a chance to see Trump in an orange jumpsuit.
It would undermine the ethos of her candidacy. She’s asking the “defund the police” party to unite behind her as she runs on being a tough-on-crime prosecutor. (Against a “law and order” party that’s united behind a convicted felon.) If liberals are going to put aside their misgivings about law enforcement to elect her, she sure as hell had better enforce the law as president against an authoritarian miscreant.
If all of that isn’t enough, congressional Republicans will have the same electoral reasons to deny Harris any policy wins that they had in refusing to compromise with Obama. The fewer accomplishments the president has, the more disenchanted with him or her the electorate should be. And the more disenchanted the electorate becomes, the more willing they should be to prefer the out-party in the midterm elections. Harris’ failure, like Obama’s, will be seen as essential to the GOP’s success.
The most recent midterm is the exception that proves the rule. Senate Republicans were willing to compromise with Joe Biden on big-ticket legislation, like an infrastructure package, during the first two years of his term—and they ended up with the weakest midterm performance for an opposition party in decades. Biden’s achievements probably weren’t the secret ingredient in that debacle, but the lesson will be learned regardless that nothing good can come from giving the governing party something to run on.
Amid all of these strategic incentives not to work with Harris, congressional Republicans will also be boxed in by the wounded pride of “real Americans” at having been denied their right to rule by a progressive black woman. This party runs largely on spite now, and spiting the new president to salve that tribal wound will become something like a moral imperative for its representatives.
One might go so far as to say that Kamala Harris is the antithesis of Trump’s movement. If MAGA is a nostalgia trip bent on making America as great as it was when white Christian men dominated it, Harris’ base of support is bent on extinguishing that nostalgia. Women and nonwhite Democrats are not going back to a past in which they were shut out of power by the other tribe. And they couldn’t be any more explicit about it:
In arguing to the Associated Press this week that Harris is too left-wing to be president, Sen. Steve Daines of Montana underlined the point with an interesting comparison. “She’s not an Irish Catholic kid who grew up in Scranton,” he said, referring to Joe Biden. “She’s a San Francisco liberal.” There was no need to mention the president’s faith or ethnicity to emphasize Harris’ relative radicalism, but Daines understands the populist id. Joe Biden is recognizably American to the right so Republicans could work with him as president. Harris is not, so they can’t.
On which of America’s major challenges, then, should we expect any progress during a Harris presidency?
Be careful what you wish for.
Should we expect progress on entitlement reform?
Of course not. Neither party has any interest in reducing the national debt and averting the fiscal crisis that’s coming.
Should we expect progress on immigration enforcement?
I think Harris will try to work with Republicans. She’ll have no choice, as public exasperation with America’s open border has reached toxic levels.
But Republicans won’t work with her. It was only a few months ago that they blocked a border security bill because they feared that easing the crisis might benefit Democrats at the polls. The GOP will do the same thing to Harris that it did to Biden, making a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum in which the president either accepts a list of immigration demands in full or Congress refuses to act.
Harris will be forced to leave it, knowing that capitulating to Republicans on immigration would cause her base to revolt. Realistically, as with all recent presidents in our polarized country, her job approval is likely to settle in the low to mid-40s. She won’t risk infuriating progressives and having it collapse into the 30s by surrendering unconditionally on the border, ruining her reelection chances.
Should we expect progress on containing China?
No one knows what Kamala Harris would do on foreign policy, possibly including Kamala Harris herself. As the American right embraces a policy of pure contrarianism, though, it’s fair to say that whatever she does with respect to China will be bitterly opposed by populists.
If Beijing moves on Taiwan and she begs off a confrontation, she’ll be vilified by Trump and other nationalists as the epitome of a weak liberal woman. Never again can America risk having a female commander-in-chief from the left, they’ll say. And if instead Harris proves to be surprisingly resolute toward China?
Republicans will attack her for that too. American nationalists’ China hawkery has always been cynical and opportunistic. If forced to choose between taking sides with Xi Jinping or with Kamala Harris, there’s not a shadow of a doubt whose side they’ll take.
Opposing and undermining her will become the raison d’être of the Republican Party for four years. I’d go so far as to predict that if a vacancy opens on the Supreme Court, the Senate GOP majority will choose to keep that seat open—possibly for years—rather than give her the satisfaction of filling it. It’ll be Mitch McConnell’s playbook on the Antonin Scalia vacancy from 2016, except this time minus any excuse that there’s an election mere months away in which voters will have their say on whom they prefer to fill the seat.
Obstruction, paralysis, and mass disillusionment with the government’s ability to solve problems: That’s the Republican strategy for Harris’ presidency. They have many incentives to execute it and will probably have the numbers as well.
All of which, I realize, sounds like an argument not to vote for her this fall, a “be careful what you wish for” admonition to those energized by her ascendance.
I don’t mean it to be. I’ll be voting for her for the same reason many other reluctant Harris voters will: because I prefer a cynical and dysfunctional federal government to one in which proto-fascists are in charge and starting to get their sea legs.
But none of us should have illusions about what’s to come. Harris can defeat Trump, but she won’t defeat Trumpism if her presidency proves to be as dismal as I expect. Her failures will strengthen the post-liberal “Flight 93” argument that leadership by the other tribe can only mean sclerosis and disaster and therefore extraordinary measures must be taken to prevent it going forward.
If Donald Trump was partly a reaction to America being governed by a black man, who knows what the reaction will be to America being governed by a black woman?
