Kamala’s Useful Idiots

Scarcely more than one week after Joe Biden’s adderall-addled corpse was unceremoniously ousted from the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, a fog of gloom has begun to creep into the tone of Republican campaign apparatchiks, most of whom were too busy gleefully envisioning a Reagan-style landslide nine days ago to notice that the Democratic Party machine was finalizing plans to depose its octogenarian leader. The party’s new standard-bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris, is as radically left-wing as any Democratic presidential nominee in modern history. She may well be a younger, more charismatic, and overall more formidable opponent than Biden — the lowest bar in the history of human civilization — but the Right should, by all rights, be able to exploit her record of hardline leftism to great political benefit.

And yet a growing faction on the Right appears committed to proving it is somehow more left-wing than Harris, at least on the issues of crime, criminal justice, and law and order. Numerous right-wing influencers have taken to sharing a mosaic of the black men Harris — then the California Attorney General — ostensibly “kept in prison past their release date” to use as “slave labor” in the state’s prison system. The conservative punditry sphere is suddenly awash in these claims: “Kamala wanted to keep minorities locked up for cheap labor” (Kevin Sorba); “Joe is a Racist! Kamala loves to incarcerate black men!” (Leo Terrell); “Kamala Harris locked up black people for smoking pot” (The Rubin Report); “Vote for Kamala if you want black men in prison” (The Hodge Twins). With the obvious caveat that readers should take the Atlantic’s — and specifically, Tim Alberta’s — reporting with a grain of salt, Alberta’s latest piece in the outlet reported that “Trump allies,” too, “plan to assault her left flank with accusations of Harris over-incarcerating young men of color when she was California’s attorney general.”

It is absurd that this even needs to be said, but the gleeful emphasis on Harris’ record locking up “black men” specifically is a recycled version of the insidious left-wing trope that the American criminal justice system is racist or unfairly discriminates against blacks — a trope that conservatives ostensibly claim to oppose. (There’s a reason this talking point originated as a hard-left line of attack against Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary). Whatever her record, Harris did not single out black men, exclusively, in her efforts to keep criminals in prison; she kept criminals — of all races — in prison. If a disproportionate number of those prisoners happened to be black men, that’s because black men happen to commit a disproportionate amount of crime. The Right used to understand these things. Many conservatives are so overjoyed by the opportunity to call the Left racist for once that they appear to have forgotten.

As a political matter, this talking point is such a terrible strategy that it’s almost impossible to believe that it wasn’t cooked up by Democratic operatives. The entire left-wing apparatus — party elites, the legacy media, progressive activist groups, and so on — is desperate to recast Harris as a sensible moderate, in stark contrast to her actual legislative record. One of her — and their — biggest liabilities, in this regard, is her actual record on race criminal justice, which includes everything from voicing support for “transformative structural change” and “reimagining how we do public safety” in 2020 to an abomination known as the “George Floyd Justice In Policing Act.” The single most effective thing the Right could do to neuter that line of attack would be to highlight the fact that Harris was briefly sensible on crime. So of course, that’s exactly what the Right is doing.

Indeed, this is precisely why the media has suddenly latched onto Harris’ past as a sort-of-tough-on-crime prosecutor. As Rafael Mangual noted in City Journal today:

During her last run for the Democratic presidential nomination, a handful of progressives and libertarians attacked Harris as “a cop,” too eager to court “the support of more conservative law-and-order types” back when she was a prosecutor in San Francisco and later California’s attorney general. Some of those arguments are resurfacing again now that President Biden has called off his reelection bid and endorsed Harris — but this time, they’re getting a more positive spin. In the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell argued last week that Harris stands to benefit from being “credibly tough on crime.” The same day, Politico cited polling data on the crime issue in support of an argument summed up by its headline: “‘Kamala the Cop’ Doesn’t Sound So Bad in 2024.” And in the New York Times, Nicole Allan (who critically profiled the vice president’s approach to criminal justice in 2019) wrote that Harris’s “prosecutorial background has transformed from a liability to an asset.”

The reason the media is taking this tack is because being tough on crime is popular — and being soft on crime is unpopular. This is why crime and public order have long served as one of the GOP’s strongest issues, despite some on the Right’s apparent enthusiasm for jettisoning their traditional position on the topic. What’s more, in the wake of a sweeping crime wave — itself caused by many of the same policies that Harris vocally supported in and after 2020 — the general public has a higher appetite for law and order (and a stronger aversion to soft-on-crime experiments) than it has in some time. A Manhattan Institute report published earlier this month found that 57 percent of voters believed the U.S. criminal justice system was “not tough enough,” whereas just 11 percent said it was “too tough.”

“The appetite for soft-on-crime policies has diminished significantly from when progressive reform prosecutors were winning elections in cities across the country,” the report concluded. “Voters, scarred from Covid-era crime increases, want to see policy makers take more aggressive action on public safety measures to bring down crime.”

Finally, on the actual merits, Harris’ actual record as California attorney general is nowhere near as draconian as the Right’s simpleton caucus would have us believe. (One suspects that most of the conservatives eagerly pushing this line would object strenuously to an attack on a Republican for the precise same policies — i.e., that their only criterion is that it is “a thing we can say about a Democrat that sounds bad,” without any further consideration for its material implications). Even as California Attorney General (and before that, San Francisco District Attorney), Harris’ record “certainly wasn’t unambiguously ‘tough,’” Mangual noted. As San Francisco DA, she sought to help “certain offenders avoid jail” via diversion programs, “pushed an implicit bias training initiative,” and — after becoming the state’s AG — endorsed George Gascón, one of the most infamously radical district attorneys in the nation.

The most that could be said of Harris’ past as an occasionally tough-on-crime prosecutor is that it was ideologically incoherent — characterized by the same finger-in-the-air political opportunism that Harris used to maneuver to the top of her party’s presidential ticket. “We felt as prosecutors that Kamala was weak or missing when it comes to matters of public safety or criminal justice, and far more political — always looking for her next office,” Jan Scully, the former district attorney for Sacramento County, told the Sacramento Bee in 2016. “She didn’t try to be everything to prosecutors and law enforcement. But she didn’t go so far out there on the liberal side, either. If anything, she was nothing to anyone.”

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