Opinion | The Kamala Harris Report Card

At the beginning of 2019 I wrote a column enthusiastically arguing that Kamala Harris was the Democratic Party’s strongest candidate to take on Donald Trump. My core argument was pretty simple: If Democrats hoped to defeat him, they needed the toughest gladiator they could get, and Harris filled that bill.

Her campaign memoir from that year features a string of scenes in which she trounced powerful men. People who watched her as a prosecutor and a rising political star have testified to her skills in the art of confrontation. In the column, I quoted something that Gary Delagnes, the former head of San Francisco’s police union, told Politico: “She’s an intelligent person. She is a — let’s see, I better pick this word carefully: ruthless.”

Looking back, that column was not wrong, but it was limited. We’ve seen a lot more of Harris in the ensuing years. Today, as she seemingly cruises to the Democratic nomination, I find myself experiencing a dizzying range of emotions. Some moments, I share the jolt of enthusiasm many are feeling. Other moments, I think the Democrats are suffering from a mass hypnotic delusion, nominating a candidate who is seriously flawed. In order to make sense of this mishmash of thoughts, I thought I’d put together a report card of her strengths and weaknesses.

Toughness: A. Harris still has it. In the rallies and events she has done since her ascension, Harris has been dominating, poised and exuberant. She prosecutes Trump with smiling self-confidence and an undertone of utter contempt. If playful aggression is a thing, she projects it.

Leadership and management skills: C. Harris’s ability to get pretty much the entire party behind her in just a few days after Joe Biden dropped out is tremendously impressive. On the other hand, from her time as the San Francisco district attorney straight through her time as vice president, Harris has earned a reputation for degrading underlings and burning through staff. Biden has a coterie of people who have been with him for decades, but Harris has no such group. The Substack newsletter Open the Books ran the numbers and calculated that as of March 31 over 90 percent of the staff she had at the beginning of her vice-presidential term had left.

“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” a former staff member told The Washington Post in a December 2021 article. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”