Will Sen. Kamala Harris play the heavy for Joe Biden? | Bill Cotterell - Tallahassee Democrat

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Bill Cotterell Capital Curmudgeon

Published 2:00 PM EDT Aug 12, 2020

When Spiro Agnew was beating up on the news media and making all kinds of culturally insensitive remarks (that’s a nice term for what Agnew said) in 1968, Sen. Gene McCarthy put his finger on what he was doing.

“He’s Nixon’s Nixon,” the erudite Minnesota senator said of Agnew, then the governor of Maryland and the Republican nominee for vice president. 

He meant that Richard Nixon, as a cutthroat congressman and red-baiting senator running for vice president in the McCarthy era, had been the heavy so Dwight Eisenhower could play the smiling grandfather role. Atop the GOP ticket himself in 1968, the “new Nixon” sought to stay above the fray and let Agnew give the liberals and hippies the daily drubbing that so delighted the conservative Republican base.

We’re likely to see something of that with Joe Biden’s selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate this week. No, she’s not going to say if you’ve seen one ghetto you’ve seen them all, or use crude terms for Polish and Japanese people, as Agnew did.

But Harris has thrown some sharp elbows and mixed it up when the going gets tough.

Any campaign with Trump is going to get nasty, we can be sure. Having Harris counter attack — or attack — shows a pugnacity a female candidate shouldn’t need, but does, while letting Biden keep his hands clean and look presidential.

Promising to pick a female running mate pretty much sealed Biden’s victory over Sen. Bernie Sanders late in the primaries. Since then, it became clear that none of the white women on Biden’s short list was likely to be chosen.

Harris’ obvious attributes — Jamaican-East India heritage, female, tough but cheerful as situations require — met Biden’s criteria. She’d clashed with him in an early debate, accusing Biden of opposing busing for school integration and being overly deferential toward segregationist Sens. Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James Eastland of Mississippi in the early 1970s. 

That’s damning by today’s cancel-culture standards. But it was the norm nearly 50 years ago. Biden was a first-term senator from Delaware and couldn’t have passed a Mother’s Day resolution if he hadn’t kept things cordial with such lions of the Senate.

Harris knew that, but she wanted to hurt Biden on his left flank in that first debate.

Several observers pounced on the Biden-Harris contretemps when he announced her selection Tuesday, but her job was different last year. She was running against him then, trying to take the nomination for herself. Now she’s running with him, trying to help Biden win the White House.

The former California attorney general was aggressive in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation mess and the Trump impeachment drama/farce. That indicates how, in the coming campaign, she can be the slugger while Biden remains aloof — or as aloof as he can be, without looking somnolent.

Remember, Trump already calls him “sleepy Joe.” 

Biden will get his jabs in, for sure, but a youthful and hard-charging Harris can be counted on to whack the president and Vice President Pence from every stage. And, like Nixon and Agnew appealed to their conservative bases when they sought the No. 2 spot, we can expect Harris to hit where Trump is weakest — among women and minority voters. 

Rep. Val Demmings of Orlando or Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta probably could have done just as well as Biden’s hit woman. Still, mayor of Atlanta and former police chief of Orlando are big jobs, but not quite presidential in stature.

So Harris, with her national name recognition and demonstrated popularity in the state with the largest number (55) of electoral votes, was Biden’s best choice.

Trump and the Republican National Committee had their opposition-research memory banks loaded for anyone Biden chose. They wasted no time calling Harris a dangerously radical liberal — and to some extent, they may be right.

The Democrats, of course, are ready and eager to fend off all criticism of Harris as racism, misogyny or both — and on a given day, they may be right. 

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com.

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