Why Kamala Harris and Cory Booker endorsing Joe Biden matters
Remember that time when Sen. Kamala Harris attacked Joe Biden on the debate stage and asserted that while he wasn’t quite a racist, he was all too happy to work with segregationist lawmakers to oppose mandated busing in the 1970s?
It was a brutal moment that saw Biden’s poll numbers drop sharply while the California Democrat’s shot up, making her suddenly a leader in the Democratic field for the 2020 presidential nomination. Harris took it seriously, even going so far as to have “that little girl was me” T-shirts ready the night of the showdown for sale to supporters. Now, Harris has endorsed Biden after a gangbusters Super Tuesday showing for the former vice president.
Watch Trevor Noah’s takedown of Kamala Harris’ endorsment on Comedy Central:
Taking to social media over the weekend, Harris tweeted, “@JoeBiden has served our country with dignity and we need him now more than ever. I will do everything in my power to help elect him the next President of the United States.” It’s tempting to look at endorsements by defeated opponents as something of a nothingburger or perhaps as just horse-trading to curry favor with a potential Biden administration. But these things do matter, and it speaks to a larger argument in favor of a Biden administration instead of a Sanders administration.
If the whole presidency thing doesn’t work out for Biden, there’s always a chance he could succeed Wayne Brady as host of Let’s Make a Deal. The former vice president spent three decades in the Senate proudly forging relationships across the aisle with Republicans and cutting deals on legislation. His theory of government is pretty standard Civics 101 in that you have to work with your colleagues on both sides to understand their priorities, and you have to be willing to give something up in pursuit of an agreement that you can sell as “the greater good.” The pugnacious socialist senator from Vermont, however, has an entirely different disposition and approach toward the presidency.
During a recent CNN town hall, Bernie Sanders repeated his answer about how he would get Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow "Medicare for all" to pass a Republican-led senate. Sanders said, “you go to Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, which is a state where a lot of people are struggling” — where he thinks 70%-80% of folks there will support his healthcare proposals. He described his job as president being to “rally the people and tell their senators to support it.”
In short, Sanders would not cut deals with Republicans but would instead attempt to turn their voters against them in an effort to transform what is possible through a populist movement. The campaign and grassroots effort would extend beyond his inauguration: “Feel the Bern” could be described as Sanders's legislative strategy. Biden, meanwhile, would do the opposite.
Understanding endorsements is tough because we can’t always know what sort of agreements were reached behind closed doors.
Pete Buttigieg dropping out after Super Tuesday despite outperforming most of his rivals looked, to most observers, like an ambitious politician angling for a role in a Biden administration. Buttigieg held Biden’s feet to the fire in numerous debates, but he never quite went in for the kill as Harris did with her stirring busing attack. So why would Harris back Biden's moderate, transactional politics over Sanders's combative political revolution?
The fact is that Sanders’s revolution is not what the professional political class got into politics for. Traditional politicians do not want people in the streets every day, and they do not want activists banging on their office and home doors every time Sanders is itching for a fight. The Vermont senator’s radicalism is real, and no one should mistake him for a complacent actor in politics. Harris is deeply in the left wing of her party, and her convictions are very real, but baked into the essence of American politics is an attitude that eventually, the fighting has to stop.
Biden, even to his left-wing former rivals, remains someone who can sell a vision of liberal gains while promising a return to “normalcy” in our politics. That looks less like Trump- and Sanders-style rallies, less like street fighting between young activists, and less of everything that has defined our politics since 2016.
It’s not that Biden has no vision of what the country should look like: He thinks that average people should be able to focus on their actual lives while the chosen few, those in Congress, make stuff happen.