Kamala Harris glories in the US military
The drama of the French elections pales in comparison with what’s happening in the United States presidential race.
First “once and future president” Donald Trump, as his running mate JD Vance dubbed him, narrowly escapes assassination at a rally. Then his failing rival Joe Biden is forced to abandon his re-election campaign.
And by “forced”, I really mean forced. The veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh quotes “a senior official in Washington”. They say Barack Obama and “the Big Three” at the top of the Democratic Party, “former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Charles Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries” intervened.
On Sunday last week, writes Hersh, “The official told me, with the approval of Pelosi and Schumer, Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” This allows the vice president to take over from a president whom they and the cabinet deem to be incompetent.
This was an offer Biden couldn’t refuse. Hersh compares it to the 1960s thriller Seven Days in May, about an attempted right wing coup against an unpopular president.
But it was the centre left, the so-called “liberal Democrats”, who removed Biden from the race and replaced him with Harris. Obama and his wife Michelle later endorsed her in an embarrassingly staged video.
Trump and the Republicans are denouncing Harris as “radical left”.
This is nonsense. She’s a mainstream corporate Democrat in the mould set by former president Bill Clinton and continued by Obama.
Her husband is a Hollywood lawyer, and they live in ritzy Brentwood in LA. Critics complain Harris hasn’t taken part in any primary elections for the Democratic presidential nomination. But, following the announcement of her candidacy, she won the most important primary as over £150 million in donations flooded in.
Big business in the US is split. Both Trump and Biden moved beyond neoliberal orthodoxy. They used federal government money to rebuild manufacturing industry and respond to the challenge from China. The political debate is mainly about how much to tax and regulate business.
According to the Financial Times newspaper, “Wall Street grew so frustrated with US President Joe Biden’s antitrust policies over the past three and a half years that many long-standing Democratic dealmakers considered switching their support to Donald Trump in the 2024 elections or even boycotting the ballot altogether.”
They “are now reconsidering their electoral strategies”. “They consider Harris to be potentially more moderate than Vance, who is seen as a populist who could double down on the policies initiated by Biden’s trustbusters,” it writes.
The paper quotes “a top dealmaker”. “Vice president Harris is a moderate,” they say. “While she would be tough on enforcement, it will be rational enforcement.”
This dovetails with what “one person close to her campaign” told the same paper. “The underlying message Harris wants to strike is that the Democrats are ‘pro-business, responsible business’,” the source said.
Will Harris water down Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel? The last time anything comparable happened was in 1968, when opposition to the Vietnam War forced president Lyndon Johnson to give up running for re-election.
His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, took over but was hampered by Johnson’s refusal to let him call for an end to US bombing in Vietnam. He lost to Republican Richard Nixon, who postured as the peace candidate but continued the war for four more years.
Harris seems to have more room for manoeuvre. Last week she condemned the protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress as “despicable”. But, after meeting Netanyahu, she spoke about “the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety” from the Israeli army.
Whether this is more than a change in style remains to be seen. Harris will face a vile racist and sexist campaign from Trump and his supporters. Whoever wins the election, the US will emerge yet more polarised and more unstable.
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