Forget policy. Forget nuance. It’s time for Kamala Harris to stop being so reasonable

During a CNN town hall last week, Kamala Harris was asked a question about the more moderate positions she has taken on issues such as fracking and law enforcement relative to her left-leaning 2019 presidential campaign.
It was a classic attempt at a gotcha question: why are you a flip-flopping flip-flopper?
The Democratic nominee gave a disarming response. She said that being the Vice President for close to four years had changed her perspective on some issues.
Harris said she wants to be a president who “works on getting stuff done,” allowing that sometimes, “that means compromise.”
Two things came to mind watching the exchange. The first was that it was a perfectly sensible response. Harris is not the first politician to discover that governing in a democracy can require the softening of some hard policy positions.
The second is that it is kind of ridiculous that anyone is asking for Harris’s thoughts on finer points of policy. Earlier in the same town hall, CNN host Anderson Cooper asked Harris if she thought Donald Trump was a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she said, without hesitation.
So, your opponent is a dangerous threat to democracy who might try to use the military to suppress political dissent. Anyway, let’s talk about your environmental and energy policies in granular detail.
This, as the U.S. presidential campaign gets into the closing days, is the awkward line that Harris finds herself having to walk: she has to respect the usual conventions of a campaign, talking about policy plans and defending her record in the Biden administration, while also trying to raise the alarm about the unique threat that another Trump presidency poses.
Given the tightness of the race, it is time to ditch the former in favour of the latter. Sound the air-raid klaxons. Fire off the warning cannons. Light the signal flares. If not now, when?
The blunt Harris answer to the question about Trump and fascism is a sign that she is ready to ramp up the urgency. She also called an interview that Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly gave to The New York Times “a 911 call to the American people.” (Kelly, a retired general, told the newspaper that Trump, who had wanted the military to do his bidding and spoke admiringly of the sway that Hitler had over his generals, fit his definition of a fascist.)
Harris said earlier on Wednesday that Trump was “increasingly unhinged and unstable.” While this isn’t typical campaign language, it is accurate. The Republican candidate has vowed to round up millions of undocumented migrants for immediate deportation, a pledge that would detain countless migrants who have lived and worked in the United States for years, almost certainly including many who are doing so legally.
He keeps referencing the Illegal Aliens Act, an 18th-century law passed to allow the imprisonment of foreigners during war time, as the basis for his migrant sweep, saying on Wednesday that “we had to go back to 1798, that’s when we had laws that were effective.” It’s a remarkable statement: a presidential candidate pining for the good old days of the 1700s, when slavery was common, true democracy was rare and doctors treated patients with leeches.
Trump has also vowed to “protect women” so that they “don’t have to worry about abortion,” a promise that is difficult to parse in its specifics but seems intended to harken back to the days in which women were primarily expected to rear children.
Harris has seized on that particular issue as another way to paint a stark picture of American life under a Trump presidency.
At a Friday night rally in Houston that focused almost exclusively on the impact of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, one of the many guest speakers was the superstar singer Beyoncé, a native of the Texas city.
While the singer has endorsed politicians before, here she embraced the theme of the night: that Trump-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court who had struck down the law allowing abortion, giving states the freedom to severely restrict the procedure, had made life more dangerous for American women.
“I’m not here as a celebrity,” Beyoncé said. “I’m here as a mother.”
She spoke of the strides that women have made over recent generations, and “a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies.” Behind her, a video wall carried the message: Vote for Reproductive Freedom.
Other speakers on the night included women who suffered medical complications when doctors were prevented by law from terminating non-viable pregnancies. One of them, identified as Ondrea, said she was forced to deliver a child who died almost instantly, before herself developing a life-threatening infection that required lengthy surgery and months of recovery. “Texas abortion bans unleashed by Donald Trump almost cost me my life and left me with physical and emotional scars,” she said.
Beyoncé’s remarks were almost cheerful by comparison, but she told the crowd and the television audience — for this was an appearance aimed well beyond the borders of red-state Texas — that it was “time to sing a new song,” one that celebrated dignity, opportunity and unity.
“Are y’all ready to add your voices to the new American song?”
Harris followed her on stage, and sounded a note of urgency, explaining that Trump’s Supreme Court appointees had changed abortion law as the former president intended.
“One in three American women lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said. Those women know, she said, “that the government should not be telling her what to do with her body.”
Beyoncé, and her fellow Destiny’s Child member Kelly Rowlands, were off stage by this point on the Friday event, but the dire warnings that Harris offered were striking coming just as they did after a celebrity endorsement. Usually those tend to come amid some rah-rah cheerleading. But the Harris campaign has brought in a long roster of stars in recent days — Bruce Springsteen, the rapper Eminem, the actors Samuel L. Jackson and Tyler Perry — to spread not just a positive message about her but also their worries about Trump.
Springsteen, on stage in Georgia with a guitar slung over his shoulder, stood with his hands on his hips and said that while Harris wants to be president, “Donald Trump is running to be an American tyrant.”
On Saturday it was Michelle Obama, the former first lady, speaking on behalf of Harris, and again warning of the Republican assault on abortion rights. She spoke in Michigan, addressing the men in the room, saying they had just as much at stake in the coming years.
“If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad … and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” Obama said. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.”
A day later, at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, speakers were telling racist jokes, proclaiming that America was “for Americans only,” and the former president was declaring that next week’s election would be “liberation day” — a reference to the migrant invasion that he insists has taken over cities across the country, without evidence. He also spoke again about the need to purge the United States of his opponents, calling them the “enemy from within,” and mocking anyone concerned by his use of that term.
Against that backdrop, the back-and-forth between Harris and attendees at the town hall in Pennsylvania last week took on an element of the surreal, as she spent time talking about her time as a prosecutor in California or grieving the death of her mother. Time spent on these rhetorical trails is time not spent smashing the alarm button.
Even the setup of the event, with a roomful of undecided voters, felt unfathomable. How in the world could any American voter possibly be undecided at this point? Is someone going to decide not to vote for the guy who wants to round up his perceived enemies because Harris gave a thorough explanation of her shifting position on fracking?
This is simply nothing like a normal campaign. Harris shouldn’t spend its final days acting like it is one.