President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek reelection creates a dilemma for moderate Democrats and independents. The party seems destined for a coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris despite the earlier calls of some for a contest and debates.
What was never clear is how that would result in a candidate other than Harris given the dominance of identity politics among many Democratic delegates and elites. What is clear is that a leftist from Berkeley such as Harris would weaken our economy, national security, and individual liberty and deprive those moderates and independents of a real option in the Democratic Party.
Harris often presents a narrative that she hails from Oakland, has a typical African American experience, and is a mainstream Democrat. It is a false narrative. She was born in Oakland because neighboring Berkeley, where her family lived, did not have a major hospital. According to her birth certificate, Kamala lived at 2531 Regent St. in Berkeley, not Oakland. Later, before moving to Montreal, she lived at 1227 Bancroft Way in Berkeley.
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian immigrant, worked at a Berkeley lab. Both her mother and her father, who immigrated from Jamaica and is of Afro-Jamaican and Irish heritage, received Ph.D.s from the University of California, Berkeley (my alma mater), where they met.
This upbringing is very different from someone such as Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), a black man who grew up in South Carolina and whose mother was a nursing assistant, or Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who came from impoverished Appalachia. In her autobiography, Harris writes of being brought often to protest marches in a stroller and a “sea of legs moving about, of the energy and the shouts and the chants.” Harris was raised in the far-left Berkeley culture of the 1960s and 1970s.
Although Harris failed the California bar the first time, she eventually took a job in the San Francisco district attorney’s office. At age 29, she began dating Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, who appointed her to high-paying state commissions and helped elect her as San Francisco district attorney. This launched her on the path to the Senate.
Congressional ratings groups tell the tale of her time in the Senate. Based on her votes, Harris was rated the most liberal member of the Senate in 2019, further left than either Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), by the nonpartisan group GovTrack. The liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action, which also compiles ratings based on major votes, gave her perfect 100 scores in 2017 and 2018.
The conservative Club for Growth, which rates based on economic, tax, and regulatory issues, gave her a lifetime rating of 9%. Progressive Punch listed Harris as one of the five most progressive senators, with a rating of 96.76 out of 100, ahead of Sanders at 94.93. The conservative Heritage Action group gave Harris a rating of 0% in the 116th Congress (2019-2021) and a 4% lifetime score.
Harris’s policy positions were consistently far-left. She supported ending private health insurance, passing the Green New Deal, imposing a carbon tax, banning fracking, eliminating cash bail and mandatory minimum sentences, and, as we saw in her 2019 debate with Biden, forcing busing of school children to achieve racial integration. Additionally, according to GovTrack, she joined bipartisan legislation “the least often compared to Senate Democrats.”
In the White House, Biden put Harris in charge of two significant priorities: stopping illegal migration and leading the National Space Council. Her liberal policies and poor execution contributed to at least 6.7 million illegal crossings at the border, far more than during former President Donald Trump’s presidency. Rather than reduce regulations to promote America’s space industry, as chairwoman of the president’s Space Council, Harris drafted new policies that promoted the imposition of new burdensome regulations and legislation on the space industry under the guise of complying with the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty. She has also vigorously promoted increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion rules in astronaut selection and roles.
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Harris’s rhetoric at times echoes Marxist ideology. Rather than equality of opportunity, she wants to force equality of result. In a video posted on X in 2020, she said, “There’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equality suggests, oh, everyone should get the same amount …. Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.” A Berkeley radical.
Moderate Democrats and independents evaluating who to vote for no longer have the choice of a purportedly center-left Biden. Therefore, they must ask themselves whether they want a Berkeley radical or will consider someone with the courage of Trump, who can take a bullet and still raise his fist and show he has the toughness and resolve to fight for the American people no matter what.
Edward Hearst is a Silicon Valley technology executive and attorney who served at the Treasury and Commerce Departments in the Trump administration.