Clumsy Kamala: Why Kamala Harris may be her own worst enemy

"What trips up Kamala Harris is an evident desire to please her audience. She wants no enemies to her left, no identity politics left untouched. She can't run as a prosecutor—crime fighting is so 1990s—but she can run as brash, bold, and woke."   . . .

Matthew Continetti  "No Democrat running for president has had a better 2019 than Kamala Harris. The numbers tell the tale. The California senator was in the low single digits in polls conducted before her official launch on January 28. She is now in the low double digits, running third behind Joe Biden, who enjoys cosmic name recognition, and Bernie Sanders, whose devoted supporters brought him a second-place finish last time. But polls do not tell the whole story.

"Harris raised $1.5 million in the day after declaring her candidacy. That number, impressive for a senator not even a third of the way through her first term, has been bested only by Sanders, a socialist who has a venture capitalist's talent for raising money. He brought in $5.9 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign. Harris, however, has something Sanders does not.

"She is a fresh face of middle age (54 years) and of diverse background (her father is Jamaican, her mother Indian) whose chief rivals at the moment are two geriatric white men. As Democrats search for someone new to lead them against President Trump, Harris has distinguished herself from the field. Her CNN town hall drew record ratings, while Amy Klobuchar's flopped. And Harris leads the 2020 Democrats in social media interactions, according to an Axios/Newswhip study. She's had a good launch. But there's a caveat.

"David Axelrod has described presidential campaigns as MRIs for the soul. He means that a candidate is subjected to pressures strong enough to reveal his or her true character. What voters get at the end of the process is a fuller picture of the men and women they choose to inhabit the White House. In these early weeks of what is certain to be a seemingly endless and certainly vitriolic campaign, Harris has demonstrated both strengths and weaknesses." . . .