The presidential marketing campaign is shaping as much as be a story of two prosecutors, each named Kamala Harris.
Harris’ report as a tough-on-crime prosecutor was a continuing chorus via a lot of this week’s Democratic Nationwide Conference.
On Monday, the conference featured an advert parodying the tv sequence “Legislation & Order” that asserted, “We’d like a president who has spent her life prosecuting perpetrators like Donald Trump.” Tuesday’s program was much more blunt, together with a five-minute video showcasing Harris as a crusading prosecutor who unflinchingly locked up murderers, rapists and little one molesters.
A sequence of audio system echoed that theme, touting Harris’ lock-’em-up bona fides. In his headlining speech Tuesday, former President Obama solid Harris, a former San Francisco district legal professional and California legal professional basic, as an uncompromising prosecutor. As with the string of audio system making comparable factors, Obama targeted on red-meat invocations of rapists, little one molesters and different sexual predators.
Harris’ expertise as a regulation girl has been the main theme of her younger marketing campaign since she made her debut and rolled out the dependable applause line, “I took on perpetrators of all types. … So hear me after I say: I do know Donald Trump’s kind.”
All of it appears like a classic marketing campaign for district legal professional — and the type of rhetoric far more regularly deployed by Republicans.
But at the same time as Harris is promoting her prosecutorial credentials, the Trump marketing campaign is trotting out a imaginative and prescient of her as feckless and mushy on crime — certainly, “one of many worst prosecutors in historical past,” in keeping with Trump’s characteristically fact-free hyperbole.
This wrestle over Harris’ prosecutorial id is for now the core of the marketing campaign, an uncommon characteristic for a presidential contest. However given Trump’s full familiarity to supporters and opponents alike, the primary variable within the marketing campaign could be whose imaginative and prescient of Harris prevails.
Trump’s caricature of Harris’ report depends on a sequence of misleading and false claims. He has asserted with no foundation in any respect that as district legal professional, she “wouldn’t arrest murderers. She wouldn’t arrest anyone.”
Trump additionally tells his supporters that Harris “helps obligatory gun confiscation” that would go away Individuals “defenseless.” That refers to a compulsory assault weapons buyback program that Harris as soon as supported however now not does.
On immigration regulation, Trump’s line is that Harris wished to present “mass amnesty and citizenship” to “all illegals.” The premise for this declare is her previous help for a path to citizenship and amnesty for restricted teams such because the so-called Dreamers introduced into the nation illegally as kids.
Or Trump accuses Harris of redefining “little one intercourse trafficking, assault with a lethal weapon and rape of a unconscious individual … as nonviolent,” a whopper that apparently refers to a 2016 California voter referendum that enabled early launch consideration for these convicted of “nonviolent felonies.”
Trump additionally argues that Harris “helps abolishing money bail,” which is in reality true. However his conclusion — “which suggests bloodthirsty criminals that simply killed any person can instantly depart custody, exit and kill any person else” — is fake. Fairly, Harris and others help changing conventional bail with different requirements for detaining violent offenders earlier than trial.
You get the thought: Mix the emotional politics of violent crime with Trump’s indifference to reality, and also you get a risky brew of sensationalist accusations that make the George H.W. Bush marketing campaign’s notorious Willie Horton assault appear like beanbag. However because the Horton episode demonstrated, misleading claims about crime may be sticky.
And Harris has an advanced monitor report on the topic. When she first ran for president, in 2020, she adopted the id of a “progressive prosecutor,” kind of the other of the portrait the conference painted this week. That drew hearth from the left primarily based on her previous help of initiatives that may strike progressive voters as overly punitive, particularly within the wake of that yr’s police killing of George Floyd. She additionally encountered opposition from police teams primarily based on her long-standing opposition to the dying penalty.
4 years later, having immediately acquired the nomination within the wake of President Biden’s disastrous debate, Harris is now not shying away from the characterizations that undermined her candidacy with the left as she competed within the crowded 2020 main.
Actually, Harris’ enthusiastic donning of the mantle of robust prosecutor is of a bit with a broader theme of the conference that seemingly will keep on into the marketing campaign: the Democrats’ self-conscious effort to reclaim an array of conventional American virtues. The primary half of the conference was marked by appeals to a throwback, “Ozzie and Harriet” world of Little League video games and church socials. Obama put it greatest in his patent enchantment to swing and even Trump voters, saying nearly all of the American individuals “don’t wish to reside in a rustic that’s bitter and divided.”
Harris is embracing that communitarian imaginative and prescient at the same time as she is presenting herself as a zealous prosecutor of those that would disrupt it. Whether or not she will be able to keep that picture within the face of Trump’s darker imaginative and prescient often is the central drama of the marketing campaign forward.
Harry Litman is the host of the “Speaking Feds” podcast and the “Speaking San Diego” speaker sequence. @harrylitman
