Kamala Harris starts her engine in the centre lane

By J.E.F. | WASHINGTON, DC

“IF KAMALA HARRIS wants people who care about dismantling mass incarceration and correcting miscarriages of justice to vote for her,” warned Lara Bazelon, a law professor, in an article published shortly after Ms Harris announced she was seeking the presidency last week, “she needs to radically break from her past.” Ms Bazelon charges that Ms Harris—who was a prosecutor before becoming California’s attorney-general in 2011 and California’s junior senator in 2017—fought to uphold wrongful convictions and supported excessively punitive policies and practices. Ms Harris faces similar criticism from across the left.

On January 27th, in her first big campaign speech, in her hometown of Oakland, Ms Harris answered her critics not by disavowing her past, but by leaning in to it. Her slogan, “For the People,” is what prosecutors say in American courtrooms, because, as she explained, “in our system of justice, we believe that a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us. That’s why when we file a case, it’s not filed in the name of the victim. It reads, ‘The People’”. Being “for the people”, she argued, means standing against “predators”, “big banks” and “transnational gangs,”—a careful bit of positioning that tries to cut into the anti-corporatism of Senator Elizabeth Warren, a rival for the Democratic nomination, and President Donald Trump’s law-and-order claims (“on the subject of transnational gangs, let’s be perfectly clear: the president’s medieval vanity project isn’t going to stop them”).