EDITORIAL: Kamala Harris is big on vibes but short on policy

What a difference five weeks (and 22 years in age) can make.

When Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, a return to a Donald Trump presidency in November felt almost inevitable.

But just over a month later, and against a comparatively young Kamala Harris, Trump is beginning to look like the underdog.

Now it’s Trump who is the old man shaking his fist disconsolately at the world, and he has so far seemed unable to find a way to counter the enthusiasm of his younger opponent.

There’s no doubt the momentum and the enthusiasm is all in Harris’s corner at this stage in the campaign.

Accepting her party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Harris cast herself as the champion of “a new way forward”, in which there was no place for the bitterness and division of the recent past.

The crowd of supporters gathered in Chicago appeared to accept this narrative. Trump the incumbent, Harris the challenger.

Never mind that Harris has been the one at Biden’s side the past four years as Vice President.

Americans who tuned in to the DNC on their televisions learnt a bit about Harris this week.

They learnt from her nieces and actress Kerry Washington how to properly pronounce her name (“comma” followed by “la”).

They learnt that she worked at McDonald’s as a teen, proving her working class bona fides.

They learnt from her childhood best friend that Harris has been standing up to bullies since she was a kindergartener.

And they heard of her experiences taking on criminals during her career as a prosecutor.

What they didn’t learn was much about what kind of president she will be, if she is successful in her mission to convince Americans to vote for her in November.

Because while Harris’s campaign to date has been big on vibes, it has been short on policy detail.

It’s difficult to know what Harris stands for, other than not being Donald Trump. Of course, for many, that will be enough.

Trump has tried to cast Harris as a radical left-winger, telling his supporters that “Comrade Kamala” has a “fully communist” economic plan.

But Harris is no ideologue.

She has already walked away from many of her more left-of-centre positions, including a ban on fracking, Medicare-for-all policy, mandatory gun buybacks, and decriminalising unauthorised border crossings.

Team Harris is likely aware that to divulge too much policy detail at this point in the contest would open her up to attacks — whether rooted in reality or otherwise — from Trump and other Republicans.

So they’re choosing to rely on personality, not policy.

It’s clear that Harris sees her primary task at this point as defeating Trump. They’ll figure out the rest later, once she is safely in the Oval Office. It’s a bad way to govern, but as a campaign strategy it might work.

There are still two and a half months left in this competition. That’s plenty of time for the pendulum to swing.

Responsibility for the editorial comment is taken by WAN Editor Christopher Dore.