Kamala Harris has Liz Cheney Syndrome

Couple of quick announcements before our main event today.

• Given all the turmoil in the media, I’m going to reopen our job listing for an Associate Editor for two more weeks (through Feb. 24). This is a part-time position initially, but it could grow into full-time down the road. There are a few promising candidates already; if you’re in this bucket, we’ll be in touch soon to set up a time for an interview in early March. But this is an important role for us, so I wanted to widen the net a little bit. The Associate Editor role has more specific requirements than for past positions we’ve hired for — we really need someone with at least some real-world, hands-on editing experience. If that describes someone you know, please don’t hesitate to pass the listing along!

• Also, we’re overdue for another SBSQ soon — so you can submit questions here. Since the January version spilled into multiple parts, this one will probably be on the shorter side, or maybe a lightning round edition.

Harris wasn’t a “centrist”, though that oversimplifies the issue

One of my pet peeves in the Great Moderation Wars is when I see the claim that Kamala Harris ran as a centrist. What actually happened is that Harris ran a largely substance-free campaign, hoping to win on vibes, quietly disavowing some of her past progressive positions without explaining why she’d changed her mind or replacing them with much of anything. The one notable exception was Harris’s convention speech, where she took a more assertive, notably male-coded approach, but she quickly abandoned those themes.1 At no point did she take any costly signal that would have risked offending any major Democratic constituency, left or center. And she couldn’t identify a single mistake that she or Joe Biden had made.2

So most voters defaulted to the assumption that Harris was left-wing — a rather reasonable assumption based on her very liberal voting record in the Senate and the aggressively progressive presidential campaign she ran in 2019. Not to mention that she’d been vice president for four years and the Biden-Harris administration had been quite progressive too. And yes, $20+ million in “Kamala is for they/them” ads helped to entrench this perception. But the whole reason the