After weeks of pressure, Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, fulfilling the prediction that Cenk Uygur recently made in this magazine. Biden is being hailed as a “hero” and a “statesman” who put his country before his personal ambition. That isn’t true, though. Biden put his personal ambition first, defying the majority of voters who thought he was unfit to run. He may have tanked his party’s prospects in November by preventing a real primary from taking place that could have produced the strongest candidate. He left the race only after the lies about his mental fitness had been exposed, when it became clear that he had lost the support of his party and would be unable to win in November. Nancy Pelosi had told Biden that he could be eased out of the race “the easy way or the hard way,” and that after three weeks of trying the easy way (explaining to Biden behind closed doors that he couldn’t win), Democrats were about to start on the hard way. 

Biden’s departure, therefore, had nothing to do with principle and everything to do with recognizing the basic reality that his power had been sapped. The instinct to heap praise on Biden for his selflessness may, as economist Alex Tabarrok pointed out, create incentives for politicians to retire gracefully instead of clinging to power. But honesty requires that we don’t give Biden credit he hasn’t earned. He was selfish until the end and deserves no praise for recognizing the basic reality that his campaign was no longer viable. 

All the praise of Biden as a good, decent, empathetic man also ignores that he is responsible for funding and arming Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has destroyed the entire place and created utterly unspeakable horrors. Tributes to Biden’s heroism simply leave Palestine unmentioned, a disturbing demonstration of how little value is placed on Palestinian lives in this country. As Owen Jones says, Biden “has the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians on his hand[s],” because “Israel would never have been able to raze Gaza to the ground without him,” and so “if Hell exists, that man would have a first class ticket there.” This is not a secondary issue, but should define his presidency just as surely as Lyndon Johnson’s horrific war on Vietnam defined his. Biden is not the “American Cincinnatus.” He’s the Butcher of Gaza. 

But enough about Biden. He is gone from the campaign, his deceptions about his own capacities having been exposed. Now Democrats have to figure out what to do next. In the hours after Biden’s announcement, it rapidly became clear that Vice President Kamala Harris would be the de facto replacement. This hadn’t been obvious beforehand. There has been a lot of talk about the prospect of an open convention or “mini primary,” with people proposing bizarre methods of selecting a new candidate. But Harris immediately received a tidal wave of endorsements, including Biden’s, and it looks as if it will be impossible for anyone to successfully challenge her for the party’s nomination. A great deal of discussion has now shifted to who her vice presidential nominee will be, rather than whether Harris herself is the Democrats’ best alternative. 

We will see whether, in the coming weeks, something happens to unsettle Harris’ status as the presumptive nominee. Joe Manchin briefly indicated he might consider challenging Harris, before backing down, perhaps remembering how many Democrats despise him for his role in tanking important parts of Biden’s legislative agenda. For now, Harris keeps racking up endorsements and donations, and there’s a lot of pressure to unify behind her in order to avoid party infighting and take the fight to Donald Trump.

It’s a little concerning that Harris is quickly being crowned, because the available data suggests she’s actually a fairly weak nominee. Despite lacking Biden’s age-related challenges, Harris performs only slightly better than Biden in polls against Trump, and her approval rating isn’t any higher. That might be enough in a close race to put her over the top. But, as we’ve noted in this magazine before, national head-to-head polling is highly misleading, because Democrats don’t have to win the popular vote. They have to win the Electoral College, so even if Harris was consistently ahead in the national popular vote (which she isn’t), she might well lose the election. Harris’ own 2020 campaign flopped so spectacularly that she had to end it before a single primary vote was cast. Harris’ selection is also deeply undemocratic; voters haven’t been given any chance to consider different candidates, and she hasn’t prevailed through any kind of open process. While some might view the need to beat Trump as so overwhelmingly important that the process doesn’t really matter, we should be clear that this is a truly suboptimal way to select a candidate. 

There are certainly other Democrats who are less risky choices. It appears, however, that this is close to a done deal. We shall see whether Harris can turn around her party’s current polling numbers. Given the messianic glow that Donald Trump now projects after having survived an assassination attempt, Harris has a lot of work to do. Fortunately for her, there will now be a massive marketing campaign to sell the public on her, spread fan videos and memes across the land, and shore up weaknesses in her image (such as her penchant for speaking in platitudinous word salads). 

For those of us less interested in “horse race” analysis than the actual human consequences of politics, the most critical question is: what kind of president would Harris be? The world faces unprecedented threats (the climate catastrophe, the possibility of war between great powers) and many of America’s most dire social problems remain unsolved. The healthcare system still kills people needlessly, child poverty is a scandal, people are exploited and abused at work, the prison system is abominable, and the rent is too damn high.

What will Harris do about the major problems facing the country? We don’t yet know, and her record suggests that she might, like Joe Biden, be committed to making sure that “nothing will fundamentally change.” Certainly, Harris has a long track record of weak and watered down policy proposals. Her plan for student debt was so filled with caveats that it became a laughingstock. (“As president, I’ll establish a student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.”) Harris claimed to support Medicare For All, but her version of it was essentially fake. As Robert Kuttner wrote for the American Prospect at the time, her  plan would have “significantly [expanded] for-profit insurance at the expense of true Medicare by promoting more use of commercial products spuriously known as ‘Medicare Advantage’ and calling that a version of Medicare for All.” 

It’s not all bad. Harris co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ free college legislation, and also co-sponsored Green New Deal legislation with AOC. She’s better on reproductive rights than Biden, whose old-school Catholicism led him to say he didn’t “want abortion on demand” as recently as February. As a presidential candidate, she “pitched a $10 trillion climate plan whose public and private investments would have dwarfed the total $1.6 trillion estimated federal cost of Biden’s major climate, energy, infrastructure and technology legislation.” She proposed a “climate pollution fee” and to end federal subsidies for fossil fuels. Climate change is a major emergency, and the Biden administration’s record has been decidedly mixed. While he has increased federal funding for climate investment, he has also presided over an escalation in fossil fuel production and attached such importance to economically thwarting China that he has actually undermined our ability to import cheap solar panels and electric cars. 

But in office, would Kamala Harris be willing to stand up to the immense pressures brought by the fossil fuel industry? Or would her climate plans fall swiftly by the wayside? Will Harris be a servant of corporate interests? The fake “Medicare For All” plan is a bad sign, but ultimately I don’t think it’s at all clear. Her likely actions on Israel-Palestine are similarly difficult to divine. Harris has spoken at AIPAC and promised stalwart support for Israel, but there have been some hints she might be more likely to use U.S. power to restrain Israel’s violence against Palestinians. I’ll believe that when I see it. Jeremy Scahill argues that “her record indicates she would maintain a staunch pro-Israel policy.” U.S. support for Israel has been consistent across both Democratic and Republican presidents, and Harris would have to take a bold moral stand and buck a lot of influential members of her party in order to change course. I hope she does, but her previous record of showing fealty to Israel suggests that she may well be almost as willing as Joe Biden to continue supplying the weapons for the worst atrocity of our time.

For those who view the American criminal punishment system as deeply unjust, the selection of an ex-prosecutor like Harris is deeply troubling. Harris claimed to be “smart on crime” rather than tough on crime, but she “spent years subverting a 2011 Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to reduce its prison population,” and infamously introduced a plan to jail parents over child truancy (then laughed about it). She was not tough on everyone though, and “ignored her own staff's recommendation and declined to prosecute [former Trump-appointed Treasury Secretary] Steve Mnuchin's bank after it foreclosed on 35,000 vulnerable families.” She mocked those who are constantly arguing for building schools instead of jails, suggesting they are naive about crime. (In fact, they just understand that the best way to prevent crime is to make sure people don’t have any reason to turn to a life of crime in the first place.) She defended the death penalty (after opposing it) and even “led a team that fought to keep more people imprisoned so they could fight wildfires.” (Harris insists that she didn’t know her office was making this argument.) And yet: in 2020, the Marshall Project argues, Harris “ran to the left of Biden on most criminal justice issues, including solitary confinement, federal mandatory minimum sentences and decriminalizing border crossings.”

It’s also hard to trust that Harris is sincere in her public stances. Famously, she heavily criticized Joe Biden in a 2020 debate for his opposition to busing and his friendships with segregationists, pointing out to him that she was a little girl who benefitted from a desegregation program. Later on, when Harris joined Biden’s ticket, she suggested that she had only deployed the story to score a debating point against Biden. Stephen Colbert asked her directly: “"How do you go from being such a passionate opponent on such bedrock principles for you, and now you guys seem to be pals?" “It was a debate,” she replied. Seeking clarity, Colbert followed up: “So you didn't mean it?" "It was a debate," Harris repeated. Okay. I suppose we have to take from that that Harris does not necessarily mean the things she says in debates.

While she’s known as a fairly weak and unpopular politician, Harris does have some assets in a race against Donald Trump. She can obviously hammer him over the fact that his Supreme Court stripped women’s fundamental constitutional right to an abortion, an act that was seriously unpopular. The contrast between a prosecutor and a convicted felon is striking. Previous campaign advertising emphasized Harris’s record of putting people behind bars versus Trump’s flouting of the law, and she is already saying that she has “seen Donald Trump’s type” because she spent so long prosecuting fraudsters and sexual predators. Those of us who are critical of the criminal punishment system may grind our teeth to see “Kamala is a cop” used as a virtue rather than a dig, but since Trump and the Republicans try to attack Democrats as soft on crime, a key angle of attack is neutralized. In fact, even Kamala’s propensity to laugh in public might work somewhat to her advantage. Trump has christened her “Laughin’ Kamala” (not his finest sobriquet, which would have to be Low Energy Jeb or Meatball Ron). Trump himself rarely laughs, and while Harris might need to tone down some of her public displays of mirth, the fact is that normal people do laugh. Kamala Harris has some of the same quality that worked so well for George W. Bush in that she seems like the kind of person you might like to have a beer with. She may be able to paint Trump as freakishly joyless and cruel. 

I don’t think we know enough about Kamala Harris yet to know whether (1) she has previously untapped reserves of political skill that can help her beat Donald Trump or (2) she would be an effective president who would actually change the country for the better. She needs to step up fast, because Trump and J.D. Vance have fascistic tendencies and the threat they pose is very real. It is hard for me to disagree with the analysis Chris Hedges wrote, explaining that the threat to democracy we now face has come about because corporate Democrats have spectacularly failed in their governance, creating an opening for Trump. Hedges is cynical about Harris and believes that she will be a status quo candidate who cannot effectively counter Trump’s anti-establishment pitch: 

The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties. The Democrats, tools of Wall Street, gave us Trump, and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020. They look set to give us Trump again. God help us.

As for myself, I am not at all sure how this will go. Harris’ record suggests she’s likely to flop. This magazine thought her 2020 campaign would be impressive. It was not. Nor has her vice presidency been. But even if she is elected, and succeeds in vanquishing Trump, the question is: what then? Because until the U.S. state manages to deliver for working people, the threat of a Trumpism (with or without Trump himself) will not be vanquished. Let us hope to God that Kamala Harris can somehow rise to meet the historical moment.