James Antle of the Washington Examiner analyzes Vice President Kamala Harris’ effort to rebrand herself for the presidential campaign.
President Joe Biden was barely out of the 2024 race when the first ad for Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic front-runner dropped.
This opening argument for Harris’s presidential campaign was interesting for three reasons. It was heavy on criticism of former President Donald Trump. There were no mentions of her vice presidency or the Biden administration. Instead, the ad focused on Harris the prosecutor.
“She prosecuted sex predators,” the narrator of the 53-second spot said. “He is one.” This was accompanied by a snippet of the Access Hollywood tape with the infamous “grab them by the p***y” quote.
“She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans,” the ad continued. “He was a for-profit college.” This was paired with footage of the former president promoting the now-defunct Trump University, which paid out a $25 million settlement to ex-students who said they were deceived by the school.
“He’s owned by the big banks,” the ad went on to say. “She’s the attorney general who beat the biggest banks in America and forced them to pay homeowners $18 billion.”
The ad said Harris is “in every possible way” the “anti-Trump.”
While continuing with Biden’s Trump-centric campaign and ignoring the actual Biden-Harris record are debatable strategic choices, the most striking thing is the return to the theme of Harris as a prosecutor. The Rev. Al Sharpton amplified this message on Monday’s Morning Joe.
“If [Trump’s] friend was promoting the bout, Don King, it would be the prosecutor vs. the felon,” Sharpton said of a Trump-Harris debate as Joe Scarborough cackled approvingly. “That’s how you’d promote it.”
Harris made her bones politically as a prosecutor. She worked in two district attorneys’ offices, prosecuting child sex abuse cases, served as San Francisco’s district attorney for six years, and was elected California’s attorney general. While she was in the Senate, she was known for tough cross-examinations of Trump administration officials during hearings.
