Journalists and other Democratic activists are at least pretending to be excited about Kamala Harris as the party's nominee. They don't really have a choice at this point. "She's not our best candidate, but she’s gonna be the candidate," a Democratic delegate from Harris's home state of California told Politico last week. "There's no point in not getting on board."
Back in 2020, when President Joe Biden was still deciding who to pick as his running mate, California Democrats were especially adamant that Harris was not the best candidate for the job, according to This Will Not Pass, the 2022 book by reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.
Biden was reportedly "startled by the ferocity" of the anti-Harris sentiment among California Democrats in 2020, according to the book. When Karen Bass, then a member of Congress from Los Angeles, was floated as a possible running mate, leading Democrats from California lobbied aggressively on her behalf, making the case for Bass as a preferable alternative to Harris.
David Crane, a longtime Democratic activist in California, was among those urging Biden campaign to choose Bass because she wasn't a self-absorbed politician. "In contrast to Kamala Harris," Crane told Biden's team, "Karen cares about something greater than herself."
Martin and Burns recounted how as soon as Bass's name was mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate, negative stories about her surfaced in the press. Many Democrats suspected a consulting firm with ties to Harris was behind the opposition research. At one point, former White House adviser Susan Rice called Harris and urged her to "call off her hatchet men."
Ultimately the Biden campaign decided Harris was the "safest choice," not because they found her particularly impressive—they didn't. "Harris was neither the candidate who most greatly impressed Biden's vice presidential search committee, nor the person his advisers saw as most immediately prepared for the presidency," Marin and Burns wrote. Nevertheless, Biden advisers reckoned that her experience in the 2020 Democratic primary, even though her campaign ended in failure, made her "more prepared" than others for the challenges of a general election.
These stories are a reminder that Harris has always been a controversial political figure, especially among Democrats in her home state. Maybe she's not as likable as the mainstream media would have you believe.