Everything old is new again

As early as 2009, pundits took to branding then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris the “female Barack Obama” or “next Barack Obama.” This week, the parallels finally began to actually emerge.

It was always a clumsy comparison, born in part from the political press corps having little frame of reference for non-white politicians on the national stage. But it also benefited Harris, serving as the narrative backdrop of her ascent from local DA to California Attorney General to U.S. senator (both races in which she received Obama’s endorsement). When she entered the presidential race in 2019, Harris’s campaign played up her potential to replicate the winning “Obama coalition.”

After the collapse of that campaign and the stumbles of her early vice presidency, the comparison fell out of fashion. As recently as a few months ago, there was little indication it had ever really been a gift — few could shine when viewed through the prism of a groundbreaking historical figure who also happens to be the most popular politician in America. But now, with Harris unexpectedly in the driver’s seat of the presidential race, she’s suddenly showing flashes of the mantle pundits pushed on her, albeit in a different way than many expected.

Exactly one month to the day since the Republican National Convention opened and four days before Democrats begin their own gathering in Chicago, Harris is riding high: She leads Donald Trump in polling averages from RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, while forecasting guru Nate Silver’s model gives her a nearly 56% chance of winning. Most notably, the exuberance that exploded from the party after President Biden’s withdrawal has not worn off; on a tour of all seven swing states over the last week, Harris and Tim Walz were greeted by tens of thousands of supporters.

That reception has reawakened comparisons to the last Democrat to reel in crowds of that size. Focus groups are likening their rhetoric. Sen. Chris Murphy calls the campaign’s energy “very similar to 2008.” Even Obamaworld veterans see similarities: Stephanie Cutter, one of several former Obama aides to join the Harris campaign recently, wrote on Twitter this week that she “hadn’t seen anything like this in 16 years.”

The focus on energy and style is understandable — multiple plugged-in sources have told me that state and local parties are seeing volunteer numbers rival the 2008 campaign. But it obscures the real story of the past few weeks: Harris is adopting a broader Obamaesque persona.

“Only in America is it possible for [us] together to make it to the White House,” the vice president said of her running mate when they first appeared in Philadelphia. “Only in America,” she repeated in speeches across the swing state tour, often drowned out by chants of “USA.” The phrase coincidentally echoes the title of the Brooks & Dunn song that blared across Denver’s Invesco Field after Obama finished his 2008 DNC address. That speech, in which he called six times for Americans to take more personal “responsibility” and closed by quoting Scripture, displayed an often forgotten but central ingredient to the former president’s political success: a fluency in the language of middle America.

The Harris campaign is unmistakably emulating that model. It has returned to a style of messaging on immigration not seen by a major Democrat in over a decade, releasing ads this week that tout her determination to “hire thousands more border agents” and “fix the border.” Echoing what became a signature Obama turn of phrase, her stump speech frames her campaign as an effort to unify the country “from red states to blue states, from the heartland to the coast.” Every rally is studded with language aimed squarely at rebutting perceptions of coastal liberalism, from celebrations of “the promise of America” to refrains of “we love our country.”

The Harris campaign is also signaling an offensive strategy that pairs populist economics with abortion rights — a playbook with direct precedent in the Obama 2012 campaign. That year, Democrats blanketed heartland states and exurban communities with ads savaging Mitt Romney’s business career and conservative economic policies while relentlessly reminding suburban enclaves of his positions on contraception and abortion. Sen. Patty Murray, who oversaw a near-sweep of the battleground contests as Senate Democrats’ campaign chief in 2012, drew a parallel to the successes of that cycle. “We saw that in 2012 during races like Senator [Claire] McCaskill's,” Murray said. “We are seeing it when abortion rights are winning at the ballot box in deep red states.”

The first woman of color to carry a major party banner, Harris has ditched the approach her immediate predecessors atop the Democratic ticket took on issues of racial injustice. In 2016, Hillary Clinton spoke more overtly about race than had Obama, decrying “barriers of bigotry” and deploying phrases like “systemic racism” and “intersectionality” that were previously relegated to college campuses or activist groups. Biden made similarly explicit appeals four years later. This was, in part, due to events outside their control: Clinton’s campaign came after the swift cultural change of Obama’s second term that, from Ferguson to Caitlyn Jenner, made the Democratic Party both more culturally liberal and more emboldened, while Biden was nominated amid the nationwide uproar following George Floyd’s killing.

But their positioning was also resultant from their race and records. In order to assuage concerns about their commitment to racial justice, to motivate voters suspicious of their life experiences or past support for measures like mass incarceration, the Clinton and Biden campaigns made the decision to be more explicit about sensitive and polarizing issues like racism and policing. Like Obama, Harris does not face the same problem. And like Obama, her campaign seems to have the flexibility to more fully embrace Americana messaging.

Harris’ willingness to dispense with recent precedent is extending to the often ominous tone both Clinton and Biden took when speaking about Trump; Axios reported this week that she “wants a clean break from Biden's often-backward-looking lens on democracy.” In its place is a sunny, forward-looking message far more reminiscent of the 44th president. “Some of the Harris-Obama analogies are overly facile, but there are a lot of similarities in the message,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as communications director in both the Obama White House and 2008 campaign. “Hopeful, future-oriented, inclusive, but populist. Like Obama, Harris has captured something special — a real desire for change and a belief that we can break out of the depressing politics of the moment.”

Of course, Obama’s legacy was formed as much by his ability to execute at high-stakes, high-pressure moments. Before taking the stage at the 2004 DNC, he famously bragged, “I'm LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I got some game.” Twenty years later, Harris’s game will be tested at her own convention next week. Next stop, Chicago.  

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