Who the heck is Kamala Harris?

I’m not writing as a conservative, though politically speaking, that’s what I am. Nor am I writing as someone who might rejoin the Republican Party once Donald Trump is no longer controlling it, though I might.

I’m writing as nothing more than a simple journalist asking a simple question: Who the heck is Kamala Harris?

We know she speaks in platitudes and that it’s hard to follow where she’s going when asked an inconvenient question. We know she flip-flops on issues when it is politically expedient.

But even now that she’s the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, we still don’t know who she is or what she really believes.

In fact, you can make the case, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board recently did, that Harris “is the least-known candidate in modern history.”

She talks a lot about “freedom” and “joy” and “a new way forward,” hoping fluff like that, along with a complicit media, can carry her on gossamer wings all the way to the Oval Office.

So the upcoming presidential debate is arguably the most important single event of this political season — an event that might finally help us understand who this person is who went, in the blink of an eye, from being widely viewed as a political liability to becoming her party’s nominee for president, without winning a single vote in any primary.

We may not know who the heck Kamala Harris is, but we do know that she’s either tied with or beating Donald Trump in more than a few head-to-head polls, and she’s winning in some crucial battleground states. For a relative unknown, that’s not bad.

Then again, maybe she’s doing so well precisely because she’s so unknown. Maybe the more we learn about Harris, the less we’re going to like her. 

As for the upcoming debate, the conventional wisdom tells us that if Trump sticks to the issues, he can win and increase his chances of going back to the White House. But if Harris gets under his skin and he resorts to insults, he will likely lose moderate undecided voters, lose the debate and then lose the election.

The question for Harris is whether she can do more than talk in generalities — whether she can answer serious questions without resorting to the word salad responses she is known for, and whether she can remain unflustered and come off looking like she actually knows what she’s talking about.

But as Rich Lowry wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece, Trump “isn’t going to beat [Harris] by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border….Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that [Harris] is weak and a phony and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class,” that “she has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office.”

Whether Trump has the discipline to pull that off remains an open question. 

We’re past Labor Day and the campaign now begins for real. And most journalists still haven’t held Harris accountable for her many flip-flops.

It’s not entirely their fault, of course, since she’s running a version of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, when his team pretty much kept him sealed away in the basement of his Delaware home, safe from inquisitive journalists who might ask questions he couldn’t coherently answer.

Yes, she’s been on the campaign trail almost every day, but reading words off a teleprompter isn’t the same as fielding unscripted questions at a news conference, something she hasn’t done yet — and may not do right up until Election Day.

In her one sit-down interview, with CNN’s Dana Bash — who, for whatever reason, didn’t ask a lot of tough follow-up questions — we heard a Harris who had moved from the left-wing progressive she was when she ran for president in 2019 to a newly-minted moderate Democrat. But we don’t know much more than the mantra with which she tried to defuse these questions — “my values have not changed” — a line she uttered repeatedly and which sounded rehearsed because it obviously was.

Was Harris sending a subtle signal to the left wing of her party? Was she telling them that, despite her convenient moves to the middle, they can still count on her do their bidding if she wins? Is that what she meant by “My values have not changed”?

Maybe the upcoming debate will shed light on the question I raised at the outset: Who the heck is Kamala Harris?

Four years ago, Biden stayed in his basement long enough to win. If his vice president can stay clear of the press and somehow get away with word salads and platitudes at the debate, lightning might strike again.

Harris is hoping voters remember why they rejected Trump the last time around. She’s hoping that those remaining undecided voters will put personality over policy this time around. And so, what she essentially is telling voters (if not in so many words) is, “Vote for me, I’m not Donald Trump.”

Okay. But that still leaves us with an important question: Who the heck is she?

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. Follow him and visit his Substack page.