The Democratic Party political establishment and its corporate and Wall Street financial backers have rallied behind the presidential candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, one day after the announcement by President Joe Biden that he was ending his reelection campaign.
Virtually every top elected Democrat endorsed Harris Sunday or Monday, including every senator and governor who has been mentioned in the corporate media as a potential rival. This includes governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, as well as senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy and Rafael Warnock.
Whitmer announced that she would be a co-chair of the Harris for President campaign, the same role she played in the Biden reelection campaign.
According to a running tally by the New York Times, all 23 Democratic governors have endorsed Harris, along with 41 out of 51 senators and 184 out of 212 members of the House of Representatives. Only one senator has publicly refused to endorse her, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was the most right-wing member of the Democratic caucus until he left to sit as an independent earlier this year.
House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, who played a key role in the pressure campaign to force Biden out of the race, waited a day to issue a statement endorsing Harris, but finally did so Monday afternoon. The two top congressional Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have remained publicly neutral, reportedly to maintain the pretense that Harris is not being “coronated” in a closed-door process dictated by the party leadership, although that is obviously the case.
In keeping with the promotion of identity politics by the Democrats, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and various other groups in and out of Congress based on race, gender and sexual orientation have embraced the Harris campaign. Hosannas are being sung for the prospective “first woman president,” as they were for Hillary Clinton before her loss to Donald Trump in 2016, amplified by applause for the first black woman and first Asian-American to receive the presidential nomination of one of the two main capitalist parties.
Following Biden’s own endorsement of Harris, which came in a separate statement issued on Twitter/X 15 minutes after he posted his withdrawal letter, the resources of the Biden reelection campaign have been turned over to Harris entirely. Campaign officials told all staff members they now had jobs working for Harris.
The campaign organization has been formally relabeled “Harris for President,” and she has full access to the $96 million in campaign cash it held in its bank accounts. This sum was quickly doubled as more than $100 million in donations came in to the Harris campaign in the first 24 hours, the bulk of it in small-dollar online donations to the official Democratic online portal.
Billionaire and multi-millionaire donors also showed their approval, according to a report by Politico under the headline, “Harris’ big-donor money bomb.” A single pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, reported $150 million in new funding commitments since Biden’s withdrawal from the race Sunday afternoon. A major factor in Biden’s pull-out was the decision of several big donors to hold back $90 million in pledges they had made to his reelection campaign.
Convention delegates are also being mobilized to rubber-stamp the Harris nomination. The first three state delegations to be polled Sunday night—North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee—voted overwhelmingly to back Harris. The New Jersey and Connecticut delegations were to meet Monday, and there is little doubt that Harris will receive near-unanimous votes at these and other caucuses.
To challenge Harris for the nomination, a candidate would require the support of 300 convention delegates, no more than 50 of them from a single state. No one has yet announced such a challenge, and Senator Manchin, who was reported to be considering it, said Monday he would not be a candidate.
While Democratic Party leaders and their corporate media allies are hoping to revive their flagging electoral prospects by presenting Harris as a younger and more attractive candidate than the decrepit Biden, there has not been the slightest change in the right-wing program of the Democrats, backing all-out war with Russia in Ukraine, Israeli genocide in Gaza, and attacks on the living standards and democratic rights of the working class at home.
Nor is there any discussion of Harris’s own right-wing political record, including nearly two decades as a prosecutor in California. She was so identified as a law-and-order prosecutor that Donald Trump sent her campaign contributions in two election campaigns.
The World Socialist Web Site made several detailed analyses of Harris’s record in the course of the 2019-2020 election campaign, when she first ran for president, then dropped out before any votes were actually cast in the primaries, and was then named by Biden as his running mate.
One commentary noted the political dilemma that proved fatal to Harris’ presidential campaign:
Harris, like the rest of the Democratic field, is trying to posture as a progressive alternative to Trump, while, in her case, seeking to split the difference between Biden, the “moderate” frontrunner, and his two main challengers from the “left” wing of the party, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Harris has tried to have it both ways, combining the “electability” argument of Biden with the suggestion that, as a former prosecutor, she would aggressively challenge Trump.
We noted that Democratic Party leaders sought to make use of her law-and-order background and position her as a future candidate for national office:
Senate Democratic leaders promoted Harris from the start, giving her plum committee assignments, including Budget, Homeland Security and Judiciary, where she was heavily publicized for her role in the questioning of Supreme Court nominee, now justice, Brett Kavanaugh.
Most revealing was her appointment to the Intelligence Committee in 2017—the only newly elected Democrat to be given such a critical position, and an indication that, as far as the Democratic Party establishment and the military-intelligence apparatus were concerned, Harris is a “safe pair of hands.”
Harris has personal connections to the highest levels of the military-intelligence apparatus. Her sister Maya, who was a senior policy adviser to the 2016 Clinton presidential campaign and chaired Kamala’s abortive 2020 presidential campaign, is married to Tony West, general counsel for Uber and former United States associate attorney general in the Obama administration.
Maya Harris also edited drafts of Stanford University law professor Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. The work, which spent a significant amount of time on the New York Times bestseller list, argued that a new racial caste system existed in the United States, largely enforced by the actions of poor whites, which far outweighed any and all considerations of class as a significant social division.
The WSWS commented:
However, despite the efforts to entrench race and gender in American politics, the demise of Harris’s presidential bid highlights the inability of identity politics to gain a significant foothold within the working class. For the vast majority of the population, Harris’s constant invocations of her identity did little to convince them that she was in any way a progressive candidate. Rather, she was recognized as a pro-corporate Democrat, the stock-in-trade of the party as a whole.
Corporate America certainly recognized her real class loyalty. After Biden selected her as his running mate, the Wall Street Journal wrote that financiers had breathed a “sigh of relief,” while the industry publication American Banker noted that her steadiest stream of campaign funding had come from financial industry professionals and their most trusted law firms. Just before she ended her presidential campaign, Harris boasted the most billionaire backers, including Gordon Getty of the oil industry fortune.
At that time, August 2020, SEP National Secretary Joseph Kishore wrote:
In the midst of this monumental political, economic and social crisis, and against the backdrop of so much suffering, the American people are to be offered the “choice” between the fascistic Trump, the conman from New York, and a Democratic Party ticket headed by a corporate shill from Delaware and an ex-prosecutor from California. This says everything about the degraded state of American politics.
Now that the corporate shill has stepped down and the ex-prosecutor has moved up, the American people will again be offered that “choice,” under conditions where both capitalist parties have moved drastically to the right.
The Republican Party is an openly fascistic instrument of the restoration of a president who vows to act as a dictator from “day one.” The Democratic Party is focused entirely on escalating the war with Russia in Ukraine, sustaining the Israeli genocide in Gaza and preparing for an even greater war against China.
The central issue remains the building of a mass political movement of the working class, based on a socialist program, and independent of and opposed to both major parties of American capitalism, the Democrats and Republicans.