The Democratic ticket has enjoyed a rise in the polls since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the party’s candidate for president last month, but controversy remains over party leaders’ decision to select Harris without holding primary elections.
“[The] Democratic Party’s choice of Harris was undemocratic − and the latest evidence of party leaders distrusting party voters,” read the headline of a recent article by Beth Daley in the website The Conversation.
“For the first time since 1968, the Democratic nominee will win the nomination without winning a single primary vote… it would be a culmination of the elite-oriented trends that have shaped the nominating process since 1984, in which party elites have played an increasingly large role in shaping the presidential nomination,” Daley warned. “If Democrats truly want to make this election about democracy, they might start by looking at the recent trends in their own house.”
Analyst Richard Morgan considered America’s democratic deficit as demonstrated during previous presidential administrations, such as that of Gerald Ford in the 1970s. Ford was selected to be Richard Nixon’s vice president after the resignation of Spiro Agnew in 1973 then became president the following year when Nixon stepped down amid the sprawling Watergate scandal. He is notable for having served as both president and vice president of the United States without winning a single vote.
Harris has also come under scrutiny for her political track record, with critics accusing her of opportunism. “Her record as a [San Francisco District Attorney]… sounds spotty, with her embracing two different extremes at different times – from strong against drugs and crime to weak,” said former US Justice Department prosecutor Ronald Sievert in an interview with Sputnik.
Harris has received criticism from some in the Democratic Party who accuse her of running as a self-styled “tough on crime” politician in the years before Black Lives Matter and a string of high-profile police shootings brought a renewed focus to criminal justice reform. She was famously criticized by former Democratic Party Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a primary debate in 2020 for her record as District Attorney and California’s attorney general during which she enforced heavy penalties for drug possession.
“When you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives you did not, and worse yet in the case of those who were on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to [turn it over],” said Gabbard during an exchange often credited with ending Harris’s previous run for president.
“There is no excuse for that and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology.”
Harris’s acceptance speech during the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago has been slammed by many within the party for its hawkish tone. The Democratic candidate signaled strong support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza and the Western proxy war in Ukraine while also receiving an endorsement from controversial former CIA director Leon Panetta.
Panetta delivered a speech praising Harris during which he claimed he was “proud” to have served in the US Army and as head of the CIA. US military aggression throughout the Middle East during the so-called “War on Terror” is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 4.5 million people while the CIA has been implicated in numerous coups and human rights violations.
“In her speech [Harris] was talking about how [former US President Donald] Trump supposedly coddled [foreign leaders] like Putin, and that's totally false,” said CovertAction Magazine managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program recently. “Trump had a pretty hardline policy toward Russia. He pulled out of the INF Treaty. He ramped up weapons supplies to Ukraine. So that's just like an extreme right-wing position that they're adopting.”
“They're celebrating this war in Ukraine [that] siphoned off billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a sinkhole just like Afghanistan, and a lot of those weapons have been stolen. And this party is cheerleading for that. So that's where they are.”
The 2024 presidential campaign cycle represents the third in a row during which Democratic Party leaders have intervened heavily to boost their favored candidate. Leaked DNC emails revealed the extent to which party officials sought to subvert Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ candidacy during 2016’s party primary while former President Barack Obama intervened to once again undermine Sanders in 2020.
2024 marks the first year in decades that a major US political party’s presidential candidate has been chosen without a democratic primary process, and observers worry about the precedent set by the Democrat Party’s end run around its own voters. The United States will likely continue to intervene throughout the world in the name of safeguarding freedom and democracy, but its own deficit of both has become increasingly impossible to ignore.