Bloomberg Businessweek (October, 2024)

Год выпуска: October, 2024

Автор: Bloomberg Businessweek

Жанр: Бизнес

Издательство: «Bloomberg Businessweek»

Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке)

Качество: OCR

Количество страниц: 116

Looking at Harris From the Left

Kamala Harris’ sudden ascension to Democratic presidential nominee has energized the party faithful. It’s also stoked quiet anxiety among Democrats across the ideological spectrum about what she would do if elected president-a feeling that’s particularly acute among progressives, who aren’t certain she’ll support their economic agenda the way Joe Biden has.

Harris is a much stronger candidate than Biden: On that, everyone agrees. But beyond beating Donald Trump, her priorities are unusually opaque. Harris is unique among recent major-party presidential nominees in that she didn’t participate in the primary process and thus avoided the gauntlet of debates, interviews, press scrutiny and factional pressures that typically produce a clear picture of a nominee’s top priorities and agenda. Instead, Harris is getting a free pass. That’s because Democrats’ desire to beat Trump is so strong that almost everyone is lining up behind her, despite whatever private concerns they have.

There were few signs of dissent at the Democratic convention in Chicago. The leading lights of the populist left, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all dutifully testified on her behalf. Rather than try to pressure Harris for specific policy or personnel commitments, most progressive leaders took the gentler approach of touting Biden’s unexpected left turn after his 2020 victory as a positive example she should emulate.

“We saw something exemplary with the way Joe Biden embraced Bernie Sanders and his movement,” says former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “He understood how important it was for the unity of the party. Harris is hitting the notes that say, to me, she understands how important it is to have a progressive economic populist message.”

Biden did more than pay lip service to progressives. He gave them genuine influence, allowing people like Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez to help shape his priorities and staff his administration. Biden’s choice of Lina Khan to chair the Federal Trade Commission and Gary Gensler to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, both anatnema to tne business community, were evidence of the left’s ascendance under a president long known for representing the corporate wing of the party. Key aides, such as former chief of staff Ron Klain, became trusted liaisons to left-leaning interest groups and advocated inside the White House on their behalf. Over the last decade, a centerpiece of the progressive strategy to gain power in the Democratic Party was to position a rising generation of regulators and cabinet officials to eventually take control, a prospect that a Biden reelection would have all but ensured.

One of the central debates on the sidelines of the Democratic convention in Chicago was about how Harris would approach business and the economy-and, specifically, whether she’d embrace the rapprochement between Biden and the left on economic matters. “Folks are super, super, super nervous,” says a top progressive strategist, who requested anonymity to avoid angering Harris’ campaign. “We’re all trying to convince ourselves it’s fine. But we’re really just glomming onto policy stuff she’s put out, and we know that’s a pretty thin reed.”

Harris has, of course, run in a Democratic presidential primary before. In 2020 she was part of the large field that encompassed everyone from Sanders, Warren and de Blasio on the left to Biden in the center. But her actions in that race raised more questions about her beliefs than they answered.

Initially, Harris aligned herself with what looked to be a rising Democratic left. She was the first senator to cosponsor Sanders’ Medicare for All plan, a vast restructuring of the US health-care system. She also lined up with progressives to support a ban on fracking on public lands and the decriminalization of unauthorized border crossings. But once it became clear that these positions were unpopular outside of the Democratic activist class, Harris began awkwardly backing away from them, drawing sharp rebukes from progressives.

Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders, accused her of trying to co-opt the Medicare for All “brand name” without supporting the underlying policy. Biden slammed her, too. “You can’t beat President Trump with double-talk,” he said in a debate. Harris’ wavering fed a broad suspicion that she was a political opportunist, willing to take whatever positions were necessary to get elected. But her support evaporated, and she dropped out before Iowa.

Being Biden’s partner in an administration that’s prioritized many progressive goals, from championing organized labor to reinvesting in US manufacturing, has bought Harris only modest goodwill from the left. That’s partly because progressives attribute Biden’s pivot to the left as having been driven by personal conviction and his desire to shape his legacy at the end of a long career. They don’t consider Harris to have been a major influence.

They also see the incentive she has to publicly distance herself from Biden’s economic stewardship, to avoid sharing blame for the inflation spike that weakened his standing. On Aug. 16, Harris traveled to North Carolina to deliver what her campaign billed as a major economic address. Many on the left winced when she declared, “Now is the time to chart a new way forward.”

Such statements have only fueled liberal suspicion that she’ll cozy up to business. In Chicago, some of her surrogates suggested she would indeed take a friendlier approach than Biden did. Former Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker told the audience at a Bloomberg Businessweek event that Harris is “more interested in working with business and labor, side by side, as opposed to defining herself as: I’m on one side of that fence or the other.”

Several wealthy Harris donors are pushing her team to replace top federal regulators such as Khan and Gensler-both heroes of the progressive wing of the party. Khan has drawn the ire of billionaire moguls such as IAC Inc. Chairman Barry Diller and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman for blocking mergers and taking an aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement. Gensler has been vil-lainized by Wall Street, and particularly the digital-asset industry, for the SEC’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies. In an interview with CNBC, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban praised Harris as “pro-business” and told her campaign to oust Gensler and “put my name in for the SEC.” Diller, Hoffman and Cuban were among the 88 business leaders who endorsed Harris in a Sept. 6 public letter.

Still, there are signs that Harris’ embrace of business interests may be more rhetorical than substantive, and that she intends to continue many of the Biden policies that revitalized the post-pandemic economy, lifted markets and delivered gains for the middle class. Her clearest overture to the left was her choice of vice president. “Selecting Tim Walz was a very good first step,” says Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “I think the enthusiasm we see for him is a reflection of the strong populist policies he instituted as Minnesota governor and shows that that’s where the energy in the party lies.”

Progressives were also encouraged by the outcome of a rare intraparty ideological dispute that played out over the summer. In a July CNN interview, Hoffman, who’s given $10 million to the Harris campaign, accused Khan of “waging war on American business” and said he’d like Harris to replace her at the FTC. Hoffman sits on the board of Microsoft Corp., whose licensing deal with startup Inflection AI has come under FTC scrutiny.

The blowback to his comment was swift and severe. “No one-not Reid Hoffman, not Elon Musk, not any other billionaire-should be able to buy our elections,” Sanders said, amplifying the attack in social media ads. In a cleanup interview a few days later, Hoffman said he would not push Harris to fire Khan.

Overall, progressives are pleased by how aggressively the administration has pursued antitrust actions since Harris’ elevation in July. “Just since the convention, the Justice Department has sued RealPage for helping landlords collude to fix rental prices, the FTC’s court case blocking the Kroger-Albertsons supermarket merger has gotten underway, and they’ve announced they’re looking at the Mars-Kellanova merger,” says Lindsay Owens, a former top adviser to Warren who runs the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic think tank. “What it suggests to me is that the progressive economic agenda is ascendant and that folks like Reid Hoffman are in retreat.”

On Labor Day, Harris gave another indication that her views may not differ so much from Biden’s. She told an audience of Pittsburgh union workers that she opposes, as Biden does, the $14 billion bid by Japan-based Nippon Steel Corp, to acquire United States Steel Corp.-a deal that hinges on the approval of federal regulators. “It is vital for our nation to maintain strong American steel companies,” she said. Within days, word spread that Biden is preparing to block the takeover outright.

But even the most optimistic progressives acknowledge that Harris’ sphinx-like campaign leaves them unsure of what she would ultimately do in the White House. “I’ll admit, I’m not able to read all the tea leaves,” says de Blasio. “The jury’s still out on how she sees the role of the business community.”

Remarks

• In office, Biden turned left. Would Harris stay there?

In Context

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• Spare a thought for your local election worker
• The Chinese phonemaker that rules in Africa
• More drivers are leasing—not buying—EVs
• Banco do Brasil’s Tarciana Medeiros is having a great run
• Israel’s other crisis: A budget brawl
• The Right Stuff: The best tools to make you sweat
• A Walk With: Sean Evans, the spicy host of Hot Ones

In View

• How the US can catch up to China on EVs
• A package design dispatch from the olive oil wars
• Trump’s tariffs would backfire on the US
• Should Uber drivers be treated like employees?

In Depth

• The demise of Hollywood has been greatly exaggerated
• Why horror endures
• Xbox expands beyond the living room
• Ones to watch in the world of entertainment
• Who is Kamala Harris?
• Apple, from “Think Different” to Big Brother
• Inside a Siberian poker-bot army
• The best business schools of 2024-25

Pursuits

• Spending millions on manual transmissions
• Hire Al Judy Garland to read you The Wizard of Oz
• Movies, music, museums: Pursuits picks for October
• Pay your respects to the place where bubbly was born
• Who owned the art can count as much as who made it
• These days the CEO is wearing a tee
• Watch Club: Of course the Dracula comes in a coffin
• Serving closed-loop cocktails and climate-proof grains
• You can stay in an English manor house—in New Jersey
• Sometimes earbuds just don’t cut it

Last Thing

• Can you find the corporate connections?