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The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
The Whole Story: Fight For The White House: Where Harris Stands. Aired 11p-12a ET
Aired October 13, 2024 - 23:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[23:00:27]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, "THE WHOLE STORY": Welcome to THE WHOLE STORY. I'm Anderson Cooper.
After Vice President Kamala Harris became the democratic nominee, she launched an aggressive campaign to re-introduce herself to the country but with the election moving, many remain undecided and are looking at where Harris stands on the issues that matter to them before casting their ballots. Over the next hour, CNNs Audie Cornish looks at Harris' record and her promises on five key issues in this election reproductive rights immigration, foreign policy, the state of democracy, and one that most American sides there our priority. The economy
(PEOPLE CHANTING 'KAMALA')
KAMALA HARRIS (D) VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Thank you guys. Thank you, thank you.
AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT (voice over): One day after President Joe Biden announced his decision to drop out of the race and endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, addressed the campaign staff at the Wilmington, Delaware headquarters.
HARRIS: Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.
CORNISH (voice over): In her first interview as candidate, she doubled down on that commitment.
DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: If you are elected, what would you do on day one in the White House?
HARRIS: First and foremost, one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class.
CORNISH (voice over): And when Harris gave her first policy speech, that too was centered on the economy.
HARRIS: As president, I will be laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle-class that advance their economic security stability, and dignity. CORNISH (voice over): The Biden campaign was focused on economic data that showed overall growth. The idea was that voters just weren't getting the message.
The Harris version of the campaign took a different tack, emphasizing cost like health care.
HARRIS: I'll take on the issue of the cost of health care.
CORNISH (voice over): Housing.
HARRIS: Provide first-time home buyers with $25,000.00 to help with the down payment on a new home.
CORNISH (voice over): And in raising a family.
HARRIS: $6,000.00 in tax relief to families during the first year of a child's life.
CORNISH (voice over): Republicans hammered her on the costs of her proposals.
KEVIN HASSETT, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE ECONOMIC COUNCIL CHAIR: This is absolute socialism.
KEVIN O'LEARY, FOUNDER, O'LEARY VENTURES: All of these ideas are very the inflationary.
CORNISH (voice over): Even the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the plan could increase the federal deficit by $1.7 trillion over a decade.
JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: One thing she did not say is how any of this would be paid for.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: These are some expensive policies.
CORNISH (voice over): But Harris is following the lead of progressive lawmakers who blamed companies reaping post pandemic profits.
To Republicans, the plan sounds like government overreach. Economic experts are skeptical as well.
JIM TANKERSLEY, "THE "NEW YORK TIMES" WHITE HOUSE ECONOMIC POLICY REPORTER: There is not great economic evidence thus far that the bulk of the inflation we have seen or anywhere close to is caused by corporate profiteering.
CORNISH (voice over): Democrats seemed happy to embrace the new language.
REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-NY): Kamala Harris has articulated a very important plan to make sure that we are lowering costs for everyday Americans --
KRISTEN WELKER, NBC NEWS: Do you think it's smart policy, governor? GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER (D-MI): Any effort we make to keep more money in American's pockets is worth walking the path. DEJA FOXX, FORMER HARRIS 2020 STRATEGIST: When we think about young folks and what is top of mind for them, it's the cost of their groceries and their gas and child childcare.
JASMINE WRIGHT, NOTUS, REPORTER: When we're talking about the middle- class, I think that the vice president thinks about her own family.
HARRIS: I grew up in a middle-class household. For most of my childhood, we were renters. My mother saved for well over a decade to buy a home.
CORNISH (on camera): How do you describe her political personality?
SEN. LAPHONZA BUTLER (D-CA): Care, it centers around care. She has the skills of a prosecutor. She knows how to analyze the facts, put together the case. But her case starts with the care of others.
TANKERSLEY: Vice President Harris has made a focus of championing what we might call the care agenda, pushing things that were part of President Biden proposals early on.
HARRIS: Our build back agenda, which will cut the cost of childcare by more than half, extend the child tax credit and expand paid leave.
TANKERSLEY: But also things like medical debt relief, student debt relief, helping smaller businesses, minority-owned businesses getting better access to capital.
HARRIS: We have secured tens of billions of dollars in private sector investment for small businesses and communities across America.
ASTEAD HERNDON, "THE NEW YORK TIMES" NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER: Things like supporting middle class families and kind of creating an infrastructure of support around them.
[23:05:05]
HARRIS: And a lot of our work also has been designed to help not only families with children, but those who are responsible for the care giving of seniors and people with disabilities.
WRIGHT: She talks about the sandwich economy. People who take care of their children, and people who take care of their aging parents. That's always been something of a focus for her.
When she was attorney general, her mother was diagnosed with cancer.
HARRIS: I spent many hours with her at the hospital fortunately, however, I had the type of job then, where I could take the time I needed to be with my mother but far too many others cannot.
WRIGHT: A Harris economic agenda for 2024 would have a lot of those same care economy components.
CORNISH (voice over): But the vice president must convince voters she is better equipped on this issue than the business minded Trump.
TANKERSLEY: And so, the challenge will be, can she get them to be more confident and how she would be as an economic policy steward.
HERNDON: The Biden administration feels like it has a good economic story to tell and Vice President Harris was part of that.
CORNISH (voice over): They did after all defy economists' predictions of a full-on recession and by many measures, the US pandemic recovery was among the strongest in the world.
HERNDON: They want to tout the economic numbers that they think are good.
CORNISH (voice over): But that didn't help Americans stuck on the numbers that were not so good.
In 2022, inflation reached a 40-year high, and the current administration has battled to bring it down. There are many economists who lay the blame, at least in part, on the historic and expensive legislation passed by the Biden-Harris administration in the aftermath of the pandemic.
STEPHEN MOORE, DISTINGUISHED FELLOW, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: When Trump left office, the inflation weight was one-and-a-half percent and then 18 months later after Biden and Harris spent five trillion dollars, we had a nine percent inflation rate.
TANKERSLEY: I think there are some economists who argue that it was still a mistake because of the additional contribution it had to inflation and inflation is definitely a huge vulnerability for her.
CORNISH (voice over): Especially as she tries to run on the Biden White House record, one Republicans are seizing on.
REP. JASON SMITH (R-MO): Vice President Harris was the deciding vote on the American Rescue Plan and also the Inflation Reduction Act that led to inflation going up more than 20.1 percent.
HERNDON: The economy was certainly Biden's biggest weakness. The question will be whether Harris receives the same level of blame for inflation.
TANKERSLEY: What will be seen from Vice President Harris so far is an effort to both project optimism about the economy and pride in the policies you have done.
HARRIS: We were facing one of the worst economic crises in modern history. And today by virtually every measure, our economy is the strongest in the world.
TANKERSLEY: While also empathizing with voters feeling their pain for high prices.
HARRIS: Still we know that many Americans don't yet feel that progress in their daily lives. TANKERSLEY: It is a very difficult balancing act, but she's been trying to navigate that in the time since her campaign started.
CORNISH (voice over): Up next.
WRIGHT: The leaked decision of Dobbs changed, I think, the trajectory of her vice presidency.
SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Women in America no longer have a constitutional right to an abortion.
HARRIS: Well, we say, how dare they.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:11:53]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The day the leak dropped, about the Dobbs decision was really an earthquake inside the White House.
ALEXIS MCGILL JOHNSON, PRESIDENT AND CEO, PLANNED PARENTHOOD: What we have seen tonight is not just a draft. We believe this is a roadmap for how they will take Roe down.
(PROTESTERS SHOUTING "MY BODY, MY RIGHT")
WRIGHT: The leaked decision of Dobbs changed, I think, the trajectory of her vice presidency.
CORNISH (voice over): In May of 2022, POLITICO published a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion, not just any opinion it was Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, the decision to overturn Roe versus Wade.
JOHNSON: I think everybody remembers where they were when they saw the actual words come down.
We were all outraged. Vice president Harris was outraged.
JAMAL SIMMONS, FORMER COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR FOR VP KAMALA HARRIS: The vice president was due to speak that night at Emily's List. One of the big political groups in the country that focuses on women and reproductive rights.
So, as the vice president began talking through what her concerns were, at some point, she started to go into a riff and that riff lead to how dare they do this, how dare they come for women's rights? How dare they change this law?
HARRIS: Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. Well, we say, how dare they.
WRIGHT: She gets up on that stage and she absolutely just blows the house down.
HARRIS: How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body. WRIGHT: And it felt like a shift in the room. This incredibly focused person, this incredibly focus politician who used fighting these restrictions on abortion as her north star.
CORNISH (on camera): It's interesting to me that she would embrace this, not for just the obvious reasons of being a woman politician, et cetera. But it is right at the moment when in some states, abortion would be criminalized specifically, right?
So now, it makes sense that the prosecutor wants to jump in
BUTLER: The rolling back of Roe was an abject attack on people, women who actually needed to get reproductive care and so, her comments about how dare they, the rejection of this sentiment that other people, men can make decisions about what rights women have about their own bodies.
And so, when those rights were stripped away, of course, the prosecutor in her showed up.
SIMMONS: That's the place for her legal mind really kicked in. She saw how the implication of this decision would go into so many other areas of Americans' lives that maybe most people didn't anticipate.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: A majority five justices overturned the landmark Roe versus Wade decision.
CORNISH (voice over): A month later, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court officially overturned nearly 50 years of federally protected access to abortion.
COOPER: The historic nature of today's five to four decision by the courts, conservatives cannot be emphasized enough.
[23:15:03]
JOHNSON: She immediately got on the road after Dobbs' meeting with lawmakers, meeting with providers.
SIMMONS: She met with faith leaders. She talked to college presidents. She talked a student government leaders. She was the hub for all these different groups that were thinking about these questions.
HARRIS: The statement has been made that the government has a right to come in your home and tell you as a woman and as a family what you should do with your body.
CORNISH (voice over): Vice President Harris was betting the issue would grab the attention of voters. Others weren't so sure.
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO, "THE ATLANTIC" STAFF WRITER: She sees the last supper panels of cable news pundit saying it's the economy. Poll after poll says that the economy will motivate a red wave --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Red wave or red tsunami -- PLOTT: -- in the midterm elections. And what she says is, I am talking to people every day about this, and I know that abortion rights is top of mind for that and you really saw her for the first time in her vice presidency meaningfully trust her own instincts.
JOHNSON: And it's not a surprise that everywhere that reproductive freedom was on the ballot, we won.
HARRY ENTEN, CNN DATA CORRESPONDENT: The abortion right side has won every single time.
JOHNSON: Because people across the political spectrum -- UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... to codify Roe.
JOHNSON: -- people across geographies --
SEN. MARK KELLY (D-AZ): The fundamental right --
JOHNSON: --people across faith --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... without having the religious beliefs of others forced upon her --
JOHNSON: ... and generations were outraged.
CORNISH (voice over): The vice president traveled the country on what she called a fight for reproductive freedom's tour.
Harris is believed to be the first sitting vice president or president to visit an abortion clinic.
CORNISH (on camera): Visiting a clinic, that's something politically that was seen as like a fascinating moment.
ASHLEY ETIENNE, FORMER COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR FOR VP KAMALA HARRIS: Yes, and she also took the message into those suburban areas that we typically don't go into.
CORNISH (voice over): With her on that tour, her future running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
WRIGHT: Walz really impressed her by being by her side in that moment. And so, I think it is a doubling down on the understanding that this campaign is in so many ways about reproductive rights.
HARRIS: We trust women to know what is in their best interests and not have their government telling them what to do.
HERNDON: Abortion rights are quite literally on the ballot and so for a lot of people that is going to be just as motivating for a reason to come to the polls as anything else.
CORNISH (voice over): Recent polling says two-thirds of Americans oppose the Supreme Court's decision on abortion. If elected, Vice President Harris is promising to secure federal abortion protection. HARRIS: And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as President of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.
CORNISH (voice over): But it's not when Congress passes the bill, it's if.
CORNISH (on camera): Even if Democrats won both the House and the Senate again, they'd need 60 votes --
BUTLER: True.
CORNISH (on camera): -- to cross whatever thresholds are required, right, to escape a filibuster. What are more realistic expectations for what a Harris presidency would do on abortion rights?
BUTLER: I think the realistic expectations have to be the restoration of the rights of Roe. It is realistic for women to expect that they can make their own health care decisions.
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): I believe that if Kamala Harris wins, we will likely have the votes in the Senate to change the rules in order to codify Roe versus Wade. And I think the vast majority of Americans will demand -- will demand that the Senate change the rules.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There's just hundreds of people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, it's not hundreds it's thousands.
CORNISH (voice over): Coming up.
Is this an issue she can run from?
CALABRO: I don't think it's an issue she can run from. Immigration is the most difficult issue for her.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:24:01]
CORNISH (voice over): Kamala Harris campaigning in 2019.
In her first run for the White House, immigration was unavoidable.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When you become president would you be committing to close the immigration detention centers?
HARRIS: Absolutely, on day one.
CORNISH (voice over): And remains so as Joe Biden's running mate.
HARRIS: And we will, when Joe and I are elected, get rid of any policy that is about separating children from their parents.
CORNISH (voice over): Joe Biden kicked off his presidency with a series of executive orders that addressed Trump era policies, including halting border wall construction.
And preserving the program shielding from deportation undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. But soon after --
PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The administration was grappling with a surge of unaccompanied minors at the US-Mexico border only months after President Biden took office. And many of those minors were from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
[23:25:08]
CORNISH (voice over): And there was some evidence that reversing these Trump policies helped create the border surge.
Biden decided Vice President Harris could lead a diplomatic approach. Her assignment, reach out to Central American countries directly.
CALABRO: She was in a meeting with several high-ranking officials, including Joe Biden himself and she very cogently was outlining ideas she had for alleviating some of these root causes.
And Joe Biden hears her and says, well, why don't you take that on? That sounds great.
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's no one better capable of trying to organize this for us.
HARRIS: Well, thank you, Mr. President, for having the confidence in me and there's no question that this is a challenging situation.
CORNISH (voice over): Border issues were a key feature of Harris' political upbringing in California.
SIMMONS: We've heard her talk about when she was attorney general, and she would go down to the border. She went into the some of the tunnels that existed, where people were smuggling goods, actually prosecuted people who were gun runners and human traffickers.
CORNISH (voice over): In 2016, a newly elected senator Harris said it would be a priority.
REPORTER: When you say immigration reform, I assume you mean legalization for people over here?
HARRIS: Correct.
CORNISH (voice over): But the most successful vice presidential assignments are discrete, achievable projects with clear markers of success and US immigration policy has long been a story of incremental steps.
ALVAREZ: And one source I spoke with said, ultimately the bottom line was that instead of looking at it just holistically as developing an entire region, it was wiser in ways to be very targeted and to use the private sector and get their investments and commitments to the region to try to create jobs, bolster the economy, then later focus on governance of countries to again build opportunity for people in the region so that they didn't feel like they needed to come to the US- Mexico border to achieve stability.
MURPHY: So she went out and built a public private partnership. She convinced 50 companies to spend five billion dollars in economic development in Central America.
HARRIS: Over one million people have been brought into the formal financial economy including 65,000 people who now have bank accounts because of our work and four more million people are now connected to the internet.
CORNISH (voice over): Her first official trip abroad as vice president, Guatemala in June of 2021. She talked about the role of women and economic development there. But Harris also delivered a stark message.
HARRIS: I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States -Mexico border, do not come, do not come.
The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border
CORNISH (voice over): Do not come, do not come -- what was her reaction to how that was received?
ETIENNE: It wasn't well-received coming from the daughter of immigrants and a Black woman. So, that was a moment in which I think we realize that, okay we have to talk about these things differently, although its the company line. We can't toe that line in the same way that Joe Biden can.
CORNISH (voice over): Nor could that message compete with desperate images on the nightly news of migrant caravan marches and family camped out on the US-Mexico border.
Vice President Harris sat down for an interview on NBC news with Lester Holt to assure the country the administration was taking action.
HARRIS: Okay.
LESTER HOLT, NBC NEWS HOST: Do you have any plans to visit the border?
HARRIS: I'm here in Guatemala today at some point you know, we are going to the border. We've been to the border. So this whole thing about the border. We've been to the border. We've been to the border.
HOLT: You haven't been to the border?
HARRIS: And I haven't been to Europe and I mean, I don't understand the point that you're making. I'm not just --
ETIENNE: I think it was a bad interview. It was clear. It was a very bad interview. She didn't achieve what she wanted to achieve -- CORNISH (on camera): --at that time, like when you were watching it, did you think that?
ETIENNE: Oh absolutely. Yes, I mean, absolutely.
HERNDON: She made some mistakes. One, in claiming that she had been to the border when she had not at that stage, and it played into a lot of Republican arguments that we're saying that not only were Democrats not acknowledging the crisis, they were unwilling to do anything about it.
CORNISH (voice-over): Weeks later, with pressure mounting, Harris made her first until this day, only visit to the southern border as vice president.
[23:30:08]
KAMALA HARRIS (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The President and I are absolutely committed to ensuring that our immigration system is orderly and humane.
CORNISH (voice-over): By now, the data showed what Border States already knew. The administration faced an unprecedented surge of migrants crossing the border.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So as for years, the people we were seeing at the U.S.-Mexico border came from three countries, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. Suddenly, we were seeing them from all around the world and all across the Western Hemisphere.
CORNISH (voice-over): To underscore that crisis, Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas hit on the idea of giving recently arrived migrants a one way bus ticket to Democratic cities, and notably to the Vice President's house at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.
JASMINE WRIGHT, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: I was actually with her husband Doug Emhoff and we were at an event where he was getting his COVID booster. And out of nowhere they tell us, hey, he's going to talk to about the migrant issue.
DOUG EMHOFF, SECOND GENTLEMAN OF THE UNITED STATES: Yes, I do have a reaction. I think it was shameful. These are human beings. They're using people as pawns for a political stunt.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It brought an issue that, up until this point, had really been on the U.S.-Mexico border to cities across the country.
JONATHAN BLITZER, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: I think from that moment forward, and of course that coincided with the midterm elections in 2022 really made Democrats, I think, a lot more conservative on border issues and specifically on asylum.
CORNISH (voice-over): To that end, President Biden and Vice President Harris supported negotiations on a Senate bill that would, among other things, give the President far reaching powers to restrict migrant crossings.
CORNISH: Can you share an anecdote, any kind of story about her involvement in the negotiations for that bill?
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D), CONNECTICUT: At a moment when I was wondering whether my party's leadership was going to get my back. If I negotiated a bill that was maybe tougher than what Democrats had been willing to agree to before, she called me, got me on the phone and said, don't worry, the President and I are going to have your back.
CORNISH (voice-over): The negotiations were bipartisan, leading a Republican senator to share some optimism.
SEN. JAMES LANKFORD (R), OKLAHOMA: But I do feel very positive about it because even the initial feedback has been good.
CORNISH (voice-over): But 10 days later --
MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Just four Republicans ultimately voted for it.
CORNISH (voice-over): Republicans block the bill at the behest of former President Donald Trump.
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: A lot of the senators are trying to say respectfully they're blaming it on me. I said, that's OK, please blame it on me. Please.
CORNISH (voice-over): Under President Biden, there would be no comprehensive solution. So what would a President Harris do differently?
WRIGHT: So I think that there are a couple of ways that we can look at her policies on immigration, and they're in line with what President Biden has already done, which, just in comparison, are far more strict, far more right leaning than anything that she proposed or was in favor of in 2019.
HARRIS: As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed and I will sign it into law.
(CHEERING)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Sources I've talked to, allies of her, expect that immigration is going to be top of mind for her if she were to win in November.
(CHEERING)
HARRIS: I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system.
(APPLAUSE)
HARRIS: We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border. (CHEERING)
CORNISH (voice-over): Next --
IAN BREMMER, PRESIDENT, EURASIA GROUP AND GZERO MEDIA: Being vice president is always an important foreign policy job.
CORNISH (voice-over): Harris on the world stage.
HARRIS: Russia will plead ignorance and innocence.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:39:23]
HARRIS: I, Kamala Devi Harris, do solemnly swear.
HERNDON: When Harris was sworn in as Vice President, she didn't have much experience in terms of foreign policy. This is someone who only spent a short time in the Senate and spent a lot of that time running for president. But one thing that's changed over the last four years is Harris has tried to make foreign policy a big focus of her tenure as VP.
ETIENNE: The first year we were very intentional about building out her foreign policy portfolio and it was at her direction in fact. And the good thing to the president's credit is he wasn't selfish about it. He shared. She spent every morning with him in the presidential briefing.
[23:40:04]
BREMMER: Being vice president is always an important foreign policy job. Also being vice president for Joe Biden. This is a presidency where the White House dominates foreign policy decision making. And so Kamala being in the White House and being close to and aligned with that process actually matters a lot.
CORNISH (voice-over): The White House dispatched Vice President Harris to more than 20 countries across Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. She met with more than 150 world leaders. She was put in front of some of the most pressing global challenges. But it didn't get much attention back home.
Between news of the Republican primaries, Donald Trump's criminal trials, and the hailstorm of criticism of her handling of the southern U.S. border, her foreign policy efforts flew under the radar.
ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Let's look at the Munich Security Conference, for example. I don't think it's appreciated by many Americans just how essential her role was at that conference.
CORNISH (voice-over): Widely seen as a sign of confidence, President Biden assigned Harris to lead the U.S. delegation at the influential Munich Security Conference three years in a row.
BREMMER: It was an enormous amount of exposure. It's a big deal. And I probably learned more about global security with three intense days in Munich than I can get almost anywhere else I can go.
CORNISH (voice-over): Paris's first appearance in Munich was in February of 2022.
HARRIS: This is a dynamic situation and will require us to be in constant contact.
CORNISH (voice-over): It was just days before President Vladimir Putin launched Russia's illegal invasion into Ukraine. It proved to be one of Harris's most consequential meetings abroad.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was the moment when President Zelenskyy of Ukraine was still really not taking seriously the idea of the eminence of a Russian invasion. And Kamala Harris goes and sits down with him and presents to him our intelligence in a one-on-one meeting and says, you need to take this seriously. And she's really the last major American voice that he hears before that invasion happens in terms of his own preparation.
HARRIS: Russia will plead ignorance and innocence. It will create false pretext for invasion.
CORNISH (voice-over): Later, when Russia escalated that land war, she expressed unwavering support for Ukraine's embattled President Zelenskyy.
HARRIS: We will be with you for as long as it takes.
CORNISH (voice-over): But, nearly three years after the conflict began, what would Harris do, if anything, differently to help steer that war to a close? Should she take the reins from Biden? American voters, Congress, and many U.S. allies will no doubt be looking to Harris to help turn the page, and finally, bring an end to Russia's war.
BREMMER: I think that U.S. policy to Ukraine is going to change. I think what would be different is that Trump would make those decisions unilaterally. He would call Putin, he would call Zelenskyy, he wouldn't necessarily be taking advice and certainly not coordinating with all of the other allies. Kamala Harris would.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Indonesia, ASEAN, and U.S. leaders --
CORNISH (voice-over): As Vice President, Harris worked to unite America's Indo-Pacific allies to fend off another prominent adversary, China. In 2022, days after her first meeting with President Xi Jinping, Harris spoke out against China's aggression in the South China Sea from a Philippine Coast Guard ship.
HARRIS: The United States stands with the Philippines in the face of intimidation and coercion. CORNISH (voice-over): And in 2023, she embarked on a multinational tour of Africa, a continent where U.S. foreign policy has recently ceded influence to China and Russia. Many believe at its peril.
MURPHY: I've been abroad with her at least twice. She is respected on the world stage.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, Evan Gershkovich is now on the ground.
MURPHY: I think we've all come to understand that exceptional, historic prisoner exchange deal would not have happened if not for Kamala Harris's work. The President deserves most of the credit, but some of those very difficult conversations, especially with the German Chancellor, were not conducted by President Biden, but by Vice President Harris.
Nobody should be questioning whether she's ready to step up and help run the world on day one. She's been doing it side by side with President Biden very effectively for the last four years.
CORNISH (voice-over): But without Biden by her side, what would U.S. foreign policy look like under a Kamala Harris presidency when she's no longer just implementing policy, but is instead creating it?
[23:45:06]
MURPHY: I mean the worst thing we could do is have, you know, the next president not reinvent parts of American foreign policy. You know, this is why it is important sometimes to have a generational shift in leadership, especially when it comes to national security.
HARRIS: Welcome, Mr. Prime Minister.
CORNISH: In one area where people perceive her to have kind of taken a forward position in the administration is in the area of the war that Israel is prosecuting in Gaza.
HARRIS: What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating.
CORNISH: Not that they have a vast policy difference, but that she talked about it differently. How do you see where she is now?
ETIENNE: Well, it takes us back to the interview with Lester Holt. A lesson that came out of that is that you have room and space to carve out your own voice, and you have to, because there's a different expectation from you. And that applies to the situation in Gaza.
There's a different expectation for Kamala Harris than there is for Joe Biden in terms of tone, tenor and message. I mean, the fact that she came out and said, we don't have a binary choice here, gets back to her ethos, which is I can see both people.
HARRIS: President Biden and I are working to end this war. Such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.
(CHEERING)
CORNISH: There's a lot of black voters in particular, or young activists of color, thought that they saw commonalities of oppression, et cetera --
ETIENNE: Absolutely.
CORNISH: -- when they looked at that issue. ETIENNE: Yes. So the challenge was, is how do we address both of these without compromising the other. And I think that's the message she was trying to convey. And I think that is the expectation of black people in general, and definitely of a black woman leader.
MURPHY: Kamala Harris understands that she is the next generation of leadership. She is not unwilling to challenge the foreign policy consensus if she thinks it's wrong. And she will have the opportunity to do that and meld it together with all of this real world on the ground experience she has.
HARRIS: I took on perpetrators of all kinds.
CORNISH (voice-over): Up next, Prosecutor Harris makes the case.
HARRIS: I know Donald Trump's tight.
(CHEERING)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:52:47]
CORNISH (voice-over): As a nominee and president of the United States, Joe Biden positioned himself as the guardian of democracy, protecting the country against a second Trump administration.
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Choice is clear. Donald Trump's campaign is about him, not America, not you. He's willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.
CORNISH (voice-over): Vice President Kamala Harris is continuing that theme and uses Trump's words to make her point.
HARRIS: The man has openly vowed, if reelected, that he will be a dictator on day one.
BREMMER: Biden talks about the world in terms of democracies and autocracies.
BIDEN: The United States is determined to defend and strengthen democracy.
BREMMER: And so there are good guys and there are bad guys, right? Kamala Harris views the world much more through the lens of a prosecutor. She cares about laws. She cares about norms.
CORNISH (voice-over): But when she first ran for the presidency, the former district attorney and California attorney general shied away from her legal resume.
CALABRO: When she was running for president in 2019, 2020, it's a moment where prosecutors are not really resonating well with the Democratic base. You had staffers around her say, we've got to present your background in a way that doesn't feel off putting to an electorate that is really disillusioned by law enforcement right now. A lot of times that translated to advice of don't talk about it at all.
HERNDON: She wasn't even willing to kind of call herself a prosecutor four years ago. And even though we know that that's a huge part of her career, I remember kind of asking at the time, why don't you have a criminal justice plan that you'll lay out? Why aren't you more willing to combat the criticisms from progressives, some of which you've been during for a lot of your career?
Not as if this answer wasn't something she's comfortable with. It was just an answer that when it came to the national stage, she wasn't comfortable saying at that time. And so you had her get push and pulled in a lot of directions and I think that played out really publicly.
CORNISH (voice-over): This time is different.
HARRIS: I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Scammers who broke the rules for personal gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's tight.
(CHEERING)
[23:55:24]
HERNDON: A huge part of this campaign is going to be her saying, I'm a prosecutor and I'm running against a felon. What we're seeing now is more of a willingness to own kind of the record that she's had throughout her career.
CORNISH: Do you think that she is going to talk about the former president in the context of him being a threat to democracy.
ETIENNE: It feels like to me she's talking about it and not utilizing the word democracy, but she's starting to talk about it in the context of freedoms. He's a threat to our freedoms, not just our democracy.
HARRIS: In this election, many other fundamental freedoms are at stake.
DEJA FOXX, FORMER HARRIS 2020 STRATEGIST: I think that this election, the matchup between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is still just as much about the future of our democracy. But I think when it comes to young people, they want to hear how this is going to affect their real lives.
CORNISH (voice-over): Harris allies say that has always been a priority. While much of her vice presidential portfolio was assigned to her by the President, she saw one area as critical and requested to take the lead.
JAMAL SIMMONS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Voting rights is part of what has driven, I think, Kamala Harris as both as vice president and even before that when she was in the Senate.
HARRIS: The freedom to vote. SEN. LAPHONZA BUTLER (D), CALIFORNIA: She chose to be an advocate on democracy and voting rights very early. I think, you know, those are things that truly represent her record.
HARRIS: We are forcefully working to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and -- and working to help ensure that all Americans know what they get when they vote to further encourage them to vote, knowing that it will make a difference in their lives.
HERNDON: One reason I think Vice President Harris sought to take on voting rights as an issue is because she wanted a signature policy issue that related specifically to black communities and some of the groups that helped push the Biden administration to choose her in the first place. But because of the realities of the Senate and the House, it was never very likely to pass.
CORNISH (voice-over): Despite an aggressive campaign from Vice President Harris and President Biden, Congress failed to pass the voting rights bills.
HARRIS: The motion is not agreed to.
HERNDON: So rather than being a signature accomplishment, I think the issue functioned in the first couple years as a signature failure.
CORNISH (voice-over): Harris promises as president, she'll keep pushing.
HARRIS: When I am president, we are going to finally pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
MURPHY: Kamala is committed to voting rights and democracy reform, and I think it's actually going to be essential that she run on that message.
CORNISH (voice-over): But passing any voting rights legislation likely comes down to winning both the House and the Senate.
HERNDON: If those things don't happen, then the possibility of passage of things like voting rights completely evaporate.
CORNISH (voice-over): Still, as a candidate, Harris is making voting rights one of her signature issues. All while some Republicans are accusing her of subverting the will of voters.
BIDEN: My fellow Americans --
CORNISH (voice-over): After President Biden's decision to pull out of the race.
HERNDON: Republicans have tried to frame the coronation of Harris or her elevation as anti-democratic.
TRUMP: We have somebody that hasn't received one vote for president and she's running. CORNISH (voice-over): There were even voices within the Democratic Party that speculated there should have been more competition for the nomination.
SEN. JOE MANCHIN (I-WV): I think going through some sort of a process would have been very enlightening.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We need a fair, open, and democratic process. Ultimately, I want the convention to decide this.
HARRIS: It is my intention to go out and earn this nomination.
CORNISH (voice-over): And she did. Harris locked up party support for the nomination in a matter of days.
WRIGHT: She was able to turn would-be rivals into people who supported her candidacy. I think people were honestly very surprised at how astute and adept Harris's team was in creating not just that natural moment but making all of the democratic players come to her side, that it kind of eliminates the idea that it was undemocratic.
CORNISH (voice-over): Kamala Harris has evolved from an aggressive prosecutor to a 2020 presidential hopeful that failed to connect with voters to the vice presidency.
(CHEERING)
CORNISH (voice-over): And now --
HARRIS: -- my entire career, I've only had one client, the people.
CORNISH (voice-over): Kamala Harris is hoping to convince voters she is the best person to represent democracy as president of the United States.
HARRIS: In this country, anything is possible.
(CHEERING)
