US politics expert weighs in on Joe Biden making way for Kamala Harris 06:43

Professor Simon Jackman is from the US Study Centre at Sydney University and hopefully he can shed some light on this. Simon, g'day. G'day. Can she win?

Yeah, I think she can, because I think there's a ton of people who are desperate not to see Donald Trump become president. So we politics is always about contrast. The Biden Trump contrast wasn't a good one. I think Democrats right now, collectively, you can almost hear from this distance the sigh of relief that they've moved on from Biden.

And can she reactivate the same coalition that got Biden just over the line in 2020? That's what it's about. I think the fact that she is a she puts abortion and reproductive rights back at the top of the ticket, emphasises the contrast with both Trump and Vance on this issue.

And that plays very well for Democrats. And the last thing is she's a minority woman. She identifies as African-American. Her dad's Jamaican. Her mom was Indian. That's going to also help drive turnout among the base of the party who have been very demobilized by low energy Joe Biden. So all that bodes well.

And so, yes, she absolutely has a shot. But boy, oh boy, it's a big mountain to climb. And she absolutely comes with some negatives. Yeah, she certainly does. But that doesn't mean she can't win. What I thought was interesting, and we were talking about this in the office, the Democratic Party...

couldn't possibly tell Kamala Harris, say, hey, I know you've been vice president for all these years, but can you hop out of the road? Because I know you're a female of, and you're a person of color. Can you hop out of the road, please? Because we've got someone else that we think is better, and that person's a bloke and probably white.

Yeah, no, no, no way. That would have been, you talk about a crisis inside the party, that would have been a crisis inside the party, right? And you look at the people that are coming out to endorse the Progressive Caucus, AOC, you're looking at the Congressional Black Caucus, Jim Clyburn, who saved Biden's bacon in South Carolina back in 2020. That base of the party, that that

core of the Democratic Party are the first out of the blocs to endorse Harris. And they were also signalling privately and sometimes not so privately, if you don't endorse Harris, you're going to have a huge fight on your hands at the convention. And so I think this is probably the easiest option, the most straightforward thing for Dems to do, given the crisis they had with Biden's candidacy. Is she any good?

Would she make a good president? Yeah, look, I think she would. Why? The track record, being vice president is awful. It's one of the most awful jobs in US politics. The HBO series Veep gave us a little bit of a comedic insight into how miserable a job it is. And

Being asked to solve the immigration crisis was a bit of a hospital pass, frankly, from the boss, from Biden. I saw her in the Bay Area when I used to live in the United States. Her first elected office was being district attorney of San Francisco. Then she went on to become attorney general for the state of California before becoming a U.S. senator for the state of California. She performed well.

quite admirably and competently in those roles as a prosecutor, then as setting statewide policy. She had to deal with some of the issues around illegal immigration once she got up to state level as Attorney General. She actually does have some runs on the board. She is a goofy speaker at times, absolutely. And I think being off the cuff and just being a natural person for some of these politicians, it doesn't come naturally. And I think that's what your grads earlier were picking up.

What about here in Australia? What can we expect from a potential President Harris and should we be concerned or is it a better prospect in your view than a President Trump, Mark Too? Look, the funny thing about the Australia-US relationship, at a government-to-government, officials-to-officials level, there's an awful lot of continuity because we are so enmeshed in each other's systems, particularly in

in defense, in intelligence sharing, in law enforcement. There's an awful lot that you can change who the boss is, but the governments and the officials, the bureaucrats are just getting on with the job. So that's the good news. The bad news is that Trump is just so volatile and everybody's just...

sort of got this huge puzzle minus and waiting for, I can remember the first Trump administration, you know, our diplomats in Washington just didn't know what was going to come out of his mouth next. And would we be the next alliance partner to cop it? And of course, we remember the phone call with Malcolm Turnbull on the resettlement deal for refugees here going into the US. But Australia actually got through it through some extremely creative diplomacy efforts.

Thank you, Joe Hockey, but thank you, a large cast supporting Joe Hockey. It was a full-court press from Rupert Murdoch through to Greg Norlin and everyone in between managing those four years. I think with Democrats, it's just way more predictable. I think there's particularly Biden, who was a foreign policy specialist. He really understood the importance of the AUKUS arrangement, of how important it was to show a bit more attention to the alliances out there.

This side of the Pacific is not just a NATO being the number one alliance that the U.S. care about. Now, Harris just doesn't have that experience. And I think to cut to the chase, who is a VP? Will that person be a foreign policy specialist? And in particular, if she is elected, who will be her secretary of state? Who will be her secretary of defense? Because.

operationally, those are the touch points for Australian governments with the United States. They're the parts of the US government we're doing the heavy lifting with and who's in those chairs can sometimes matter way more than the president because so much is tracking with a bit of direction from the president, but the actual transaction is happening far below. Simon Jackman, let's hope that Kevin Rudd can play golf.

Down at Mar-a-Lago and swing the nine iron. Good on you. I appreciate you coming. Blame everyone else if it goes poorly. That's Simon Jackman, Professor and CEO of the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney.