David Brooks endorses Kamala Harris – Washington Examiner

New York Times columnist David Brooks said Sen. Kamala Harris could be the Democrats’ best nominee to battle President Trump in 2020, and he said she might be able to “pulverize” him next year.

“To beat Trump, I suspect Democrats will want unity,” wrote Brooks, the paper’s center-right leaning columnist. “They won’t want somebody who essentially runs against the Democratic establishment (Bernie Sanders); they’ll want somebody who embodies it (Harris). They’ll want somebody who seems able to pulverize Trump in a debate (Harris).”

“Democratic primary voters may decide that if they are going to take on Donald Trump, they’re going to want the roughest, most confrontational gladiator they can get. After they see how, well, direct she can be, they may decide that person is Kamala Harris,” Brooks added.

Brooks said that while some people might see her past as an “aggressive prosecutor” as a weakness, he sees it as a strength. He said that in her job as a prosecutor, she was able to see more of the realities of some less fortunate. Especially, he noted, with her background as a “highly educated progressive coastal elite.”

“[I]n deciding to work as a prosecutor — rather than going to a law firm — Harris was immersing herself in the gritty world the rest of the achievatrons were rising away from,” Brooks said. “Working as a prosecutor put her in touch with a world in which brothers sexually abuse their 6-year-old sisters, in which a man literally scalps his girlfriend in a domestic dispute, in which parents are too financially stressed and personally strained to have the time to make sure their kids go to school.”

Harris, D-Calif., launched her presidential bid on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, began her campaign at a rally in Oakland over the weekend, and is one of the many high-profile Democrats who have entered, or are considering entering, the 2020 Democratic contest.

Fellows Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and, as of Friday morning, Cory Booker of New Jersey, are also running among more than a half dozen other potential nominees.