On the Monday after the weekend when Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar announced their candidacy for President, is there any new evidence that the NYT has already picked a winner?

Look how the NYT home page structures the coverage this morning (click to enlarge and clarify):



I've had the tag "NYT pushes Kamala" since December 29th, when I wrote "The NYT makes its 2020 presidential choice obvious."

There are 5 women running in the race for the Democratic Party nomination — so many that I have to stop and try to remember them all. I count on my fingers and I google to check my work. And I feel that the NYT is always there to say, Don't worry, don't be confused, there's Kamala, and there's everyone else.

And I wonder about holding back the other women. The NYT can't know Kamala Harris will wow the crowds at rallies and shine at the debates. I don't think Harris, as a presidential candidate, has been tested at all, and I don't know anything about how serious antagonists will try to take her down... other than 1. She had a sexual relationship with Willie Brown and he boosted her early career, and 2. She's too much of a prosecutor to win the love of a minority group Democrats need to turn out if they're going to beat Mr. Criminal Justice Reform Donald Trump.

The big link — the one with the smiling face — goes to "THE LONG RUN/‘Progressive Prosecutor’: Can Kamala Harris Square the Circle?/Ms. Harris seemed to try to be all things to all people as a district attorney and state attorney general. Now, as she runs for president, her record faces a chorus of critics, especially on the left." The photo reappears and fills the whole screen. I see that the article is about the second thing of the 2 things I know. Is the NYT running interference for her? If you actually read the article, you'll find lots of criticism. It's not a puff piece. Excerpts:

“She played it very careful,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who served on an independent panel that investigated one of the cases of prosecutorial misconduct while Ms. Harris was attorney general. “She had her sights set on what her future might be, and she realized every day she was navigating a minefield, because she had law enforcement to deal with, she had the public to deal with, the minority community to deal with. I think she was trying to be very careful not to alienate.”...

Ms. Harris scorns what she calls false choices, and says her critics are imposing them on her record. Those who have worked for her call her disciplined, a characterization she prefers to “cautious.” She describes her thinking — about criminal justice, but also about the other issues animating her presidential candidacy, like health care and economic inequality — as scientific. “It’s a hypothesis; this is how we can do things better,” she said in a recent interview. “You have to inform it with: Where’s the empirical evidence? Where is the data? Where is the detail?”...

“She really was a sideline player in all the decarceration efforts,” said Robert Weisberg, a law professor and co-director of the criminal law center at Stanford. “She didn’t stake out a strong position on what to do other than, ‘Let’s promote re-entry and anti-recidivism programs.’”...

In a case in Orange County, a public defender had discovered that the district attorney’s office was strategically placing jailhouse informants, offering them leniency if they could coax confessions from fellow inmates. A judge found that the district attorney’s office had lied to him about the use of informants and withheld potentially favorable evidence from defense lawyers.

When the judge disqualified the entire office from a death penalty case, Ms. Harris appealed, accusing the judge of abusing his discretion. While she opened an inquiry into the case at hand, she rejected repeated calls for a broad investigation of the prosecutor’s office....

Frustrated by her refusal to investigate, Erwin Chemerinsky, then the law school dean at the University of California, Irvine, joined with a former attorney general to ask the Justice Department to examine what they believed was a pattern of civil rights violations in the prosecutor’s office. Their letter was signed by 25 prominent law professors, prosecutors and defense lawyers.

“Twice Kamala Harris called on my cell and said she was on top of it and looking into it,” he said. “To my knowledge, the California A.G. never did anything with regard to the scandal.... Their reaction ranged from silence to criticizing the judge who found the misconduct... Never did they attempt to be a force for reform.”

Much more at the link. This is a serious article and it deserve the front-page highlighting it gets.

The second article, "Democrats’ 2020 Choice: Do They Want a Fighter or a Healer?" refers to Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren in the squib on the front page, but it's a fairly lightweight look at rhetoric, based on Booker's Obamaish language of healing and Warren's repetition of the word "fight." This piece deserves subordination beneath the big substantive Harris article.

Finally, "Amy Klobuchar Enters 2020 Presidential Race." Yeah, we know. That's a fact and it must have an article. It is what it needs to be, with references to the snowfall and the juiciest (most embarrassing?) quote: "Let’s stop seeing those obstacles as obstacles on our path. Let’s see those obstacles as our path." It's completely fair to subordinate this article too.

So I'm okay with the NYT here. The first look at the home page made me suspicious, but a closer look restored my (wary) trust. Be good, NYT, please. We need you.