No apology.

Authentic. Steadfast.

Popeye for president. I am what I am.

So far Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have resisted pressure to apologize.

Everyone has a history. Democratic candidates who are plausible as a president today were alive and doing something--politics probably--five, ten, and twenty years ago. Politicians who were around in 1995 and 2000 conformed generally to the acceptable standards of that time, ortherwise they wouldn't have been holding office.

But now they are stuck with that history. (Except for Bernie Sanders, who has been making the same case for a lifetime.) He was a socialist, populist outlier in the past and had a Vermont constituency that accepted him. Meanwhile, times have changed, Democrats have evolved, and Sanders-style populism is the new center of gravity for activists. 

This sets up a problem for Democrats other than Sanders. These other Democrats are Johnny-come-lately-Sanders wannabes.

Social media is revealing the judgement of activists. Sinners! Frauds! Corporate lackey!

This is the context for the round of apologies by candidates, each judged for actions in the past by the economic populist and identity-conscious orthodoxy of today. 

Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have resisted apologies, so far. 

Warren has some explaining to do. She is white, married, heterosexual. She had been a Republican. She teaches at a university that exemplifies elitism. She was a bankruptcy expert. She got rich.

This makes her suspect. It identifies her with privilege, not disadvantage and victimhood. She did in fact grow up poor in Oklahoma and had a bit of lingering family history of presumed partial Cherokee ancestry, which she mentioned. It blew up on her.  Critics say she looks like pure white privilege, and she fraudulently tried to appropriate undeserved status of disadvantage.

She took a DNA test to try to put this to bed. 

It didn't work, not at first. but Elizabeth Warren isn't apologizing for who she is. 

Cherokee criticize her, saying that Native American blood doesn't create tribal heritage, because it is cultural as well as ancestral. Democrats say that anyone who had voted for Reagan in the past couldn't be a real Democrat in their soul. Trump and Fox News call her a fraud.

But in the weeks after the DNA test she is slowly changing the definition of the Pocahontas charge from sneaky into resolute, and the apparent identity-fraud body blow "Pocahontas" charge is helping define her as courageous and self confident. She says she is tiny bit Indian, like she said, no apology. And, yeah, she used to be a Republican, but she changed her mind when she saw the corruption among the power elites. She knows who her enemies are: corrupt elites. 

She is ok with who she is. No apology.

NY Times op-ed

Kamala Harris, too, has a history. She used to be a California Attorney General and before that a prosecutor for San Francisco County. In 2004, as prosecutor, she refused to seek the death penalty on a man she prosecuted for killing a police officer in the line of duty. She said she opposed the death penalty. Diane Feinstein and the Police Officers Association were furious with Harris. 

Now she gets criticism from the left for her failure to prosecute Steve Mnuchin's bank, OneWest, for some financial irregularities, saying that the evidence was insufficient to prosecute. She gets more criticism for defending as AG some convictions of people obtained when county prosecutors inserted false confessions into a court transcript.  She is ripped for caring more about convictions than about justice.

Her opposition to the death penalty does not hurt her now, but her work on behalf of law enforcement hurts her with the Left. 

Harris has not apologized for this, at least not yet. "The bottom line is that the buck stops with me and I take full responsibility for what my office did."  

The net result for Harris: she looks like someone willing to be characterized as a "law and order Democrat" at a time when the progressive activist base of the Democratic Party is talking about immigration amnesty, abolishing ICE, defending unarmed blacks shot by policemen, and ending the current era of mass incarceration.

Is there a niche for a black, female "law and order" Democrat?  We will see. But at least her unwillingness to apologize for her history defines her as proud of her work of herself. There is no niche for a black, female Democrat who admits that her career prior to being in the Senate was to perpetuate injustice, but now feels miserable about it.

Warren and Harris are communicating a bigger message than points of policy. We are looking at character and temperament. We are choosing a Commander in Chief. A Commander in Chief knows what to do in a fight. The stand resolute and confident in themselves, even in the face of criticism.

Actually, especially in the face of criticism. Otherwise, it isn't a fight.