Vice President Kamala Harris has finally made her decision on a running mate — middle-aged white guy Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who blamed his drunk driving arrest on deafness.
All that remains is for Harris to tell voters what she wants to do at president. So far, she hasn’t said much.
Oh, she wants to be president all right, but she hasn’t offered anything about as what she wants to do as president. Watching her campaign up to this point, you would be forgiven if you came away thinking that Kamala Harris is a very harsh critic of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration.
Harris’s website includes pictures of her and Walz, a biography, donate buttons, etc. But when you visit, you realize that there is actually nothing on issues at all. It’s been more than two weeks now, and there’s no issues tab, no statement on what the candidate believes in, no list of campaign promises.
What is it Kamala Harris wants to do as president? She doesn’t say. Maybe she doesn’t know.
My liberal friends point out that she wasn’t supposed to be the candidate, so she was caught off guard and is still trying to get her sea legs. But she has to have some core beliefs, right?
We’re not entirely in the dark here. Kamala ran in 2020 on a very far-left list of promises: abortion on demand, open borders, “Medicare for All” (including for illegal immigrants), “equity,” banning plastic straws, banning fracking, etc. In some areas, she tried to “out-Bernie” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). In that she failed, however, not even making it to January 2020, let alone Iowa.
So, out of all those things she promised, which ones does she still support? No one knows. With the help of the media, she is trying to rewrite her own past and distance herself from those 2020 promises. She’s also gone from being Biden’s “border czar” to someone who was barely involved in the issue.
Her campaign has been all biography, no accomplishment. “She’s fearless,” they declare, while pointing out how she took popular positions on non-controversial issues. “She put murderers in prison!” As opposed to what? Taking them to lunch?
“I’m running to fight for an America where the economy works for working people, where you only have to work one job to pay the bills,” a Future Forward Super PAC ad quotes Harris. Is this because the Biden-Harris economy does not “work for working people”? They’ve been in charge for four years and swear they’ve “cured the economy.” So why is she promising this now? If Harris has the answers for our economic woes, why hasn’t she already shared them with the president?
When you look at what Harris says on the campaign trail now — and that’s really all we have to go on, since she has been avoiding reporters’ questions — her campaign has turned into a contradiction of her previous positions and, quite frankly, reality.
The addition of Walz might distract from that for a couple of days, but reality has a way of making itself plain. If Harris were confident in her convictions or had a clear plan, she would not only be doing interviews with MSNBC and CNN, but also doing a debate moderated by Fox News anchors. After all, former President Donald Trump marched into CNN without hesitation this summer, despite having antagonized that network specifically throughout his term in office.
But Harris won’t do that. She can’t. That’s why the Democratic Party has formed a phalanx around her, crying racism, sexism or both in reply to any criticism of her record or her candidacy.
I think they’re going to find that victimhood, as the battle cry of the powerful, doesn’t carry the weight it once did with normal people. Harris’s toughest challenge will be explaining why she didn’t fight to fix the Biden-Harris economy or border policy while she was helping build it, and why anyone should believe for even a second that she’d do anything differently.
Her campaign may end up being a better advertisement of the failures of the Biden-Harris administration than Republicans could ever hope to mount.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).
Most Popular
Comments / 0