I’m sorry, a person can’t just wake up one morning and abandon their entire worldview without an explanation. I mean, they can try, but no sensible person would take them seriously.
Which is to say, no sensible person can possibly take Vice President Kamala Harris ’s spectacular change of heart on policy seriously. Sure, politicians have been calibrating and triangulating their positions since Pericles. Most have been compelled to explain their ideological evolution — or have the decency to lie about it.
None, though, have ever relied on an army of anonymous campaign flacks to erase a lifetime of positions. Well, not until Harris.
Now, we all understand Democrats are desperate to shield voters from their candidate’s mind-numbing tautological rhetoric. Who can blame them, right? “Kamala Harris” is an empty vessel to be filled with the aspirations and dreams of gullible partisans. And allowing her to speak extemporaneously in public would kill all the joy, tout de suite.
These swirling platitudes and nervous laugh, however, don’t suggest that Harris isn’t bright. They suggest that she has no genuine philosophical or ethical belief system — other than, perhaps, obtaining and using power. Indeed, there’s little chance she will coherently expound on her sudden policy U-turns because they make zero ideological sense.
Let’s remember that Harris hasn’t merely been tinkering with the top marginal tax rate in her economic plan. She’s on the record championing, often quite passionately and definitively, a bunch of completely hare-brained extremism.
“Will you fully endorse the Green New Deal tonight?” an Iowa voter asked Harris in 2019.
Yes, she answered. Fully.
"I support a Green New Deal, and I will tell you why," Harris said. "Climate change is an existential threat."
At the time, the price tag of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s (D-NY) trendy transformative idea to save the planet was about $10 trillion — though, really, the cost of deconstructing modernity is more likely to be in the tens of bajillions.
Harris's campaign contends she no longer supports policies of the Green New Deal . And that’s fine. But it would probably be helpful to know what initially led her to back the elimination of fossil fuel energy production, the banning of meat and air travel, the retrofitting of “every building in America,” and a government-guaranteed job, home, and “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work.
Because some policy ideas are too dumb to forgive.
Democrats assure us that Harris only endorsed the Green New Deal conceptually, even though this was never discussed at the time. Even so, that’s bad enough. It means she is either an unhinged leftist or a dangerously unprincipled person willing to act like an unhinged leftist.
Besides, Harris has also explicitly promised to ban fracking nationally as a way to mitigate the alleged climate crisis. This would be a devastating blow to the economy. And this, too, has been “walked back” by anonymous staffers. So, I guess the climate apocalypse has been delayed, which is exciting news.
The economy is just the start. Harris has yet to answer a single genuine question on why she advocated the elimination of private health insurance or the decriminalization of illegal immigration. These aren’t tweaks in one’s political agenda. They represent two of the most vital issues facing voters.
Harris is also on the record supporting taxpayer-funded universal healthcare for illegal immigrants. On a 2019 ACLU questionnaire, the future "border czar" wrote that she was in favor of taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants — though she also pledged to end detentions altogether.
“Let me just be very clear about this,” Harris assured CNN’s Jake Tapper, every “human being” in the United States, citizen or not, deserves access to all government services, “period.”
The anonymous campaign official tasked with walking back this position failed to let us know why Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, no longer believes “human beings” deserve care. Though, to be fair, flip-flopping on an appeal to emotion is never easy.
Of course, an appropriately curious voter might also want Harris to clarify whether she regrets helping bail out Minnesota “protesters” who were burning down minority neighborhoods, whether she is still a fan of the “ defund the police ” movement, whether she still believes black people should have their own set of laws, or whether she still supports the reparation racket , probably the most un-American vote-buying scheme in existence.
No doubt, press releases are on the way.
Remember, as well, that Harris didn’t endorse these policies as some idealistic young person. She was in her mid-50s, a senator from the most populous state in America who was running for the presidency, the same job she now seeks, when she thought it was a good idea to endorse the elimination of the combustion engine.
Back then, Harris offered voters 18 sections on her website, teeming with stylish racial grievances, culture war attacks, and statist economic ideas. She was all in. This time around, she slapped a vaguely worded Biden-esque left-wing agenda statement on her website the day before the first, and probably only, presidential debate of 2024 — over 50 days after Democrat bigwigs paved the way for her presidential campaign.
It's gotten so bad that even the generally pliant press are becoming a bit antsy about the candidate’s inability to answer basic questions. Listen, you can detest Donald Trump all you like, but the guy, perhaps against self-preservation, rarely runs from the press. The former president, in fact, has been not only been induced to answer for his past positions, actions, and statements, some of them concocted, but also for policies proposed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which wasn’t even written by his campaign.
Yet, at the same time, Harris has been able to treat over a dozen major on-the-record stances as if they never existed. Modern campaigns ostensibly exist to provide voters with information so they can make educated decisions. Harris, self-styled defender of our sacred democracy, isn’t even pretending it matters.
This cocooned campaign is unprecedented. Democrats are running the most superficial campaign in modern presidential history. There is nothing organic about Harris-Walz 2024. They’ve managed to make President Joe Biden’s 2020 run, the first modern campaign run remotely from home, a bastion of transparency in comparison.
Come to think of it, Harris also participated in the cover-up of the president’s mental decline, a matter she’s yet to answer for. Not long ago, she was bragging about all her accomplishments as vice president — the last person in the room before the Afghanistan withdrawal and the only person who could fix the border crisis. These days, a casual voter might be under the impression that Harris was running against the incumbent.
Neat trick if you can get away with it.
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And she might. Maybe none of this will matter. Maybe campaigns are just about rallying the troops and tribalism. Last weekend, for instance, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that he still considered Harris a “progressive” in good standing, who was “just being pragmatic” and trying to “win.” Every presidential candidate in memory has moderated one position or another. None have moderated dozens in a month. All of them have been asked, sometimes hounded, to account for their change of heart.
Except Harris.
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