Kamala Harris’s Policy Problem

I f one strips away the many glittering layers that have been added to her avatar by the operators and sycophants of America’s contemptible national press, one soon notices that Kamala Harris has a policy problem. Politics, even now, is about more than baubles and encomia, and in their obstinacy, most voters remain at least somewhat interested in the policies that each candidate brings to the feast. It would no doubt suit Kamala Harris down to the ground if she could spend the next 100 days being hysterically feted with visions of “Kamalot” — dispiritingly, that’s a real neologism — but, at some point, she’s going to have to answer a smattering of substantive questions, and, when she does, she’ll have three realistic options from which to choose: (1) Run on the radical agenda that she adumbrated in 2019; (2) embrace the array of positions that have made the Biden–Harris administration one of the least popular in modern memory; or (3) cut the president she serves loose and gesture at a contrived moderation in which she does not in any sense believe. None of these is ideal.

Thus far, it seems as if Harris is being forced by gravity to plump for Option 2. Last week, her campaign vowed that she would seek to impose no new taxes on individuals who earn less than $400,000 per year. That, verbatim, is President Biden’s position. Soon afterward, the campaign not only reversed Harris’s 2019 position on fracking — which was to ban it completely — but insisted that those who had seen the many videos in which she had made her toxic vow were guilty of making “false claims,” and it confirmed that, henceforth, “she would not ban fracking” if given the chance. That, too, was President Biden’s effective approach, right down to the immediate attempt to change the subject to “climate-change legislation.” Given that 2019-era Harris wanted to kick 150 million people off their private health insurance, make an open border a matter of explicit policy, extend Medicaid to illegal immigrants, ban modern sporting rifles by executive order, consider racial reparations, and pass the Green New Deal in its entirety, it seems likely that this reflex will persist.

As an alternative to running as Kamala Harris — a vapid California progressive who, astonishingly enough, managed to become the most left-wing member of a Senate that included Bernie Sanders — this would be a sensible choice. Still, that does not make it desirable per se. Not only does the Biden–Harris administration have a poor reputation in key areas such as the economy, the border, foreign policy, and crime, but a majority of Americans also believe that Harris was involved in its most egregious act: The conspiracy to hide President Biden’s senility. By 54 points to 30, voters believe that there has been a “cover-up of Joe Biden’s health,” and, within that 54 percent, 92 percent believe that Kamala Harris was in on it, with 68 percent estimating that she was involved “a great deal.” Who would have thought that, in the year 2024, “Actually, I’m Joe Biden” would be the best shelter for a Democrat?

A commonly expressed hope within the center-left commentariat is that Kamala Harris’s history as a prosecutor will help her to appear more moderate than she is. Maybe, at the margins, it will. And yet, like the ersatz version of Harris that has appeared in memes since she was parachuted into the nomination last week, the mere declaration that she “used to be a prosecutor” does not count as a policy platform. Prosecutors, by definition, prosecute. Beyond her stated intention to make the case against Donald Trump, voters are going to want to know what, if she were to be president, Harris would hope to do. If Harris really were the tabula rasa candidate the press hopes she can be, she could perhaps get away with her platitudes. But she’s not. Indeed, thanks to her candidacy in 2019, she has been repeatedly filmed staking out a series of positions that are lethal among a broad swath of the electorate. Her first step in response will be to disavow her previous words. But then what?

Which is all to say that, despite the intensity of the celebration that has attended her rise to the nomination, Harris has few good options — if, indeed, she has any choice in the matter at all. She can run as Bernie Sanders, she can run as Joe Biden, or she can publicly take on her own party and reinvent herself as something that she’s not. I am no Nostradamus, but I see nothing in the behavior of the Democratic Party in the past decade that suggests that Harris will be able to take either of the non-Bidenesque routes. In 2020, the Democrats went to considerable lengths to ensure that Sanders did not become their standard-bearer, and, since 2016, they have tried everything they could think to beat Donald Trump except moderating even a millimeter on any issue beneath the sun. What’s left is the status quo, and, once this mawkish honeymoon has at last been put out of its misery, we’ll discover whether that’s enough.