The easiest job in American politics must be serving as a communications staffer for Democratic politicians. The media do your job for you every day.
The easiest job in American politics must be serving as a communications staffer for Democratic politicians. The media do your job for you every day.
T here is no position that Kamala Harris supports now that she won’t oppose later should it prove politically advantageous.
This is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans.
It’s bad for Republicans because, as it turns out, it’s a slippery thing, campaigning against Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
For Democrats, however, their nominee’s preternatural gift for supporting every side of an issue has made it exceptionally easy for so-called media fact-checkers to rewrite her political record, absolving her of all previous electorally unpopular positions with a simple argument amounting to: “That was then, this is now.”
It’s the old John Kerry “I supported it before I was against it” line, except now with a thick veneer of credibility courtesy of the corporate press.
PolitiFact, for example, published a “fact-check” last week, flunking former president and GOP nominee Donald Trump for claiming that Harris supported the “defund the police” movement before she switched positions.
“She wants to defund the police,” Trump said on July 24. “Now she’s pulled back on it.”
In response to this accusation, PolitiFact awarded Trump a “mostly false” rating. Let’s review the record.
In 2020, when the anti-police movement reached a fever pitch with nationwide rioting, Harris said that “we have to redirect resources” from law enforcement into government functions, including schools, and “to reimagine public safety in America.”
What do you call it when you reduce funding for a group? Unfund? Ex-fund? The word is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite think of it.
“For too long,” Harris said on June 10, 2020, “people have confused achieving public safety with putting more cops on the street.”
She added, “We have to have this conversation about redirecting resources where they are needed to truly support communities to be healthy and therefore safe.”
In separate remarks, Harris praised the defund movement, characterizing it as “rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities.”
George Stephanopoulos of ABC News asked her directly in one conversation, “So does that mean you support proposals like what we’ve seen in Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti saying take some of the money from policing, about $150 million, invest it in health initiatives, training initiatives for youth?”
“I support investing in communities so that they become more healthy and, therefore, more safe,” Harris said in response. “The issue right now in America is that many cities spend over one-third of their entire city budget on policing. But meanwhile, we’ve been defunding public schools for years in America.”
Of course, it’s worth noting that in her 2009 book Smart on Crime, then–San Francisco DA Kamala Harris argued, “A more visible and strategic police presence is a deterrent to crime, and it has a positive impact on a community.” In fact, she wrote,
Virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat. This is as true in economically poor neighborhoods as in wealthy ones. There is a widely held notion that poor communities, particularly poor African American and Latino communities, consider law enforcement the enemy and that they do not want police officers in their neighborhoods. In fact, the opposite is true.
Unsurprisingly, Harris abandoned her “defund” rhetoric after Joe Biden named her as his running mate. The campaign released statements unequivocally denouncing attempts to reduce policing budgets, claiming further it was a dirty lie to suggest Harris would ever support such a thing.
In explaining its “mostly false” rating for Trump’s remarks on July 24, PolitiFact argues, “The Trump campaign points to statements by Harris in 2020 — not in 2024.”
That was then. This is now.
“While in 2020 she didn’t explicitly call for getting rid of police departments,” PolitiFact continued, “she did state support for reexamining police budgets and lauded a proposal by the Los Angeles mayor to shift part of the police budget to community initiatives.”
Wow. “Reexamining police budgets . . . to shift part of the police budget” is a mouthful. I wonder if there’s a more straightforward term to describe such a process.
“Where Trump veers into territory that makes this claim inaccurate is when he spoke in the present tense,” the PolitiFact “fact-check” continued, “although he did follow his sentence with the phrase ‘now she’s pulled back on it.’ When he said that Harris ‘wants’ to defund police that leaves voters with the impression that the vice president and presumed presidential nominee is now calling for defunding the police. She is not.”
Oh, come on. This is absurd. Surely it cannot get more ridiculous than this. Yes, it can.
On July 24, Trump also alleged, “Lyin’ Kamala supported abolishing ICE.”
This claim is outright “false,” according to PolitiFact.
“It’s clear that Harris opposed, and opposes, many of Trump’s immigration positions,” the website explained. “And she called for an end to the hard-line tactics that had been used by the administration. But she never said she would abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In fact, she said the opposite.”
In 2018, Harris was asked whether she agreed with activists who had called to abolish ICE. She did not say no. In fact, she said, “We need to probably even think about starting from scratch because there’s a lot that is wrong with the way that [ICE] is conducting itself, and we need to deal with that.”
Later, in a separate interview on The View, she was asked whether she would abolish the Department of Homeland Security.
“No, I would not,” Harris said, adding that, though DHS, which includes ICE, is “dysfunctional,” she does not “believe in getting rid of it.”
Saying that DHS shouldn’t be abolished but that ICE may need to be restarted “from scratch” gets Trump a “false” rating — not even an equivocated “mostly false” but a flat “false”?
If you think these “fact-checks” are bad, it gets worse. Indeed, where certain “fact-checkers” can’t argue that Harris’s new positions render attacks on her old positions “false” or “mostly false,” they have opted to revise the historical record with misleading characterizations and blatant untruths
Of course, we’re talking about the concerted effort to rewrite Harris’s past as the “border czar.”
We’ve covered this before. Harris was the border czar. Everyone understood her to be such. She held all the duties and responsibilities associated with the position. It wasn’t until it became a political liability that “fact-checkers” decided to revisit the record, claiming that anyone who understood her to be the border czar, including their own newsrooms, got it wrong.
I know it’s a lie. You know it’s a lie. They know it’s a lie. That they never bothered to correct this three-year-old “misconception” until she became the presumptive Democratic nominee gives the game away. But the all-too-obvious timing of the thing is not stopping them from trying to revise her record anyway.
“Harris was never made Biden’s ‘border czar,’” CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote in a July 25 “fact check,” citing a White House “fact sheet.”
“In reality,” he added, “Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment.”
In 2021, CNN published a report titled “Biden assigning Harris to lead diplomatic efforts in Central America to address immigration.” Its subhead read (emphasis my own), “President Joe Biden is tasking Vice President Kamala Harris with overseeing efforts with Central American countries to stem the flow of migrants to the US southern border, the first major issue Biden has assigned directly to his No. 2.”
Elsewhere, Reuters ran a “fact-check” last week, promoting it on social media under the news blurb, “At campaign rallies and in social media posts, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has intensified his attacks on Kamala Harris as a failed ‘border czar.’ But experts say Harris wasn’t really a border czar at all.”
The “experts” cited in the Reuters report are “three current Biden officials, 13 former officials and others tracking the issue.”
The only “experts” mentioned by name are Democratic senator Chris Murphy, former Clinton and Obama official Alan Bersin, and former Biden administration official Roberta Jacobson, who was herself referred to colloquially as the “border czar” before Harris assumed her role (but don’t call Harris the “border czar”!).
This isn’t “fact-checking.” This is political activism. This is propaganda.
Also, why are we treating the term “border czar” now as if it were an official federal title? It’s casually used to refer broadly to “a person appointed by the government to advise on and coordinate policy in a particular area.” Everyone understood the title as such until last month.
The answer is simple: If you distract people long enough with a completely meaningless semantic argument over what constitutes a federal “czar,” they’ll be too distracted to remember that Harris failed miserably in her goal to address the immigration crisis. More than 7 million illegal border crossings on her watch isn’t a defensible thing. So let’s not talk about that.
It depends on what your definition of “is” is.
Honestly, the easiest job in American politics must be serving as a communications staffer for Democratic lawmakers. It must be a hell of a thing to clock in every morning and see that some corporate conglomerate has done your job for you.