The GOP’s goal shouldn’t be to outbid Harris but to demonstrate that she is trying to approximate what Republicans already bring to the table.
The GOP’s goal shouldn’t be to outbid Harris but to demonstrate that she is trying to approximate what Republicans already bring to the table.
K amala Harris’s presidential campaign has more flip-flops than a Ron Jon Surf Shop. But if we observe Ramesh Ponnuru’s rule of thumb when evaluating political flip-floppers, conservatives and Republicans can take some solace in the fact that the Democratic nominee’s effort to reinvent herself has featured the candidate moving rightward.
Once an advocate of what she herself called a “mandatory gun buyback program” for so-called assault weapons, Harris now insists she no longer supports firearms confiscation, compensated or otherwise. “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” the Democratic presidential nominee once insisted. Now, her campaign maintains that she favors the exploitation of America’s domestic-energy reserves, and the Trump campaign’s “false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class.” Harris portrays herself today as a “border state prosecutor” with a record of supporting the “toughest border control” measures possible. In reality, she was anything but.
Harris once supported a Medicare-for-All plan that would by necessity eliminate the private health-insurance industry. Now, she doesn’t. The vice president no longer backs a Soviet-style “federal job guarantee” or programs that shift funding away from local police forces and toward alternatives to law enforcement like social workers and “community interventionists.” She’s even appropriated Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate taxation on income that service workers derive from tips despite serving in an administration that presided over an IRS crackdown on employers and employees alike who underreport tips.
Harris’s makeover has allowed Democratic operatives and their allies in media to pretend as though she’s always been a closet centrist, or that her positions were somehow more nuanced than she herself let on. But the monodirectional nature of Harris’s flip-flops has revealed something reassuring about American political culture. Indeed, voters seem to appreciate Harris’s political evolution.
For example, a poll conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business found that fully 60 percent of respondents believe Harris should either make “major changes” to Joe Biden’s economic policy or adopt “a completely different approach” to handling America’s economic affairs. It would be hard for even the savviest political operator to divorce herself entirely from the policies of the president she served as second in the line of succession. But that transition, should she embrace it, will be rendered smoother by voters’ desire to see her repudiate Biden’s legacy. After all, the public has been telling pollsters for years that they despise “Bidenomics” and all it stands for. Why wouldn’t the public want to see Harris distance herself from policies that appeal only to the most committed Democratic activists?
Conservatives, in particular, should take some comfort in this silver lining. This spectacle suggests that limiting the federal government’s license to intervene imperiously in private affairs still appeals to a critical mass of general-election voters. But what soothes conservatives surely rankles Republicans. How can the GOP highlight the essential weakness reflected in Harris’s flip-flops — which is, at a fundamental level, her inauthenticity, malleability, and untrustworthiness — without doing the Harris campaign’s work for it by reminding the public that her policy preferences have shifted in their direction?
For guidance, we might look to the last Republican presidential campaign to win the popular vote in this century. It wasn’t enough for George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign to hammer home the message that John Kerry had no fixed beliefs, though that is what they did. What allowed the “flip-flopper” attack to gain traction was the Bush campaign’s methodical efforts to link Kerry’s inconstancy to the Massachusetts senator’s core identity as a security-minded war hero.
With near-unfailing discipline, the Bush campaign pummeled Kerry for trying to wiggle out of his vote for a bill authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which Kerry laughably maintained was little more than a vote “to threaten” military action.
For months, the Bush camp goaded Kerry over his opposition to an $87 billion legislative package funding military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. When a friendly questioner at a town hall — not a reporter — asked Kerry about the charge, he infamously replied, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”
The Bush campaign hounded Kerry over his evolution on an Israeli security fence, which he initially claimed was a “barrier to peace” but had become “a legitimate act of self-defense” only in response to political inducements. A longtime opponent of the death penalty for convicted terrorists on moral and practical grounds, Kerry suddenly reversed course but did so in the absence of a convincing conversion narrative. And so on.
It wasn’t just that the Bush campaign stayed relentlessly on-message to the point that the narratives it retailed broke through the mainstream media’s bulwark. It was that the message punctured the image of Kerry that his campaign sought to promote — that of a steady hand and a sober executor of America’s national-security priorities abroad. “It’s been a little tough to prepare for the debate because he keeps changing his positions, especially on the war,” Bush said in September 2004, not with bitterness but with a chuckle. Indeed, Kerry “could spend 90 minutes debating himself.” The charge stuck, and with that went the utility of the Kerry campaign’s claim that its candidate was “Ready to Serve.”
If there is a Harris-campaign analog to Kerry’s efforts to promote himself as a slightly more sophisticated species of hawk, it may be in the fact that the vice president is marketing herself as little more than neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden. That’s a low hurdle for Harris to clear, but not so low that she can’t trip over it.
Tying Harris to the unpopular administration in which she served for the last three and a half years and fixing in voters’ minds the idea that her administration will functionally be Biden’s second term accomplishes two objectives. First, it tethers Harris to a sinking ship. Second, it will compel Harris to further distance herself from Biden, exacerbating presently muted tensions on the left over her political evolution and compelling her to explain herself in ways that may lead her to make a mistake. And she will have to explain herself — not because the press will suddenly rediscover its civic obligations, but because it will be the Left demanding clarification.
Harris has so far been afforded an open runway to reinvent herself, but the candidate who has emerged from this makeover is a contrivance. The problem for Republicans is that it seems most voters appreciate the contrivance. The GOP’s goal shouldn’t be to outbid Harris but to demonstrate that she is trying to approximate what Republicans already bring to the table. One message, not several, promoted to the point of exhaustion and centered on the fact that Harris believes her only path to the election is to run away from the Democratic Party’s failed president. Anything less risks losing the plot.