Who is she?
Who is she?
W ho is Kamala Harris?
Does she know? Does her campaign know? Are they ever going to settle on an answer?
It’s not a new phenomenon that politicians are fake. Usually, though, a candidate has achieved a steady state a month and a half before a national election — we know what he or she is, or pretends to be, and he or she has worked through various flip-flops long ago.
All of this is still happening with Kamala Harris in real time.
We know Harris is supposed to be a joyful centrist who, if you set foot into her house, will shoot you dead with her trusty handgun, but, otherwise, the exact permutations of her political identify are TBD.
She certainly has made progress in her ongoing redefinition, yet the grade nonetheless has to be “incomplete,” with the admonition that she has to do more to show her work.
Axios has made a point of excavating Harris policy positions from several years ago and asking the campaign whether she still supports them, with varying degrees of success.
Most recently, the news site asked whether Harris still supports legalizing prostitution.
It would seem a “no” would be in order, but Axios didn’t have an answer by the time it published its item.
The video from The Root in which Harris staked out her position in 2019 was headlined, “Exclusive: Kamala Harris Calls for Decriminalization of Sex Work, Unequivocally Calls Trump a Racist and Wants Reparations (Sort of).”
Her answer gave the impression of being the product of some thought. She defended her work shutting down backpage.com and said the question of decriminalization isn’t a “simple” one, but she nonetheless came down in favor. “When you’re talking about consenting adults,” she said, “I think that, yes, we should really consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed.”
If the campaign does reverse her position, it surely won’t explain how or why she’s reevaluated her formerly considered view that conduct between consensual adults shouldn’t be criminalized.
In 2019, her task was to try to convince people that her values were consistent while she was lurching to the left. Now, her task is to try to convince them that her values are consistent while she lurches back to the center. The only thing that’s consistent is the insistence on a deeper consistency, while she swings wherever she thinks she needs to go.
Just the other day, Axios asked the Harris campaign whether she still supported a unilateral executive amnesty for 2 million so-called Dreamers.
A spokesman issued forth with, “The vice president has fought for Dreamers throughout her career and is proud of the actions taken under her and President Biden to expand protections for them, including the executive action President Biden took this year, which she supported.”
Which isn’t a disavowal or a reaffirmation but a straddling non-answer deployed in the hopes that no one will know what the campaign is saying and move on to the next thing.
She’s not in favor, not against, not really one thing or the other, except vaguely (and consistently, mind you) supportive of Dreamers.
In an insightful New York Times op-ed several weeks ago, James Carville noted the vulnerability presented by her flips-flops: “As last week’s CNN interview with Ms. Harris showed, this will be a consistent plotline deployed at her throughout this campaign. It’s vital that she give the same answer every time to these attacks. The retort can be simple: I learned from my time governing in the White House. These are my positions. Take it or leave it.”
She’s hasn’t given much indication of learning in office to this point, though, meaning this line of argument is clearly an artifice to explain the larger artifice.
Obviously, all candidates take advice from their campaigns and plot out answers to questions and lines of attack in advance. They’d be foolish not to (ahem, right, Mr. Trump?). The difference with Harris is the overwhelming sense she is being fed lines that have almost no connection to what she really thinks or believes, and that she is a playactor for a larger operation.
When CNN unearthed a 2019 candidate questionnaire from the ACLU that Harris filled out with a range of fantastical left-wing positions, including taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners, the campaign put an unnamed adviser on the case.
“The Vice President’s positions have been shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris Administration,” the flak told CNN.
No direct answer about her current position on the issues she addressed in the questionnaire. No explanation why she changed. No indication that the unnamed adviser even knows the answer to any of this, or cares. Just a brush-off with a transparent evasion.
Her campaign is running Harris as an ink blot. They hope to keep her California progressivism under wraps until it reemerges full force after the election if she wins. Until then, it’s all elusion based on the imperatives of the day or the hour.