We Already Have a Harris Administration

S o far, it has been the greatest switcheroo in modern American politics.

Just over two months ago, Democrats were burdened by the albatross of Joe Biden, a president whose approval rating hovered at under 40 percent in large part because two-thirds of voters thought the country was going in the wrong direction. In July, Donald Trump had a two-point lead over Biden in the NBC News poll.

Now, the latest iteration of that same NBC News poll shows Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, with a five-point lead over Trump. Most important, on the issue of which candidate best represents “change,” Harris has a nine-point lead over her opponent, 47 percent to 38 percent.

That is astonishing since, according to NBC, 65 percent of voters continue to say the country is on the wrong track and only 28 percent say it’s heading in the right direction. Similarly, two-thirds of voters say their family income is falling behind the cost of living, and that issue is their top concern in the election. Harris, the candidate connected at the hip to the unpopular Joe Biden, and who has never disagreed with any of his inflationary policies, has managed to convince many that she is the best vehicle to move the country in the right direction.

It’s no wonder that Harris’s successful shape-shifting makes Team Trump nervous. The NBC News poll found that 71 percent of voters claim that their minds are made up, and only 11 percent say they might change their vote. A silver lining for Trump is that, in the NBC poll, 40 percent of voters say they are concerned that Harris would continue Biden’s policies and governance model. But with only six weeks to go before the election, Trump is running out of time to build on that number.

Far from projecting the issue consistency that won him the White House in 2016, Trump has been sowing confusion about his own positions — from limits on abortion to caps on credit-card interest to skepticism about certain parts of his 2017 tax cut — which gives cover for Harris’s flip-flops on such issues as fracking, the potential decriminalization of border crossings, and the idea of banning private health insurance.

Harris critics who call the status quo the “Biden-Harris administration,” however, are being even fairer and more accurate than you think.

Trump lost a big opportunity in his September 10 debate with Harris — which may turn out to have been the only event during which candidate Kamala faced questions she couldn’t control or influence. Trump didn’t mention that Harris waited almost 60 days after being anointed as the Democratic candidate to add any policy positions to her campaign website. And when she finally did, just two days before the debate, she didn’t do herself any favors. Even the progressive New Republic called her evasive maneuvers on issues “comical” and quickly pointed out how sloppily her policy positions were slapped together. The source code of her new policy Web pages revealed “a simple but telling error,” namely, “that parts of the platform were copied directly from Biden’s campaign page.”

Harris would more likely “plagiarize” Biden’s record than offer any new approach to governance.

But she is going to great lengths to hide it. Despite a polished and expertly rehearsed debate performance, Harris’s first and only solo interview since the debate showed just how little she wants the American people to know of her plans. The interview was with Brian Taff, the news anchor at ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate. Over eleven minutes, the vice president reverted to her favored word salads to avoid answering any substantive question. The conservative website Issues & Insights summarized the interview as follows: “For more than three painful minutes she droned on about growing up as a middle-class kid, her mother saving enough to buy their first house when she was a teenager, being raised in a hard-working neighborhood where people were ‘very proud of their lawn.’” The rest of the interview was “overflowing with meaningless jabber, a too-practiced performance, let-me-lecture-you hand gestures — and obvious lies about her positions.”

Other analysts are coming to the same conclusion. Peggy Noonan, the carefully centrist columnist at the Wall Street Journal, calls her an “artless dodger” who is “airy, evasive and nonresponsive.” (Even Axios, a bible for Beltway policy wonks, describes the Harris-Walz campaign strategy as “Hide from the press.”) Noonan says no one can know for sure why Harris goes out of her way to hide behind smoke and mirrors, but she surmises that, fundamentally, Harris is “as progressive as Joe Biden, meaning as progressive as the traffic will bear. But that would mean she’s more of the same, so why talk about it?”

Instead, Harris vaguely hints that she shouldn’t be judged by the decades she spent promoting progressive views as California’s attorney general, a U.S. senator, and now vice president. During an interview with Oprah Winfrey before a live studio audience last Thursday, Harris touted the fact that she is a gun owner: “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”

We’ve seen this approach before. In a 1977 speech he made just after Jimmy Carter was elected, Ronald Reagan noted that liberals win when they are smart enough “to run someone as a moderate even when he is liberal”:

Jimmy Carter, a Southern governor and Evangelical Christian, ran as someone who claimed to be a moderate. But even if Jimmy Carter wants to be moderate, he can’t be. His congressional leadership and the Democratic Party will not let him. He will govern from the left.

Kamala Harris is trying to pull the same trick, boasting that she has been a prosecutor, highlighting the fact that she owns a gun, and claiming that, even as a lifetime product of the radical politics of San Francisco and Berkeley, she represents middle-class values. So far, she may be successfully distancing herself from the policy missteps and stagnation of her own, Biden-Harris administration. The truth, however, is that the most likely “change” she would bring as president would be a governing model even more progressive and less coherent than the one we have now.