It’s not a well-kept secret, but it is a truth that partisans on either end of the political spectrum dare not acknowledge: Kamala Harris’s wholesale makeover is aimed at convincing voters she’s not the woman of the Left she once made herself out to be. For now, Democrats are letting her get away with it. They know that the presidential race is a dead heat, and they’re not inclined to make demands of Harris until she can deliver the goods. Republicans can also be counted on to keep this observation to themselves. Their theory of the case against Harris is that the years she spent crafting a reputation for herself as a doctrinaire progressive is her biggest liability. But the fact is that Harris is running to the right of her own record because she’s trying to meet the median voter where he lives.
On guns, Harris is running away from herself. She jocularly told Oprah Winfrey that she would gleefully wield the firearm she owns to shoot a home invader if she had the chance – an articulation of the Castle Doctrine that is anathema in the (primarily northeastern) jurisdictions where homeowners must feel demonstrably threatened before they can legally disregard their “duty to retreat.” “We will not take anybody’s guns away,” the campaign insists, even as it embraces “some reasonable laws” to control firearms, and she is withdrawing her former support for mandatory-firearms-buyback programs. Why? Because America, both culturally and legally, has grown far more comfortable with and even supportive of the rights of firearms owners. America moved right, and Harris is moving with them.
Harris is retrenching from her opposition to fracking for the same reasons. She backed a ban on this revolutionary energy technology in 2019 because that’s what progressives wanted, and then she echoed Joe Biden’s stance, noting that he opposed a ban, when she became his running mate because the Left’s objectives were out of step with what most Americans believed. The same could be said of the political suicide note progressives deemed “The Green New Deal.” In advance of the 2020 Democratic primaries, nine of the party’s presidential aspirants signed on to that radical plan – in whole or “in concept”— to renovate every free-standing structure in America, eliminate the fossil-fuel industry, guarantee Americans employment, make college a “debt-free” proposition, nationalize private health insurance, and provide a universal minimum basic income, among other far-left desiderata. “Our whole party was on this weird pogo stick in 2020,” Van Jones recently confessed. “We had all kinds of ideas that turned out to be bad ideas.” Jones was right to include himself as someone who succumbed to that mania, but he had much company. Joe Biden was the exception to that rule, and it was no accident that he subsequently won his party’s nomination and the White House.
Harris has abandoned a plastic-straw ban – an inconvenience imposed on us as a result of a nine-year-old boy’s passions (seriously). She’s backing off legislation she herself co-sponsored that would entirely phase out the internal combustion engine in passenger vehicles. She is restyling herself a border hawk – even going so far as to commit to signing legislation that would fund the construction of Trump’s border wall – because Americans want to see the border crisis contained, and they’ve warmed to a wall as part of a suite of policies that might contribute to that outcome.
All this is good news for Republicans and conservatives who would like to see the country directionally oriented toward the right, but I can already hear the angry objections to these observations. It’s all a ruse, they might insist. Harris is hardly a woman of the Right, and she can be counted on to govern from the Oval Office as the radical progressive she spent her career making herself out to be. I agree.
Harris has given her Republican critics plenty of ammunition to substantiate the allegation that her instincts are dogmatically leftist and foolishly statist. Noting her efforts to ingratiate herself to voters outside the progressive bubble does not, however, undermine the assertions from the Trump campaign or their allies that Harris’s policy instincts are too left-wing to be trusted. That’s true enough, but it is also true that Harris’s hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. The Harris campaign’s tacit acknowledgment that America is a center-right country is evidence of a conclusion the Left bitterly resents and has argued against for years. That concession isn’t much, but it’s nothing to sneeze at, either.