On Donald Trump’s plan to convince Congress to change the law so that tips are not longer taxed — a plan that has now been copied by Kamala Harris — Dan writes:
When you run on the things you actually want to see happen, it’s a good thing if your opponents copy your ideas. Sure, you can press them on the sincerity of their opportunistic conversion (such as John McCain saying he wanted to “build the danged fence”), but that, too, is a way of trying to box them in to actually do it. It was a good thing for conservatives when they actually got Bill Clinton to sign a bunch of stuff like tax cuts, welfare reform, border enforcement, and the Defense of Marriage Act. It was a good thing for liberals when George W. Bush adopted the Clinton–Gore idea of a new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs and passed it into law – even if the precise structure of that entitlement wasn’t what liberals wanted. When the other side is copying your rhetoric and your proposals, you’re winning.
But this isn’t winning. Trump is mad now because the point of the tip-tax cut isn’t to accomplish a policy priority, it’s to get Donald Trump elected. If it instead gets Kamala Harris elected, what’s the use in that?
I agree. In fact, I made a similar point on today’s Editors podcast. But I’d like to add a related point, which is that, for the same reasons that Dan outlines, Kamala Harris’s pretending to have changed her mind on everything also does not count as a win for the conservative movement.
For the last three weeks, conservatives have been complaining that Harris is not running for president in the way that candidates typically do. We have noted that she went through no primary process that forced her to sell herself to the public; that she won’t sit down for interviews; that she won’t acknowledge that she’s currently the VP; that she has shed all of her previous positions via anonymous statements; and that her website — which is a shell — is devoid of any concrete policies at all. In response to this complaint, some observers have accused us of churlishness — or worse. “Why are you upset,” they have asked, “that the Democratic candidate has abandoned a set of policies you hate?”
Well, I’ll tell you: Because there’s no solid evidence that she actually has abandoned them. Harris has offered no explanation for the changes her spokespeople have reported; neither her party nor political coalition has shifted under her feet; and, most notably of all, she hasn’t replaced the old ideas with anything new. With the sole exception of her stated opposition to increasing individual taxes on individuals who earn less than $400,000/year — which reflects a shift in the Democrats that has been consistent from Obama through to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — there is no reason that anyone should believe that Harris is on the level here. That, as Dan says, “isn’t winning.”
If Harris had accounted for these alterations, I’d be genuinely thrilled. It used to irritate me during the Obama years when people would insist that I was destined to criticize Obama “whatever he did.” I wasn’t. Had Obama woken up one day and become a pro-life, free market-loving, constitutional originalist, I’d have been absolutely thrilled. Not only would I have voted for him, I’d have considered his change of heart a massive victory for the movement to which I belong. After all, convincing your opponents to agree with you — or to reluctantly fight for what you want in order to win elections — is the whole point of politics. But Obama didn’t do that — or anything close to it — so I opposed him instead of supporting him.
That is not because nobody ever changes. Sometimes, parties genuinely do move toward the other side. The Republicans had to do this after the New Deal. The Democrats had to do this after the 1980s. And, as I noted earlier, the Obama-Hillary-Biden-Harris-led progressive movement has felt obliged to do it on taxes since the two rounds of cuts in the early 2000s. But there is a difference between this actually happening and a candidate casually insisting that any of the unpopular things she said she believed are no longer operative. Why am I not thrilled that Harris is denouncing her past self while copying some of Trump’s policies? Because I don’t think it’s real, that’s why. And because it’s not real, it’s pointless.