On the menu today: Kamala Harris is proving that you don’t need to make promises on specific policies or have a clear agenda to run a presidential campaign that, at the moment, looks to have no worse than a 50–50 shot of reaching 270 electoral votes. Meanwhile, the New York Times takes a long look at the seedy side of California politics and concludes that the Bosch television series might as well have been a documentary.
Specific Policy Proposals Are for Losers, Chump!
The morning’s polling news: The latest Fox News poll shows Kamala Harris narrowly ahead of Donald Trump in Arizona, 50 percent to 49 percent; Harris ahead in Georgia and Nevada, 50 percent to 48 percent; and Trump narrowly ahead in North Carolina, 50 percent to 49 percent.
The latest USA Today/Suffolk poll has Harris ahead nationally, 48 percent to 43 percent.
The latest Emerson/The Hill polling finds Trump ahead in Arizona, 50 percent to 47 percent; Harris ahead in Georgia, 49 percent to 48 percent; Harris ahead in Michigan, 50 percent to 47 percent; Harris ahead in Nevada, 49 percent to 48 percent; Trump ahead in North Carolina, 49 percent to 48 percent; a 48-all tie in Pennsylvania; and Trump ahead in Wisconsin, 49 percent to 48 percent.
In other words, just about every swing state looks awfully swing-y.
Does anything a presidential candidate says on the campaign trail matter? Or is the Harris campaign “ahead of the curve” in a way, by behaving as if there’s no point in laying out policy proposals during a presidential campaign, because once she’s in office, she can and will do whatever she wants, and whatever she has enough congressional support to pass?
My Washington Post colleague Jason Willick argues that while new presidents can break promises they made on the campaign trail, the point of getting them to make these promises is to fence them in once they’re in office, and to create a penalty for deviating from their stated positions:
The mainstream media has significant power to shape the behavior of Democratic presidential candidates, as the frenzy that expelled Biden from the race showed. If liberal outlets could embarrass Biden into stepping aside, they could also embarrass Harris into engaging in a modicum of policy discussion.
But it’s important to be clear-eyed about the reason such discussion is urgent and necessary: to box Harris in, extracting commitments not only of what she would do but of what she wouldn’t. Of course, Harris is not interested in having her mandate limited in this way, but with political guardrails eroding, that’s precisely the purpose of a free press.
Like the old poster on Fox Mulder’s wall in The X-Files, “I want to believe.” But I’m not sure I believe.
If George H. W. Bush had never said, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” would Americans have been as irritated with him when he instituted higher excise taxes on gasoline, alcohol, tobacco, and telephones, and a new luxury tax on cars, yachts, airplanes, furs, and jewelry? No one except diehard Democrats likes tax increases, but I suspect people get more steamed when you implement them after promising the opposite.
(President Biden has 144 days remaining to keep his promise to cure cancer.)
I’m going to take the wayback machine to 2009 and recall one of those conversations that occurs in the guest green rooms of cable-news networks, at least to the best of my memory. We were a few months into the new Barack Obama administration, and most of the media was euphoric — Time magazine had portrayed Obama on its cover as Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a “New New Deal,” and Newsweek’s cover had declared “We’re All Socialists Now”; this was leading up to that magazine’s eventual portrayal of Obama as the Hindu deity, Lord Shiva, and “God of All Things.”
But when Obama unveiled his first budget, it included some proposals he had never mentioned on the campaign trail:
President Obama has proposed limiting the value of the tax break for all itemized deductions, including donations to charity, to 28 percent for taxpayers making $200,000 or more, and couples making $250,000 or more. Currently, taxpayers who are in a 33 percent or 35 percent tax bracket take deductions at that rate. Obama believes that the reduction could save the federal government $179.8 billion over 10 years.
Saving the feds money sounds like a good thing. But what worries charitable organizations is whether the result would be less philanthropic giving.
Obama had run on “hope and change,” and had suddenly taken office and said, “Let’s reduce the tax break that rich people get for giving to charity.” Needless to say, the nonprofit community — which had largely fallen in love with Obama during the preceding two years — was shocked and horrified that its favorite new president was attempting to cut it off at the knees: “A study conducted by Bank of America and Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy found that curtailing the charitable tax deduction would ‘somewhat’ or ‘dramatically’ decrease the contributions of 47 percent of affluent donors. The study also reckoned that Obama’s budget would cut donations nationally by $10 billion to $20 billion per year.” (That’s roughly $15 billion to $30 billion in 2024 dollars.)
To their credit, a bunch of congressional Democrats were highly skeptical of this idea:
During a March 4 hearing, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Vice Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) expressed strong reservations about this proposal to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. While Geithner downplayed any significant harm to the nonprofit sector as a result of the limit, he did say that there may be “wiggle room” to amend the tax proposals.
It’s noteworthy that the senators who will be writing the tax portion of budget reconciliation have stated their opposition to reducing the charitable deduction. Recent reports indicate the administration may be backing off from its insistence on this provision.
In that green room back in spring 2009, I recall two prominent news anchors expressing disbelief and dismay at this proposal. (I don’t know how they’d voted, but let’s face it, the odds are extremely high that they had voted for Obama over McCain.) One said something like, “Where the heck was this when he was running for president? It’s a terrible idea, but either way, he’s got to learn that you can’t just blindside people with something like this.” The other concurred, and said something like this was a sign that Obama hadn’t spent enough time in Washington to realize you couldn’t bait-and-switch people like this.
The charitable deduction remained intact. Obama kept calling for it to be curtailed in his budget proposals, but Congress was never interested in making that change.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time a Democratic president got into office and suddenly changed the plan; Bill Clinton took office and suddenly announced that no one would get the middle-class tax cut he had spent the previous year promising to deliver. The New York Times, back on February 18, 1993:
In selling his economic plan, President Clinton is gambling that voters never took seriously his campaign promise to lower the tax burden of the middle class and will respond favorably to an aggressive pitch based on equal measures of hope, fear and class revenge.
After months of polling and research, Mr. Clinton’s top political advisers say they are convinced that middle-class voters will support higher taxes. The advisers say the voters will see the new taxes as the price of great improvements in government service and as inflicting a just punishment on the rich who profited during the Reagan and Bush Administrations. . . .
The first challenge in selling Mr. Clinton’s plan to raise taxes on the middle class would seem to be overcoming the voluble history of his many specific promises to the contrary.
As candidate, Mr. Clinton promised to offer tax relief to families with incomes of less than $80,000 a year. He said he would raise taxes on only “the wealthiest 2 percent,” those with incomes above $200,000 a year, and impose a surtax of 10 percent on those with annual incomes of more than $1 million. . . .
And the “millionaire’s surtax” would be imposed on households with taxable income of more than $250,000 a year.
There’s a school of thought that argues that without policy proposals, a candidate wins election with little or no mandate. But what if the opposite is true? If you run on “we’re not going back” and coconut-tree memes and “joy” and all of this touchy-feely vibes stuff, aren’t you free to attempt to enact any policies you like? After all, it’s not like Harris specifically promised not to enact a certain policy. In the past few weeks, we’ve learned — through statements issued by staffers — that she apparently no longer supports an electric-vehicle mandate, a fracking ban, a federal jobs guarantee, “starting from scratch” with a replacement for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a mandatory buyback of assault weapons, or the elimination of private health insurance.
The people voting for her clearly don’t want or need policy details. They trust her judgment to figure it all out later, after she’s been elected.
If Harris wins the election, she’ll have an argument that she has a mandate to do whatever she pleases, as very few Americans demanded more specifics from her.
And if she wins, why should any presidential candidate spell out specific policy proposals ever again?
This Just Handed to Me: California Politics Is Basically All the Bosch Novels
Over in the New York Times, there’s a spotlight on worsening corruption scandals, all over the Golden State:
Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
California has a larger population than those states, but the recent wave of cases is attributable to much more than that, federal prosecutors say.
A heavy concentration of power at Los Angeles City Hall, the receding presence of local news media, a population that often tunes out local politics and a growing Democratic supermajority in state government have all helped insulate officeholders from damage, political analysts said.
Well, that sounds like all kinds of unethical, sleazy, crooked California elected officials were convinced that no one in law enforcement would ever catch them, and they certainly didn’t fear, say, the state attorney general showing up at their door with a slew of indictments.
Hey, who was in that job from, oh, 2011 to 2017 or so?
ADDENDA: National Review’s editors offer a long list of questions for Kamala Harris — both in tonight’s interview and afterward.
A reminder of what the Biden administration pledged regarding Afghanistan, and the catastrophic results it delivered instead.
You can watch me and the world’s most crooked necktie in yesterday’s appearance on Meet the Press Now.