By Audrey Fahlberg
Thursday, August 22, 2024
After a few speeches at the outset that were heavy on
theatrics, Kamala Harris’s “freedom”-focused presidential campaign has remained
awfully light on substance.
“This campaign is a fight for the future!” Harris told a
large crowd at Temple University in Philadelphia on August 6. A bright future,
in Harris’s eyes, is one “where we defend our most fundamental freedoms” to
vote, “to be safe” from gun violence, “to love who you love openly and with
pride,” and to get an abortion. The Democratic ticket, she said, has a “message
for Trump and others who want to turn back the clock on our fundamental
freedoms: We’re not going back!”
Two weeks later, at the start of the Democratic
convention in Chicago, the campaign website still has no policy section.
Haven’t you heard? It’s a “vibes” election now. And as her new running mate,
Tim Walz, likes to say, Kamala Harris is “bringing back the joy.”
Prioritizing the joy at the start of her campaign meant
waiting a full three weeks before she unveiled a list of proposals to reassure
voters that she does, in fact, have views on economic policy. Among them are
pledges to “end” alleged corporate “price-gouging,” restore and expand Biden’s
child tax credits, and subsidize first-time homebuyers’ mortgages. In other
words, Bidenomics on steroids.
Feeling down about high prices at the gas pump and the
high cost of buying a home? Not to worry. When Harris is elected president, “it
will be a Day One priority to bring down prices,” she said in an August 15
social-media post. “She says she’s going to lower the cost of food and housing
starting on Day One,” Donald Trump retorted at a rally in Pennsylvania. “But
Day One for Kamala was three and a half years ago.”
Therein lies the central challenge of Harris’s
presidential campaign — figuring out how to present herself to voters as a
fresh face and in no way responsible for the inflation, chaos overseas, and
surge in illegal immigration that have occurred under the watch of the
Biden-Harris administration.
But the Democratic Party’s slapdash effort to reinvent
her may just work. If the pre–Labor Day polls are right, this toss-up
presidential race is trending in her favor, thanks in part to an undisciplined
GOP nominee and an uncritical press that may hold Harris’s hand through
Election Day.
Winning the presidency would complete quite the
redemption arc for Harris, who wasn’t riding so high before Joe Biden’s
catastrophic June 27 debate performance.
Dubbing her early in her career as the “female Barack
Obama,” the Democratic Party had high expectations for the first black, South
Asian, and woman vice president, but its hopes began to fizzle almost as soon
as she set foot inside the West Wing. Soon after her swearing in, a trickle of
brutal media coverage began to show a new side of Harris: a policy lightweight
who runs a dysfunctional office and degrades her staffers, doesn’t take well to
criticism, and is unsure of herself and what she believes.
The next three and a half years did not relieve her of
this reputation. Since January 2021, Biden and his inner circle have done
little to promote her public portfolio beyond making her the administration’s
abortion-rights messenger and assigning her the unglamorous task of addressing
the “root causes” of illegal immigration from Central America.
Serving in the president’s shadow is, of course, what she
signed up for. “The nature of the job is that you’re working for the president
and you’re there to help him execute his policies — you’re not there to blaze
your own,” says David Axelrod, a former White House adviser to Barack Obama.
Now the time has come for Harris to blaze her own trail. Yes, it’s
important that she fleshes out her forward-looking positions on issues such as
the economy, Axelrod told me on August 14. Then came the but: “What I
don’t sense in the public is this hungering for more white papers from her.”
To get some clarity on the values that motivate Harris’s
30,000-foot approach to governing, National Review turned to
one of her closest allies on Capitol Hill.
“She is always going to be an advocate for fairness and
for seeing those who have felt left out,” says Senator Laphonza Butler (D.,
Calif.), who advised Harris’s first presidential campaign. Butler rattles off a
list of convictions that she says have long driven her friend’s politics: a
strong sense of justice, a desire to lift up the middle class, an eagerness to
give people the tools they need to pursue their dreams. “So while there’s lots
of banter” about “the ways in which to achieve those outcomes,” Butler insists,
“the outcomes that she has desired have remained the same.”
How can the American people be sure? Since replacing
Biden on the ticket in late July, no term has better described Harris than
“flip-flopper.” Through staffers and with no explanation, she’s walked back her
prior support for single-payer Medicare for All, “assault weapons” buybacks, a
mandatory federal jobs guarantee, and a ban on fracking. As the New York
Times characterized her in November 2019, “she is a candidate who seeks
input from a stable of advisers, but her personal political convictions can be
unclear.”
Foreign policy is another black box. Aside from a slew of
post–October 7 news reports that Harris has privately urged Biden to adopt a
more humanitarian approach to Palestinian suffering in Gaza, her view of
America’s role in the world remains hazy, critics say. “As far as I can tell,
she knows very little about national-security policy,” says John Bolton, who
served as U.N. ambassador under George W. Bush and national-security adviser
under Trump. “She hasn’t made any notable foreign-policy pronouncements. She’s
given speeches at places like the annual Munich Security Conference, but those
are speeches probably written for her by the Biden NSC, and they state
Biden-administration policy, which she’s simply repeating.”
Helping Harris’s 2024 effort to redefine herself, Axelrod
argues, is the reality that her rival is “not exactly a policy maven” himself.
“Trump’s had like four different positions on abortion in this campaign,” he
says. Plus, with Biden out, Trump is now the old man in the race — and an
undisciplined, vengeful one at that. “Trump seems a bit unhinged because he has
a new and more competitive opponent,” he adds, “and he doesn’t know quite how
to deal with her.”
***
In May 2023, Joe Biden made a surprise appearance at a
gala hosted by the pro-choice advocacy group EMILY’s List, in honor of former
House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He shuffled onstage with flowers to thank her, the
big star of the night, before praising another speaker: “I also want to thank
my buddy Kamala, who I work for in the — up in the White House, for leading on
this issue” of abortion, Biden said, mispronouncing her first name and
eliciting awkward cheers and scattered applause from the crowd.
This was a time-capsule moment for an aging president and
his second in command, whose uninspiring remarks that night did little to
instill confidence in the Democratic establishment that she would be ready if,
heaven forbid, circumstances required her to replace her boss on the ticket. “I
do believe it is critical that we also take a step back to clearly see the
moment we are in, see this moment in the context of the history we have lived,
and see it in the context of the future we must shape,” Harris told the swanky
crowd of Democratic donors, operatives, and politicians.
Little did the audience know that, just 14 months later,
her often insipid babble on the stump — she has spoken of “what can be,
unburdened by what has been” and shares words of wisdom from her mother (“You
think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in
which you live and what came before you”) — would make her an internet
sensation among Gen Z and earn her more points in the “fun” department.
As the campaign enters its post-honeymoon phase, her
allies bristle at the slightest insinuation that Harris fears the press. Two
Harris spokesmen did not respond to National Review’s requests for
comment about campaign strategy. Asked whether she should be doing more
sit-downs with reporters, Senator Butler turned the question on its head. “Do
you want to report on her running the flawless campaign and actually going out
and executing on a vice-presidential pick that actually helps to grow the
coalition and invite more American people to participate in their democracy?”
she asks me. “Do you want her to execute massive rallies that inspire and
engage voters who felt left out and with no choice in their options before? Or
do you want to report on her not talking to reporters?”
Sure, there’s a role for the media to play, Butler says.
But there’s a “pretty important task” that Democrats are “demanding” that
Harris execute on a short time line “that you could report on” — i.e.,
winning the presidency — “and I think she’s doing that incredibly well.”
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