Why a Platform Is Poison for Kamala Harris

By Judson Berger

Friday, August 30, 2024

 

The rational voter would turn to RFK Jr. for three things, and three things only: instruction in falconry, expertise in roadkill-consumption laws by state, and a stinging assessment of why Kamala Harris’s campaign is policy-light.

 

“Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?” he said a week ago, as he suspended his campaign and endorsed the Republican nominee.

 

It was perhaps the truest thing Kennedy said, even if that’s not saying much. (Okay, he made a few valid points about censorship and ultra-processed foods, but how much do you want to praise a guy who sees a whale carcass and thinks: Glad I brought a chain saw?)

 

The Democratic nominee can eschew any commitment to a traditional campaign platform in part because negative partisanship will allow her to capture a near-majority of voters no matter what her policies end up being, when the choice is Harris or Donald Trump. But there’s more to it. Her No. 2 position in an unpopular administration puts her in a policy straitjacket: She can’t lean into that agenda too much, nor can she convincingly divorce herself from it. And so, as Audrey Fahlberg and Brittany Bernstein report, the message for now is joy, freedom — and TBD.

 

The campaign has no policy section on its website, has renounced several of the nominee’s past positions, and is endorsing plans this cycle that, in key respects, allies and the media insist will not actually become law. Harris’s anti-price-gouging plan is already being downplayed as not viable and a mere “messaging tactic,” per Politico. In other words, “never mind.”

 

In Thursday’s CNN interview alongside Tim Walz, Harris nevertheless talked up that plank of her economic agenda (among others, including a $25,000 credit for first-time homebuyers, despite concerns it could raise the cost of starter homes). Addressing the inconsistencies between her last presidential campaign and this one, she insisted simply that her “values have not changed.” The campaign is teasing additional detail. Harris spokeswoman Brooke Goren told National Review that voters “can expect more to come from the campaign in terms of her talking about her specific plans.” The New York Times reported that aides expect “a few targeted policy proposals, akin to the first planks of an economic agenda she rolled out” — but that the campaign “is unlikely to detail a broader agenda beyond what Mr. Biden has already articulated.”

 

The reality is that the Harris platform remains a mostly black box — and may stay that way, in a stark departure from tradition considering the policy output by this point of the party’s 2008 and 2016 nominees, as Audrey and Brittany detail. Jim Geraghty, after watching the CNN sit-down, can only conclude, “This is a campaign built on vibes, and it will remain a campaign built on vibes.” Does it matter? That’s the underlying question in Audrey’s latest magazine piece, which gets at the central problem for Harris — “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.”

 

Jim wonders if the candidate can simply get away with running for president without a policy vision. After all, the nominee whose theme is “freedom” would be granting her future administration plenty of it by withholding any agenda by which to be measured. Jim writes,

 

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?

 

The nominee’s convention speech included a few references to policy goals, including pursuing a national abortion bill and reviving the recently failed border bill. But Obama adviser/strategist David Axelrod told Audrey that, while elaborating on the issues is important, “what I don’t sense in the public is this hungering for more white papers from her.” Axelrod noted that her rival is “not exactly a policy maven.” Trump, indeed, is all over the map — on abortion especially. But even Trump has a platform on his website, albeit one that contains as many specifics as it does lower-case letters.

 

Marc Thiessen, writing in the Washington Post, notes a historical detail that haunts Harris: A sitting VP has been elected president only once in the last 188 years. That was George H. W. Bush, who ran when his boss, Ronald Reagan, was about as above water in public-opinion polls as Harris’s is below. “Bush succeeded where other modern vice presidents failed for one simple reason: Americans wanted a third Reagan term. Today, no one wants another Biden term,” Thiessen writes.

 

Harris is understandably reluctant to commit herself to anything resembling such a thing, her economic plan notwithstanding. So, no, don’t expect the nominee to suddenly “have a plan for that,” à la Elizabeth Warren. That’s not this campaign — not this year.