According to the Press, America Has Already Let Kamala Harris Down

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 22, 2024

 

America has already failed Kamala Harris.

 

According to two recent analyses in some of the country’s biggest media outlets, it’s we who are to blame for the fact that Harris’s far-left policy proposals have landed with a thud.

 

A New York Times “news analysis” via reporter Jim Tankersley, both Harris’s “foes and allies may have the wrong idea” about her plan to set price caps on basic commodities — a proposal to fix prices that definitely does not constitute “price controls.”

 

As Tankersley notes, “people familiar with Ms. Harris’s thinking” believe her “price-gouging ban” is neither a “price-gouging ban” nor a “Soviet-style” intervention in the private economy. It is whatever you want it to be, as long as you want it to be good because the Harris “campaign has created space for multiple interpretations.” What we can be sure of is that Harris’s plan would definitely not create scarcity by disincentivizing firms to meet demand where it exists in response to market signals — e.g., prices. Why? Mostly because voters wouldn’t like that.

 

The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein similarly chastises the voters for reaching conclusions that are disadvantageous to the Harris campaign. The vice president’s price-gouging ban “has been misconstrued,” the headline read. Indeed, her proposal has been “taken out of context,” Stein insists — the preferred context being the acknowledgement that emergency declarations can trigger price-gouging prohibitions at the state level. It’s not clear what any of this has to do with Harris’s pander to economically illiterate voters, and it’s a non-sequitur to couple Harris’s federal ban proposal with state-level laws because there is no emergency save the vice president’s desire to win the presidential election.

 

Throw these two items on the growing pile of utterly unconvincing attempts to craft a rationale for Harris’s price-fixing scheme — one that Harris herself has not provided. It’s not that Harris has failed to communicate her proposal effectively. The problem is us and our thick-headed failure to intuit her meaning in ways that reflect favorably on Harris. We’ve really blown this one.

 

But let’s be charitable. Let’s say that Harris’s well-meaning proposals have been “misconstrued” and “taken out of context.” If only there was some way that Harris could clear up the confusion. Would that she had some way to communicate directly with us from beyond the veil with which her campaign has shrouded her. In the absence of an Ouija board, we’re forced to collect clues and assemble into something resembling a cogent defense of Harris’s discredited policy instincts. But that hasn’t stopped Harris’s defenders in the press from completing her sentence for her. Maybe they are holding a séance without us.