By Becket Adams
Sunday, August 04, 2024
The easiest job in American politics must be serving as a
communications staffer for Democratic politicians. The media do your job for
you every day.
There is no position that Kamala Harris supports now
that she won’t oppose later should it prove politically advantageous.
This is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans.
It’s bad for Republicans because, as it turns out, it’s a
slippery thing, campaigning against Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
For Democrats, however, their nominee’s preternatural
gift for supporting every side of an issue has made it exceptionally easy for
so-called media fact-checkers to rewrite her political record, absolving her of
all previous electorally unpopular positions with a simple argument amounting
to: “That was then, this is now.”
It’s the old John Kerry “I supported it before I was against it” line, except now
with a thick veneer of credibility courtesy of the corporate press.
PolitiFact, for example, published a “fact-check”
last week, flunking former president and GOP nominee Donald Trump for claiming
that Harris supported the “defund the police” movement before she switched
positions.
“She wants to defund the police,” Trump said on July 24.
“Now she’s pulled back on it.”
In response to this accusation, PolitiFact awarded Trump a “mostly false” rating.
Let’s review the record.
In 2020, when the anti-police movement reached a fever
pitch with nationwide rioting, Harris said that “we have to redirect resources”
from law enforcement into government functions, including schools, and “to
reimagine public safety in America.”
What do you call it when you reduce funding for a group? Unfund?
Ex-fund? The word is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite think of
it.
“For too long,” Harris said on June 10, 2020, “people
have confused achieving public safety with putting more cops on the street.”
She added, “We have to have this conversation about
redirecting resources where they are needed to truly support communities to be
healthy and therefore safe.”
In separate remarks, Harris praised the defund movement,
characterizing it as “rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets
and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities.”
George Stephanopoulos of ABC News asked her directly in
one conversation, “So does that mean you support proposals like what we’ve seen
in Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti saying take some of the money from
policing, about $150 million, invest it in health initiatives, training
initiatives for youth?”
“I support investing in communities so that they become
more healthy and, therefore, more safe,” Harris said in response. “The issue
right now in America is that many cities spend over one-third of their entire
city budget on policing. But meanwhile, we’ve been defunding public schools for
years in America.”
Of course, it’s worth noting that in her 2009 book Smart
on Crime, then–San Francisco DA Kamala Harris argued, “A more visible and
strategic police presence is a deterrent to crime, and it has a positive impact
on a community.” In fact, she wrote,
Virtually all law-abiding citizens
feel safer when they see officers walking a beat. This is as true in
economically poor neighborhoods as in wealthy ones. There is a widely held
notion that poor communities, particularly poor African American and Latino
communities, consider law enforcement the enemy and that they do not want
police officers in their neighborhoods. In fact, the opposite is true.
Unsurprisingly, Harris abandoned her “defund” rhetoric
after Joe Biden named her as his running mate. The campaign released statements
unequivocally denouncing attempts to reduce policing budgets, claiming further
it was a dirty lie to suggest Harris would ever support such a thing.
In explaining its “mostly false” rating for Trump’s
remarks on July 24, PolitiFact argues, “The Trump campaign
points to statements by Harris in 2020 — not in 2024.”
That was then. This is now.
“While in 2020 she didn’t explicitly call for getting rid
of police departments,” PolitiFact continued, “she did state support for
reexamining police budgets and lauded a proposal by the Los Angeles mayor to
shift part of the police budget to community initiatives.”
Wow. “Reexamining police budgets . . . to shift part of
the police budget” is a mouthful. I wonder if there’s a more straightforward
term to describe such a process.
“Where Trump veers into territory that makes this claim
inaccurate is when he spoke in the present tense,” the PolitiFact “fact-check”
continued, “although he did follow his sentence with the phrase ‘now she’s
pulled back on it.’ When he said that Harris ‘wants’ to defund police
that leaves voters with the impression that the vice president and presumed
presidential nominee is now calling for defunding the police. She is not.”
Oh, come on. This is absurd. Surely it cannot get more
ridiculous than this. Yes, it can.
On July 24, Trump also alleged, “Lyin’ Kamala supported
abolishing ICE.”
This claim is outright “false,” according to PolitiFact.
“It’s clear that Harris opposed, and opposes, many of
Trump’s immigration positions,” the website explained. “And she called for an
end to the hard-line tactics that had been used by the administration. But she
never said she would abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In fact, she
said the opposite.”
In 2018, Harris was asked whether she agreed with
activists who had called to abolish ICE. She did not say no. In fact, she said,
“We need to probably even think about starting from scratch because there’s a
lot that is wrong with the way that [ICE] is conducting itself, and we need to
deal with that.”
Later, in a separate interview on The View, she
was asked whether she would abolish the Department of Homeland Security.
“No, I would not,” Harris said, adding that, though DHS,
which includes ICE, is “dysfunctional,” she does not “believe in getting rid of
it.”
Saying that DHS shouldn’t be abolished but that ICE may
need to be restarted “from scratch” gets Trump a “false” rating — not even an
equivocated “mostly false” but a flat “false”?
If you think these “fact-checks” are bad, it gets worse.
Indeed, where certain “fact-checkers” can’t argue that Harris’s new positions
render attacks on her old positions “false” or “mostly false,”
they have opted to revise the historical record with misleading
characterizations and blatant untruths
Of course, we’re talking about the concerted effort to
rewrite Harris’s past as the “border czar.”
We’ve
covered this before. Harris was the border czar. Everyone
understood her to be such. She held all the duties and responsibilities
associated with the position. It wasn’t until it became a political liability
that “fact-checkers” decided to revisit the record, claiming that anyone who
understood her to be the border czar, including their own newsrooms, got it
wrong.
I know it’s a lie. You know it’s a lie. They know it’s a
lie. That they never bothered to correct this three-year-old “misconception”
until she became the presumptive Democratic nominee gives the game away. But
the all-too-obvious timing of the thing is not stopping them from trying to
revise her record anyway.
“Harris was never made Biden’s ‘border czar,’” CNN’s
Daniel Dale wrote in a July 25 “fact check,” citing a White House “fact sheet.”
“In reality,” he added, “Biden gave Harris a more limited
immigration-related assignment.”
In 2021, CNN published a report titled “Biden assigning
Harris to lead diplomatic efforts in Central America to address immigration.”
Its subhead read (emphasis my own), “President Joe Biden is tasking Vice
President Kamala Harris with overseeing efforts with Central American
countries to stem the flow of migrants to the US southern border, the first
major issue Biden has assigned directly to his No. 2.”
Elsewhere, Reuters ran a “fact-check” last week,
promoting it on social media under the news blurb, “At campaign rallies and in
social media posts, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has
intensified his attacks on Kamala Harris as a failed ‘border czar.’ But experts
say Harris wasn’t really a border czar at all.”
The “experts” cited in the Reuters report are “three
current Biden officials, 13 former officials and others tracking the issue.”
The only “experts” mentioned by name are Democratic
senator Chris Murphy, former Clinton and Obama official Alan Bersin, and former
Biden administration official Roberta Jacobson, who was herself referred to
colloquially as the “border czar” before Harris assumed her role (but don’t
call Harris the “border czar”!).
This isn’t “fact-checking.” This is political activism.
This is propaganda.
Also, why are we treating the term “border czar” now as
if it were an official federal title? It’s casually used to refer broadly to “a person appointed by the government to advise on and
coordinate policy in a particular area.” Everyone understood the title as
such until last month.
The answer is simple: If you distract people long enough
with a completely meaningless semantic argument over what constitutes a federal
“czar,” they’ll be too distracted to remember that Harris failed miserably in
her goal to address the immigration crisis. More than 7 million illegal border
crossings on her watch isn’t a defensible thing. So let’s not talk about that.
It depends on what your definition of “is” is.
Honestly, the easiest job in American politics must be
serving as a communications staffer for Democratic lawmakers. It must be a hell
of a thing to clock in every morning and see that some corporate conglomerate
has done your job for you.
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