By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday,
October 08, 2024
Kamala
Harris was a local prosecutor for twelve years, San Francisco district attorney
for eight years, California attorney general for six years, and a U.S. senator
for four years, and she’s closing in on four years as the U.S. vice president.
(Her last private-sector job might well have been that
gig at McDonald’s.*) That’s a lot of time in the public eye; over the
years, and during her campaigns, she must have done hundreds of interviews,
perhaps thousands.
And
yet, since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has appeared terrified of
doing them.
When
Harris has agreed to take questions, her campaign has chosen interviewers who
either are friendly and prone to softballs or who have already formally
endorsed her — Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC and Oprah to start. We’re told that Harris is doing a so-called
media blitz this week: The View, The Howard Stern Show, and The
Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Ana Navarro, a co-host of The View,
was one of the hosts at the Democratic convention in Chicago.
Four years ago, Howard Stern
endorsed Biden and encouraged Trump supporters to drink bleach and “drop dead.”
Colbert has turned his show into an infomercial for whichever Democratic
Party official is in town that night.
This
is an indication that Harris campaign managers wake up in a cold sweat from
nightmares about their own candidate’s deviating from talking points and happy
chat.
You
might be thinking, “And she’s getting away with it!” Eh, don’t be so certain
that there isn’t any consequence to running a campaign on coconut-tree memes
and vibes and “joy.” A dramatically under-discussed report in Politico from the weekend:
Democratic operatives, including some of
Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her
relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than
Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press
almost entirely.
In interviews with POLITICO, nearly two dozen
Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the
race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day
stretch.
With early voting by mail and in person
already underway in more than half of the country, Harris spent just three days
of the last week of September in battleground states.
. . . While the plan is for Harris’ travel to
ramp up in October, the vice president has spent more than a third of days
since the Democratic National Convention receiving briefings from staff and
conducting internal meetings, or without any scheduled public events, according
to a POLITICO review of her travel. . . .
Of the remaining days, the vice president
spent just a little more than half of them holding rallies, policy-focused
speeches, events with labor unions and other in-person, public-facing events,
including stops at small businesses, in swing states. And she has spent nearly
half of her post-DNC days in Washington.
Harris
has had no public events on more than a third of the days since the convention?
We’re left with the question that has haunted Joe Biden’s presidency: What is
the leader doing all day?
Seven
states will determine the outcome of the election, and they’re all within the margin of error. They’re mostly
clustered in three geographical areas — Nevada and Arizona in the West,
Michigan and Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest, and Georgia and North Carolina in
the South, with Pennsylvania a bit farther north of the last two. It’s the
easiest possible arrangement to do multiple rallies in multiple states in one
day. If the hurricanes have disrupted the ability to campaign in the Southeast,
there are still five other states worth a campaign stop!
Harris’s
interview with Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes, which aired last night, may
be the only time the vice president gets anything resembling a tough question.
And as we can see in the transcript, she turned in the kind of performance that
makes the media-averse strategy appear justified:
Bill Whitaker: Do we have a real close ally
in Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Vice President Kamala Harris: I think, with
all due respect, the better question is do we have an important alliance
between the American people and the Israeli people. And the answer to that
question is yes.
That’s
another way of saying no. Heck of a way to mark the first anniversary of the
October 7 massacre.
Harris
remains weirdly allergic to specifics when speaking off the cuff:
Whitaker: There are lots of signs that the
American economy is doing very well, better than most countries, I think. But
the American people don’t seem to be feeling it. Groceries are 25 percent
higher and people are blaming you and Joe Biden for that. Are they wrong?
Harris: We now have historic low unemployment
in America among all groups of people. We now have an economy that is thriving
by all macroeconomic measures. And, to your point, prices are still too high.
And I know that, and we need to deal with it, which is why part of my plan—you
mentioned groceries. Part of my plan is what we must do to bring down the price
of groceries.
Whitaker
had to spell out some of the details of Harris’s economic agenda in the form of
questions:
Whitaker: You want to expand— the child tax
credit.
Harris: Yes, I do.
Whitaker: You want to give tax breaks to
first-time home buyers.
Harris: Yes.
Whitaker: And people starting small
businesses.
Harris: Correct.
Whitaker: But it is estimated by the
Nonpartisan Committee for Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan
would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you
going to pay for that?
Harris: OK, so the other econ— economists
that have reviewed my plan versus my opponent and determined that my economic
plan would strengthen America’s economy. His would weaken it.
Whitaker: But—
Harris: My plan, Bill, if you don’t mind, my
plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses, you invest in
the middle class, and you strengthen America’s economy. Small businesses are
part of the backbone of America’s economy.
Whitaker: But— but pardon me, Madame Vice
President, I— the— the question was, how are you going to pay for it?
Harris: Well, one of the things is I’m going
to make sure that the richest among us, who can afford it, pay their fair share
in taxes.
First,
the U.S. has the most progressive tax code out of all the 38 countries in the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, including the
United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, Spain, Australia, and
New Zealand. Check out the tax brackets for yourself.
Or
examine the congressional testimony of William McBride of the Tax
Foundation:
By any objective measure, the U.S. tax code
is extremely progressive and very redistributive. According to the latest IRS
data for 2020, the top 5 percent of taxpayers (about 7.9 million filers that
earn more than $220,521) paid in aggregate $1.1 trillion in income taxes,
amounting to 62.7 percent of all income taxes paid that year. The top 1 percent
of taxpayers (about 1.6 million filers who earn more than $548,336) paid $723
billion in income taxes, or 42.3 percent of all income taxes paid—a larger
share than the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined.
The share of federal income taxes paid by the
top 1 percent is higher than it has been in at least 20 years, according to IRS
data. In 2001, the top 1 percent’s share of income taxes paid was 33.2 percent,
then fluctuated with the business cycle and the ups and downs of the housing
and stock markets, before rising steadily to its current high of 42.3 percent
in 2020.
“The
rich aren’t paying their fair share” is an exhausted talking point, an economic
myth promulgated by partisan hacks attempting to stir up a tide of envy and
resentment.
Still,
as ugly as it turned out to be, Harris did sit down and do the interview. 60
Minutes raked Trump over the coals for not doing the same. I’m not
sure why anyone on the Trump team thought that doing that interview would hurt
him — or hurt him any worse than any other appearance during the campaign.
Trump’s the ultimate known quantity. What, is the fear that he’s going to say that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the
blood of our country” again? Claim that Harris didn’t visit North Carolina when she did?
Declare that he didn’t know that Harris is black? Invoke Hannibal Lecter again?
Trump
is what he is. There’s no amount of smoke and mirrors that can obscure, spin,
or alter perceptions of him. Best to let him rise or fall on his own merits or
liabilities.
*I
know, I know, lots of people doubt that Harris ever worked at McDonald’s,
although I don’t really understand why a college student working at a fast-food
joint for a summer is such an implausible tale, or why anyone would expect
McDonalds to keep employment records from 41 years ago. To that point, Philip Bump writes:
Harris has indicated that she worked at a
restaurant in Alameda — an island on the east side of the San Francisco Bay —
during the summer of 1983. Over at the Alameda-focused discussion board on
Reddit, there was some discussion about which restaurant that would have
been, the one on Central Avenue or the one on Shore Line Drive. Consensus
seemed to be the former, since it wasn’t clear whether the latter existed at
the time.
I called both, without success. Again,
unsurprisingly: This was 40 years ago. I also discovered that both restaurants
are owned by members of the same family. My call to them was not returned, even
when I touted the potential historic nature of their franchises. Then I reached
out to McDonald’s corporate, both to the company and to the company’s archivist
(which, as an aside, seems like a very interesting job). No dice.
Technically, then, the claim exists within
the formal parameter of “unproven,” which is what the fact-checking site Snopes
has granted it. But it might just as well exist as
“unprovable,” barring some release of records from the Social Security
Administration.
ADDENDA: Over in that other publication I write for, I note an argument being
made against last-minute attempts to change what qualifies as a legitimate
vote, what the deadline is for an absentee ballot, or how a state allocates its
electoral votes. If you want to change any of those rules, you have to do it
well before the election process begins.
Over
in the Corner, I note that the world’s most notorious arms dealer, released
back to Russia by the Biden administration in exchange for professional
basketball player Brittney Griner, is back to his old tricks, working to put dangerous weapons in the hands of the Houthis.
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