So we’ve been through an entire debate, and Kamala Harris still hasn’t explained any of her extraordinary policy flip-flops.
I’m sorry, a person can’t just wake up one morning and abandon their entire worldview without an explanation. I mean, they can try, but no sensible person would take them seriously. Sure, politicians have been calibrating and triangulating their positions since Pericles. Most have been compelled to explain their ideological evolution – or have the decency to lie about it. None has ever relied on an army of anonymous campaign flacks to erase a lifetime of positions.
Well, not until Harris.
We all understand Democrats are desperate to shield voters from their candidate’s mind-numbing tautological rhetoric. Who can blame them, right? “Kamala Harris” is an empty vessel to be filled with the aspirations and dreams of gullible partisans. And allowing her to speak extemporaneously in public would kill all the joy, quicky.
These swirling platitudes and nervous laugh, however, don’t suggest that Harris isn’t bright. They suggest that she has no genuine philosophical or ethical belief system – other than, perhaps, obtaining and using power. Indeed, there’s little chance she will coherently expound on her sudden policy U-turns because they make zero ideological sense.
Let’s remember that Harris hasn’t merely been tinkering with the top marginal tax rate in her economic plan. She’s on the record championing, often quite passionately and definitively, a bunch of completely harebrained extremism.
“Will you fully endorse the Green New Deal tonight?” an Iowa voter asked Harris in 2019.
Yes, she answered. Fully.
“I support a Green New Deal, and I will tell you why,” Harris said. “Climate change is an existential threat.”
At the time, the price tag of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y., trendy transformative idea to save the planet was about $10 trillion – though, really, the cost of deconstructing modernity is more likely to be in the tens of bajillions.
Harris’ campaign contends she no longer supports policies of the Green New Deal. And that’s fine. But it would probably be helpful to know what initially led her to back the elimination of fossil fuel energy production, the near-banning of meat and air travel, the retrofitting of “every building in America,” and a government-guaranteed job, home and “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work.
Because some policy ideas are too dumb to forgive.
Remember, as well, that Harris didn’t endorse these policies as some idealistic young person. She was in her mid-50s, a senator from the most populous state in America who was running for the presidency, the same job she now seeks, when she thought it was a good idea to endorse the elimination of the combustion engine.
The economy is just the start. Harris has yet to answer a single genuine question on why she advocated the elimination of private health insurance or the decriminalization of illegal immigration. These aren’t tweaks in one’s political agenda. They represent two of the most vital issues facing voters.
Harris is also on the record supporting taxpayer-funded universal health care for illegal immigrants. On a 2019 ACLU questionnaire, the future “border czar” wrote that she was in favor of taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants – though she also pledged to end detentions altogether.
“Let me just be very clear about this,” Harris assured CNN’s Jake Tapper, every “human being” in the United States, citizen or not, deserves access to all government services, “period.”
The anonymous campaign official tasked with walking back this position failed to let us know why Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, no longer believes “human beings” deserve care. Though, to be fair, flip-flopping on an appeal to emotion is never easy.
Of course, an appropriately curious voter might also want Harris to clarify whether she regrets helping bail out Minnesota “protesters” who were burning down minority neighborhoods, whether she is still a fan of the “defund the police” movement, whether she still believes Black people should have their own set of laws, or whether she still supports the reparation racket, probably the most un-American vote-buying scheme in existence.
Harris has been able to treat over a dozen major on-the-record stances as if they never existed. Modern campaigns ostensibly exist to provide voters with information so they can make educated decisions.
The vice president, self-styled defender of our sacred democracy, isn’t even pretending it matters.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
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