Following is today’s Washington Post editorial, chastising (yes, chastising) Kamala Harris for offering exactly no explanation for any of her views, or why they have changed now that she’s the Democrats’ presidential candidate.
Here it is:
Opinion
Questions we’d love to ask KamalA harris
Why has she changed so many positions since 2020? How would she govern differently than Joe Biden?
By the Editorial Board
August 11, 2024 at 4:26 p.m. EDT
Since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has neither given a sit-down interview nor held a news conference. Her campaign’s website lacks an “Issues” page (there’s only a biography). We get it, tactically: It’s tempting for Ms. Harris, as it would be for anyone in her position, to stay as vague on the issues as possible, for as long as possible, to avoid giving fodder to the opposition or dividing her supporters. Ms. Harris is confident she’ll win if the campaign is about the many flaws of former president Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump makes her task easier by regularly spouting falsehoods and wild rhetoric, such as his crack about Ms. Harris’s racial identity at a session of the National Association of Black Journalists. But at least he has taken questions, including hostile ones, both from NABJ and at a long news conference on Thursday.
If she hopes to prevail, Ms. Harris needs to present her ideas. The media and public have legitimate questions, and she should face them. This is a political necessity — Mr. Trump is already turning her avoidance of the media into an attack line. And elections aren’t just about winning. They’re about accumulating political capital for a particular agenda, which Ms. Harris can’t do unless she articulates one.
What’s more, Ms. Harris might find her best hope of persuading voters is not to reinforce familiar negative information about Mr. Trump, even if it’s repackaged as an attack on his, and his party’s, “weirdness.” Rather, a new survey published in Matt Yglesias’s newsletter by political scientists David Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley and Josh Kalla of Yale, who study political messaging, suggests that her best bet would be to provide the public new, positive information about herself — and her agenda.
To be sure, the vice president has run ads on those themes. And she has let it be known, through spokespeople, that she no longer supports a national ban on fracking or the elimination of private health insurance. The Harris campaign has said that she will stick with Mr. Biden’s pledge to not raise income taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 per year — though whether she would offset that with higher taxes on corporations and those at the very top of the income scale remains unknown.
On border security, Ms. Harris is now running commercials that highlight her support for increased enforcement. Back in June 2018, amid the movement to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Ms. Harris said, regarding that idea, “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.” She said in July 2019 that undocumented immigrants who cross the border illegally should not be charged with a crime. Now the campaign says she believes “unauthorized border crossings are illegal.”
All of this moves her toward more popular positions. Still, it’s a lot of mind-changing for the public to absorb without further explanation. Without hearing Ms. Harris articulate her thought process, she runs the risk of leaving voters to wonder whether she is just shifting with the political winds or, indeed, planning to revert to previous positions after she’s won the presidency. Why, for instance, did she embrace Mr. Trump’s idea to exempt tips from taxation?
On foreign policy, Ms. Harris’s aides have denied claims by activists that she expressed openness during a private meeting to an arms embargo on Israel. She has placed added emphasis on expressing sympathy for Palestinian suffering while also supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. Both critics and supporters of Israel are reading her running-mate choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a sign that her policy might be somewhat tougher on Israel and more sympathetic to the Palestinians than Mr. Biden’s has been. She needs to tell us: Are they misreading it?
Ms. Harris said in 2021 that she was the last person in the room with Mr. Biden when he decided to pull out of Afghanistan. Did she try to urge the president to keep some U.S. troops in the country? And how does she answer Mr. Trump’s charge that the total withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? In 2020, Ms. Harris said she agreed unequivocally “with the goal of reducing the defense budget.” Is that still her view?
The “vibe” around the vice president’s campaign launch has been undeniably strong among Democrats, but she can’t bask in it forever. The more substance Ms. Harris can offer before the election, the more control she will have over what voters think of her and the more of a mandate she would have to govern should she prevail in November.
That, folks, is a diplomatically worded frontal attack on Kamala Harris for articulating exactly nothing about her views – both the ones she has had until now and the new ones she has acquired since becoming a presidential nominee.
Yes, there is also an attack on Donald Trump. This is the Washington Post, after all. But even there, the attack is more requisite than hard-hitting. The major thrust of this editorial is that Kamala Harris had damn well better get off her ass and start explaining how and why her current positions on major issues have changed from what they were just months, even weeks, ago, or those poll numbers are going to drop as fast as they rose.
When a major media venue that absolutely despises your opponent tells you this, you better consider doing something about it…assuming Kamala Harris is in any way capable of doing so, that is.
Personally I doubt she can pull it off. When it comes to thinking on her feet, on answering unexpected questions, Harris makes Joe Biden look good by comparison. In other words, she is in deep, deep excrement.
Stay tuned, folks. In the immortal words of that great Johnny Mercer song, something’s gotta give.
