On Monday’s broadcast of “CNN Newsroom,” Harris-Walz Campaign Senior National Spokesman Ian Sams responded to questions on if 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris thinks people are better off than they were four years ago by stating, “I think when people are running for president, they want to see what are you going to do for me, and it’s not a retrospective question, it’s actually a forward-looking question.” But Harris “thinks that the American people have made progress, but that we have to go even further.”
Host Pamela Brown asked, “[W]hen you look at a metric like grocery prices, they’re up, still, 20% compared to four years ago, and Harris was asked recently, on the debate stage, whether she thinks Americans are better off now than four years ago, and she didn’t directly answer that question. So, I’ll ask you, does she think Americans are better off now or not?”
Sams answered, “Well, I think that she talked pretty openly about the mess that we inherited when President Trump left office and the economy — and the crash that happened because of his total mismanagement of COVID and the way that COVID itself created global inflation numbers that were out of control. And so, she thinks that the American people have made progress, but that we have to go even further. That’s why she has a plan, specifically, to take on corporate price gouging when they jack up prices in emergencies like that, especially on things like food and at the grocery store. And, at the same time, you have Nobel Prize-winning economists who have come out and said that Donald Trump’s economic plan would actually blow up inflation and make it worse. And so, when it comes to costs, when it comes to high prices for people, the choice in the election is also very clear, and she’s going to keep talking about her plans to bring down those grocery costs, while Donald Trump is going to explode them.”
Brown then asked, “But let me just follow up, then, on that, because you said her plan to bring down grocery costs, as you know, Republicans would argue, well, they’ve gone up under the Biden-Harris administration, I’ll ask the question, again, are Americans — does she think Americans are better off now than four years ago?”
Sams responded, “Well, I think when people are running for president, they want to see what are you going to do for me, and it’s not a retrospective question, it’s actually a forward-looking question. And that’s what she’s doing on the campaign trail every day is saying, I understand that we have to go further for people, there are still too many people out there who are hurting, yes, inflation has eased a little bit and prices are starting to come down. But, man, we’ve got to go even further.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett