On top of ridiculing sitting Vice President Kamala Harris for plagiarizing a whole lot of the “issue” page on Joe Biden’s campaign website, the far-left New Republic is also warning CacklyMcNeverBorderCzar that her lack of concrete policy proposals is not sustainable.
This, to no one’s surprise, comes after the latest polling shows Kamala’s support leveling off and the race tightening in favor of former President Donald Trump. Since last week, Trump has regained the lead in the RealClearPolitics “no toss-up” electoral map. Additionally, the national race has tightened from a two-point Kamala lead to just one point.
As I’ve been saying, the Harris campaign’s attempt to recreate Biden’s 2020 basement campaign is not sustainable. Biden was already well-known both politically and personally, and the pandemic excused his lack of public appearances. All the public knows about Kamala is that she is a terrible vice president and her politics are far to the left of Normal People.
To try and remedy this, the Harris campaign has had anonymous staffers claim she no longer believes in these unpopular policies—fracking ban, eliminating private insurance through Medicare for All, decriminalizing illegal immigration, offering illegal aliens free sex changes, gun confiscation, etc. The problem with this approach is that 1) no one knows her current position on these issues, and 2) this allows Donald Trump and JD Vance to fill in the blanks, and Harris is nothing of not a blank.
“Kamala Harris Can’t Keep Running Like This,” reads the New Republic headline.
The campaign’s strategy, it seemed, was to ride those good summer vibes and avoid the risk of an aggressive policy agenda that would expose her to criticism. But having too few policies is also risky, not least because it makes Harris look like she doesn’t stand for anything (and also because her few policy stances then get nitpicked to death: Her price-gouging solution was roundly criticized by economists across the political spectrum, while her tip policy has come under fire because it was first taken up by Trump).
The Harris campaign is only now, belatedly, realizing that this is a problem. On Sunday, they finally added an “Issues” section to her website. It includes a slew of policies that the campaign has previously outlined, as well as sections on reproductive and civil rights. Unfortunately for Harris, its release was undermined by a simple but telling error: The page’s source code revealed that parts of the platform were copied directly from Biden’s campaign page.
Even with the plagiarism, her “policy page” should be called her “platitude page.” It’s more about her values, which said have not changed, than anything resembling a road map to what her presidency would look like.
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but the following is terrible and terribly desperate advice from the New Republic: “She’s been coasting on good vibes, but the honeymoon is over. Now she needs to lay out how her governing agenda differs from Biden’s—and Tuesday’s debate is the perfect place to do it.”
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A debate is a ludicrous place to introduce your policies. You don’t want to lay out your agenda only to have it swatted down in real time during a live debate. A debate is where you defend your ideas, not introduce them. You want to introduce them through highly-publicized “policy speeches” on the campaign trail. This gives the public time to think about them and your surrogates time to take to cable news outlets where they can hone their arguments in favor of them—arguments the candidate can use during the debate or during her own media appearances (not that Kamala will do any of those).
The last thing you want is your candidate caught off guard during a debate, and we all know Kamala doesn’t handle pressure well.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.