Here is a bit of ancient history – from one month ago – that’s worth revisiting. On July 8, President Biden released a defiant letter explaining why he was “firmly committed to … running this race to the end”. “The voters – and the voters alone,” he insisted, could decide the party nominee.
“How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?” Biden asked.
Now, a month after he insisted that dethroning him would be an assault on democracy, Biden has stood down and his erstwhile running mate is leading Donald Trump in the polls.
Biden was able to cling to power for so long largely based on the widespread perception, even in the Democratic party, that the Vice President, Cackling Kamala Harris, was unelectable. And the Old Kamala Harris, the bumbling border czar, the dismal ‘that little girl was me’ presidential candidate of 2020, was unelectable. That Old Kamala wanted to ban fracking, offshore drilling, and private health insurance. She compared ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) agents to the KKK, supported mandatory gun buybacks, co-sponsored the far left wing Green New Deal, backed sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, decriminalizing border crossings and offering free health care to illegal immigrants. Harris even helped a far-left group fundraise to spring George Floyd rioters and other criminals in Minnesota from prison; one man who was freed went on to commit murder.
While the Old Kamala was an unmarketable product outside the coasts and the college towns, the Brand New Kamala that’s emerged suddenly looks surprisingly electable. CNN thinks she has quietly backed off of her hard-left positions on fracking, health care, and defunding the police, but in fact she hasn’t stated that personally for the record. On immigration, she hasn’t formally recanted the hard-left stances she took in the 2020 campaign, but has pivoted hard, calling for more border patrol agents, while ludicrously insisting that Trump is the one who is soft on enforcement.
What are Harris’ present views on immigration, the environment, and a host of other issues where she’s pivoting? Her campaign website has no issues tab or policy details whatsoever. And she’s barely uttered a word that wasn’t typed up for her on a teleprompter since her coronation. Queen Kamala hasn’t granted her adoring subjects in the press a single interview or press conference in the 18 days since her coronation. The trailblazing, glass ceiling shattering, all-knowing Vice President wasn’t even game enough to be questioned by three black women moderating an association of black journalists event last week, though Trump was.
In her sole unscripted moment so far as queen of the Democrats, she answered a single softball question shouted by a reporter, about the release of WSJ journalist Evan Gershovich, and made a mess of it, rambling semi-coherently about Joe Biden and the power of diplomacy. It’s clear why her campaign staff has her on such a short leash. She’s failed miserably on the rare occasions when the press has aggressively questioned her. For example, in 2020, CBS’ Norah O’Donnell asked her about being ranked the most liberal Democrat in the Senate that year by the non-partisan database Govtrack.us and she couldn’t stop cackling as though it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.
It’s unclear if we’ll have a Presidential debate, but even if we do, will moderators be able to pin down Cackling Kamala on the issues and her shifting stance on them? She and the Democratic Party have violated Biden’s July 8 warning in effectively subverting the democratic process by shielding her from the kind of scrutiny a Presidential candidate deserves. At least so far, legions of voters who dislike Trump and are relieved to have Biden out of the race are giving her a pass while the media promotes her inane candidacy, which has been all about abortion, Trump, her “brat rebrand” and coconut tree memes.
Meanwhile, as Harris sticks to her teleprompter, Trump sounds like a man who could use one, and with tighter scripts too. His meandering and stupefying 92-minute convention speech did him no favors, nor did attacking Brian Kemp, the popular governor of Georgia who refused to help him overturn the 2020 election, at a recent rally there. He’s losing by double digits with women in every recent poll, but inexplicably fails to advertise GOP issues that poll well with female voters, like school choice, which Harris and the Democrats oppose. And in July, he inexplicably proposed to offer green cards to any foreigner who graduates from a two- or four-year college. Talk about muddying what should be a winning issue for Republicans.
Trump continues to moan that he should be facing geriatric Joe Biden and dismisses recent polling as fake news. He needs to explain how he’s going to make Americans’ lives better with details, not platitudes and vague promises. Harris is a far-left politician who was handed the Vice Presidency and her party’s nomination based on identity politics. She has few legitimate selling points besides the fact that she isn’t Biden or Trump. But she may be able to laugh her way right into the White House unless Trump can refocus and stop the bleeding.
The post You may not like Trump. You may be glad Biden quit. But nobody knows what Harris would do appeared first on The Telegraph.
