How To Understand Harris’s Shifting Policy Views
Charles Fain Lehman
August 16, 2024Since she was handed the Democratic nomination for president late last month, Vice President Kamala Harris has struggled to comprehensively answer a relatively simple question: If elected, what will her administration do?
Although Harris has not been completely silent on issues of policy, her campaign still lacks a comprehensive platform, with no issues section appearing on her campaign website, for example. And much of what the vice president has said—largely through her press team—has been self-reversals, designed to distance the candidate from the positions she took the last time she ran for president in 2019.
"Shaking the etch-a-sketch" is not unusual behavior for a candidate pivoting to the general election. But Harris’s dramatic swings—from embracing Medicare for All and vowing to decriminalize border crossing to trying to sell herself as "tough on crime"—raise the question of what, if any, coherent ideology underlies the vice president’s views.
It might make more sense to understand Harris as motivated not by ideology but by political advancement. A review of Harris’s views suggest that they reflect what Democratic elites want to hear from their politicians rather than an attempt to persuade the electorate. If that model is accurate, then it offers predictive insight for what a Harris administration would do—that is, whatever the Democratic Party, as an institution, wants.
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https://freebeacon.com/policy/how-to-understand-harriss-shifting-policy-views/
