There is a reason Vice President Kamala Harris chose “A new way forward” as her campaign slogan. According to the latest polling, 60% of voters disapprove of the job Joe Biden is doing as president, and 64% say the country is heading in the wrong direction.
Voters want change. They want a candidate who knows where Biden went wrong and how to fix it.
This made it surprising that even on the friendliest possible media platform, a liberal propaganda show called The View, hosted and watched mostly by women over 50, Harris blanked when asked if there were any differences between herself and Biden.
Asked by host Sunny Hostin, “What, if anything, would you have done differently than President Biden during the past four years,” Harris paused, looked at the ceiling, and then managed, “There is not a thing that comes to mind. … I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had an impact.”
Former President Donald Trump could not have come up with a more damning indictment of Harris’s candidacy.
On Biden’s first day in office, he began dismantling Trump’s successful border security policies, issuing more than half a dozen executive actions, making it easier for illegal immigrants to enter and stay in the United States. He ended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, suspended all interior deportations, and created new loopholes in Trump’s Title 42 enforcement.
As a result, illegal border crossings quadrupled in Biden’s first year in office and peaked in December 2023. Asked point blank in another interview by CBS News’s Bill Whitaker if it was “a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place,” Harris mumbled that “the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem,” and then she blamed Congress for not acting, when, as Whitaker pointed out, it was Biden’s policies, supported by Harris, that caused the crisis in the first place.
Just months after Biden opened the migrant floodgates, Harris cast the tiebreaking vote on Biden’s COVID-19 stimulus bill, which opened another set of floodgates for deficit spending. Despite warnings from many of us, and from Obama-era Democratic Party economists such as National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman, and auto bailout czar Steve Rattner, that pouring $2 trillion in deficit spending onto a red-hot economy guaranteed inflation, Biden went ahead and did it anyway
Harris reportedly differed from Biden only in that she wanted more, not less, borrowed money pumped into the economy. If she had been completely in charge, not merely “the last one in the room,” inflation would have been even worse, and worker purchasing power would have been cut even further as a result.
Months later, Biden followed through on his political timetable for withdrawing American military personnel from Afghanistan, a botched and reckless operation that cost the lives of 13 U.S. service members and threw the women of that benighted nation back into despotism. Authoritarians from around the world witnessed Biden’s hapless weakness and were emboldened by it. It is not an accident that the invasion of Ukraine and the attacks by the Houthis and Hamas followed in its wake.
What makes it doubly odd that Harris is unable or unwilling to name a single policy decision by Biden that she would do differently is that she has so many known disagreements with him to choose from. Biden is for fracking, Harris was against it. Biden is against banning private health insurance, Harris was for it. Biden is against mandatory gun buybacks, Harris was for them. Biden is against decriminalizing illegal border crossings, Harris was for it.
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Asked later on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert what the major changes would be under a Harris administration, all she could say was, “I’m obviously not Joe Biden, and so that would be one change.”
The problem for Harris is that all of the areas where she disagrees with Biden are where she is far to his left and far to the left of the median voter. She can’t admit that out loud, hence the awkward silences are where she thinks Biden went wrong.