As Kamala Harris attempts to shake off the most enduring images of her years as vice president, she will talk no more about the significance of the passage of time or the joy of yellow school buses. She won’t be repeating, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day,” or, “Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia.” No sir, it seems the VP has made a critical decision. She has replaced her signature word salads with a pair of simple mantras, evidently concluding that these all-purpose, infinitely repeatable phrases are sufficient responses to all questions at all times. Her trips to the word salad bar have been replaced by a simple salad or two off the menu.
The first mantra is that she had a typical “middle-class” upbringing. Second is, as president, she will create an “opportunity economy.” Since her successful debate performance against Donald Trump, we might have expected the same kind of crisp, though evasive, talking points she so effectively employed against the GOP nominee. Instead, in an apparent attempt to run out the clock with just more than six weeks to go before Election Day, she has decided to respond to virtually every question or inquiry with one or both of her mantras, allowing her to avoid making gaffes – or even making news.
While her campaign has kept her as distant as possible from both real and biased national media, Harris has appeared on friendly social media sites and local TV. But after her remarkably vacuous sit-down with WPVI-TV in Philadelphia on Sept. 13, her advisers may decide to have her stop doing any spontaneous or unscripted interviews. Here was the initial Q&A with the reporter:
Q: When we talk about bringing down prices, and making life more affordable for people, what are one or two specific things you have in mind for that?
A: I’ll start with this – I grew up a middle class kid. My mother raised my sister and me. She worked very hard. She was able to finally save up enough money to buy our first house when I was a teenager. I grew up in a community of hard-working people – construction workers and nurses and teachers. I try to explain this to some people who may not have had the same experience, a lot of people will relate to this: I grew up in a neighborhood of folks who are very proud of their lawn, um, you know. And I was raised to believe and to know that all people deserve dignity.
In case you didn’t notice, her 44-second answer did not include a single reference to the economy. One YouTube commenter on her interview, @LisbonLadd, wrote:
Imagine her negotiating with Putin.
Putin: “Why should I agree to a ceasefire?”
Kamala: “I was raised in a middle class …”
She has offered identical talking points at every stop along the campaign trail, obviously believing it most important to squeeze in totally unrelated talking points touting her “middle-class” background – a claim she hopes people will swallow whole. Her talk about lawns sounds like what a non-middle-class person is told to say in order to connect to actual middle-class voters. But since she has made her supposedly typical American suburban, middle-class background the centerpiece of her identity (as opposed to her last iteration as the prosecutor who put people like Trump in prison), just how typically middle class and suburban was her life really?
American or Canadian Sensibilities?
Three rhetorical questions effectively reveal the utter inauthenticity of the VP’s claim: How many typical suburban middle-class families do you know in which both parents are doctors of philosophy (PhDs)? How many typical suburban communities with gleaming lawns include an avowed Marxist in their midst? How many average American suburbanites actually spent their teenage years not in the United States but in Canada? The answer to each, of course, is few, if any.
Kamala Harris (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
While big media has done its best to bury these inconvenient truths, facts remain stubborn things. Kamala’s father, Donald Harris, from whom she is estranged, is a retired Marxist academic who, when scrubbed by elite media, is now termed a “post-Keynesian economist.” His book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” attacks mainstream economic beliefs and openly supports the theories of Karl Marx. He and Kamala’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, were deeply immersed in left-wing academia during Kamala’s childhood, from UC Berkeley to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, two of the most left-wing institutions of higher learning in the entire country.
When she was 12 years old, Kamala and her divorced mother moved to Montreal and stayed there through her high school years. To the question of just how typically American Kamala is, when one of her Canadian high-school classmates, Anu Chopra Sharma, was asked by CTV if she could identify Harris’ nationality at the time, she responded, “There’s no way I could have told you that she was American.”
Kamala and Her Opportunity Economy
On the matter of what Harris calls her opportunity economy, it is based on, you guessed it, massive government giveaways and higher taxes. She is calling for a $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers, $15,000 for small business startups, raising the corporate tax substantially, a capital gains tax by almost 50%, and a 33% increase on income tax for the wealthy. And then there is the big Kahuna: taxing unrealized capital gains – meaning you would, for the first time in American history, be taxed on your investments before you even cash in on the profits. Well, at least she is clear about the handouts she favors and the wealth she opposes and is unafraid to kill the goose that lays the golden egg and send the economy spiraling downward into recession. How this amounts to an opportunity economy is anyone’s guess.
Harris is undoubtedly trying to sit on her dead heat with Trump, perhaps following the wisdom of the old saying that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. With a 9% edge in favorability over her opponent, according to RealClearPolitics, her successful debate in the books, and no second debate on tap, the question is just how much she will be willing to reveal about herself and her policies in the next six weeks.
You can fool all people some of the time and some people all the time, but you can’t fool everybody all the time. How many voters will feel they are being deceived by Harris’ refusal to reveal her true intentions, her emphasis on vibes over policy, and feeling over facts? Can she run out the clock and become president of the United States with nothing more to offer than her ginned-up middle-class bona fides and undefined opportunity economy?
