Does Kamala Harris Have Anything Specific to Say?

By Jacob Weindling  |  October 9, 2024 | 12:00pm
Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
Elections Kamala Harris
Does Kamala Harris Have Anything Specific to Say?

Vice President Kamala Harris is taking one of her biggest critiques head-on, as she is on a press tour doing interviews with a wide range of people who don’t work in mainstream journalism. Aside from a 60 Minutes program that was designed around both her and Trump, the latter of whom chickened out when he heard that facts will be checked, Kamala Harris is talking to a lot of media personalities that young people actually listen to, like the Call Her Daddy podcast.

Last night, she was on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. He asked her the most basic, fundamental question about her candidacy, and she responded with a bunch of pablum that if you close your eyes, you can clearly hear it in Selena Meyer’s voice from Veep.

Just to really reinforce the vast nothingness in her answer, I am going to put the words she said in print.

“I’m obviously not Joe Biden. And so that would be one change in terms of—but also, I think it’s important to say with 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump. And so when we think about the significance of what this next generation of leadership looks like were I to be elected president, it is about—frankly, um, I, I, I, I love the American people and I believe in our country. I, I, I love that it is our character in nature to be an ambitious people. You know, we have aspirations, we have dreams. We have incredible work ethic. And I just believe that we can create and build upon the success we’ve achieved in a way that we continue to grow opportunity and in that way grow the strength of our nation.”

She uses the word “opportunity” to transition into her economic platform and her apparent belief that prioritizing small businesses is a major change in American politics, per Colbert’s question. A couple weeks ago, I went through the 76-page document she released which provided more detail about what she plans to do should she become the most powerful person in the world (short answer: tax incentives!), and saying she has no detailed plans is not accurate.

Saying she has little to no original plans is, however. The most detail she provides in that response to Colbert is that “we can create and build upon the success we’ve achieved,” because that is basically her campaign’s entire domestic policy vision. Do what Biden did, but less ambitious, in short.

The Harris camp has speedrun through a traditional presidential campaign cycle and overshot the post-primary shift to the right. She first took advantage of the immense vibes shift of switching from a man whose every word is an existential threat to the Democratic Party to a charismatic politician whose brain isn’t failing them. Harris kept the vibes going by selecting Tim Walz, the Veep the left and most of the party’s base coalesced around, and going into the Democratic National Convention, the vibes were as good as they can reasonably be for a Vice President helping to perpetuate a genocide.

Then she tacked hard right as we got a wholesale rejection of a Palestinian speaker at a convention designed to convey the Democratic Party’s principles, alongside “the most lethal military” and a bunch of cops and Republicans while everyone was stumping for Trump’s racist border policies the party has adopted as its own. The Democrats followed that up by seemingly banning Tim Walz from saying the word weird and making him try to become JD Vance’s friend in the VP debate, all while they parade around war criminal and election thief Dick Cheney like he’s some kind of American hero and not a monster that every person with a conscience and memories of the pre-Trump era believes should be locked in The Hague forever.

This is the most vacuous, substance-free presidential campaign I have ever seen a Democrat run, even after adjusting for the short and unprecedented cycle Harris has been thrown into. There is no grand plan, other than to point to Biden’s successes and say, “do more of that,” while sticking her finger in the wind to try to figure out which way it is blowing.

If this is where the Kamala Harris-led Democratic Party is going, ignoring the majority of its base while supporting a genocide and celebrating Dick fucking Cheney “for what he has done to serve our country” while giving Republicans a space in her cabinet, then congratulations to the neocon anti-Trump GOP for successfully remaking the Democrats in their image. You lost the battle but it’s looking like you may have won the war.

Her appearance on 60 Minutes really drove home how little the Harris campaign wants to detail its foreign policy vision. This immensely patronizing non-answer on the biggest crisis in the world right now is borderline disqualifying.

Again, let’s transcribe those words so their hollowness really shines through. The question was “what can the U.S. do at this point to stop [the war in the Middle East] from spinning out of control?”

“Well let’s start with October 7th, twelve hundred people were massacred. Two hundred and fifty hostages were taken including Americans. Women were brutally raped. And as I said then I maintain that Israel has a right to defend itself—we would—and how it does so matters. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. This war has to end.”

Not only was this not a response to a question about Israel and Iran going to war, but yet again, we see the depraved logic of Israel and the U.S. on display here, which is that nothing justifies October 7th, but October 7th justifies everything. That attitude is directly connected to reports like this, and if she loses Michigan, there will be no mystery as to why.

Here’s another question from 60 Minutes specifically about Biden’s failure to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu where she spends nearly two minutes saying a bunch of words that don’t mean anything without ever trying to address the question. She can talk a big game about her “opportunity economy,” but that won’t happen without Democratic control of Congress. This is the kind of stuff she would have real power over, and Harris has given us zero indication of how she plans to use it other than to vaguely perpetuate Biden’s policies that have abetted a genocide and driven us to the brink of all out regional war in the Middle East.

No wonder they don’t want her talking to journalists. The strategy of the Kamala Harris campaign is very clearly to ensure that Americans know as little about Kamala Harris as possible. Retreats to talking point-driven non-answers like this define every interview of hers, and her light, Biden-esque schedule is even alarming Democrats and her own staffers now, per Politico. This “do-no-harm” style of campaigning that Hillary Clinton employed in 2016 and has been the animating campaign principle of the Democratic Party as long as I have been alive has reportedly struck “fear” into “nearly two dozen Democrats” who are concerned that it “could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch.”

No shit.

Kamala Harris has offered no grand unifying vision for America outside the hope that an avalanche of tax cuts and credits can “create opportunity.” Nor has she presented any coherent narrative about what American power looks like in the 21st century. She is a change candidate sans the change. The caveman logic of “orange man bad” manifested into a superficial candidacy. Polls show her slightly ahead, but the fact that it is still this close with a well-known and wildly unpopular candidate like Trump does not reflect well on her vague and defensive campaign strategy to date.

 
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