Kamala Harris Finally Put a Policy Page on Her Website

The core tension around Kamala Harris’s campaign is centered around what she will actually do should she take power. Joe Biden’s campaign thought that talking to the press about their plans was a mostly useless exercise, and given Harris’s grand total of one traditional post-convention joint interview with her vice-presidential nominee, it’s clear that much of her campaign staffed with Bidenworld alumni believes the same. While the merits of answering Trump’s racist attacks through CNN’s empty journalistic vessels like Dana Bash is surely up for debate, the notion that someone aiming to be the most powerful person in the world still owes her supporters a plan is not.

The power of the low propensity voter in this election and the shallow media environment which informs them heavily incentivizes Kamala Harris to run a cynical and superficial campaign bereft of much detail, and us policy nerds must accept that the game is the game to a certain degree. There is a logic to being vague in order to avoid getting bogged down in policy minutiae the press could not care less about when those standards are applied to Donald Trump, but at some point, the rubber must meet the road. Running as a generic Democrat only works if people see you like one, and the more you avoid detail, the more reasons people have to distrust you. This strategy is a game of chicken, and at least according to a NYT/Siena poll released Sunday, Kamala Harris is starting to lose it.

This seems to confirm some of my suspicions/concerns about the Kamala campaign since it actually began. Their hyper-defensive, scared approach of avoiding policy commitments and risky moments may not only be failing, but might be actively harmful to her reputation. https://t.co/emU94MOiAD pic.twitter.com/BHCk7avPnN

— ettingermentum (@ettingermentum) September 8, 2024

Whether it was a coincidence or not, later on Sunday, Kamala Harris did what Donald Trump has already done, and put up a policy page on her website explaining in detail how she plans to use her power. Many have treated this demand as superfluous to Harris’ campaign, which is a pretty bleak vision of politics as an entirely superficial enterprise.

Speaking of superficial, some of these policy outlines! While the overall vision is good, and she is definitely pledging to continue the more inclusive IRA style of politics over the detached neoliberalism by decree practiced by the Clintons and Obama, some of this stuff…I do not feel like I am doing a service to my political science degree by calling it policy.

Her entire “Restore and protect reproductive freedoms” section is nine sentences attacking Trump for destroying a woman’s right to choose, telling stories about women she’s met dealing with the horrific outcome of this monstrous shift in policy, and then this sentence “As President, she will never allow a national abortion ban to become law. And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, she will sign it.” Given its importance to the Democratic coalition and its proven salience in electoral politics since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, I highly doubt we have to worry about whether Kamala Harris has pro-choice policies, but yeesh, “I will sign a bill whose details other people figure out” is not policy.

There are other sections like this where it’s mostly campaign talking points, then some vague reference to supporting congressional action, but it’s not all light on detail, though. Her “Opportunity Economy” is where you can see Bidenomics 2.0 spinning up, and on this subject, I don’t think you can fairly accuse her of being vague, as she is clearly pointed in a known direction. She has staked out specific policies that would do wonders like restoring and expanding the Child Tax Credit. Harris’s “Take on bad actors and bring down costs” section on “anti-price gouging statutes” gives us Lina Khan stans hope that her reign atop the FTC will be eternal.

This issues page is very much a reflection of how Kamala Harris has run her campaign to date, providing the kind of detail she wants you to hear, while withholding the detail she does not. Who’s going to push back against the $25,000 first-time homeowner credit (except for pretend economist doofuses who think all homebuyers in the market are first-time homebuyers)? How can anyone argue against one of the greatest forces to reduce child poverty in history? Even JD Vance agrees with her when he says that parents should pay lower taxes than non-parents!

But on more contentious issues like Hamas’s terrorist attack and Israel’s subsequent genocide of Gaza, she reverts to tired campaign talking points. Harris’ entire foreign policy section is light, which grinds nerds like mine and Joe Biden’s gears knowing that this is the realm where a president has the most power to utilize the levers of American empire, and after some typical campaign foreign policy speak ripped right from a Biden 2020 speech, the vice president got around to the elephant in the room.

She and President Biden are working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination. She and President Biden are working around the clock to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done.

Not only is the Biden-Harris administration’s use of the word ceasefire different from the rest of the world’s, but Kamala Harris got a huge applause line at the DNC for that Palestinian right to self-determination line too, and you can’t help but wonder how that crowd would have reacted if Donald Trump had delivered his line on it from his White House website.

Palestinians and Israelis alike deserve a future of peace and prosperity. A realistic two-state solution will protect Israel’s security, fulfill the aspirations of self-determination for the Palestinian people, and ensure universal and respectful access to the holy sites of Jerusalem.

Both of them are right, and yet the status quo looks nothing like what both Trump and Harris’s words say, specifically because of policies both of their administrations pursued–or in the case of Biden, did not pursue, that other presidents like Ronald Reagan have, in order to keep the IDF from acting out its worst impulses in what Reagan called a “holocaust.” Words are just sounds you make to get people to pay attention, policy is how you actually affect people’s lives, as calamities from Roe to Gaza to Ukraine prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Kamala Harris is asking you to put her in charge of the most powerful entity on earth. Even if our politics are so depraved that reality itself takes a backseat in importance to the TV show, she still owes it to everyone who truly does believe in her to outline a specific path to make good on the widespread feeling of hope in the Democratic Party. This is a good start, and like the selection of Walz, it indicates that the neoliberal hegemony over domestic policy is no more, but given the deep hole we find ourselves in, she still must do more if she is going to be the transformative president her campaign claims her to be.