NYT: Kamala to Deliver Economic Plan on Friday. Sorta.

AP Photo/Adam Bettcher, File

Has The Silence of the Kams come to an end? Will Kamala Harris finally add a policy page to her campaign website to explain why people should vote for her? The absence of policy from a presidential campaign has become conspicuous enough for the Washington Post to scold Harris about it, especially with all of the conflicting positions Harris and her team have taken in the three weeks since The Anointment.

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Oddly, though, the one issue set that the WaPo editorial board skipped over was economics. Perhaps that's because Harris has spent the past three years not just endorsing Joe Biden's Bidenomics but actively defending it. Other than a reference to her strange embrace of Donald Trump's plan to exempt tips from income tax, the Post's editorial skips over the most urgent issue for voters in this cycle. 

However, both the New York Times and Axios report that's precisely where Harris will start to redefine herself. She will lay out an economic vision on Friday, according to the NYT, or at least some frothy version of one. Jim Tankersely and Andrew Duehren apparently want to keep expectations low.

Really low, in fact:

Vice President Kamala Harris’s sudden ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket has generated a host of questions about her economic agenda, including how much she will stick to the details of President Biden’s positions, tweak them, or chart entirely new ones.

When she begins to roll out her policy vision this week, Ms. Harris is likely to answer only some of those questions.

During an economy-focused speech on Friday in Raleigh, N.C., Ms. Harris will outline a sort of reboot of the administration’s economic agenda, according to four people familiar with Ms. Harris’s plans.

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A 'sort of reboot'? What does that mean? Harris may only have been the nominee for 25 days, but she's spent the last three and a half years as Vice President. She has her own team of advisers, as well as having access to Biden's advisers, especially now. The whole argument for dispensing with a convention election and anointing Harris is that she's supposedly ready to lead right now.

Apparently not, emphasis mine:

She will lay out an approach relatively light on details, they said. It will shift emphasis from Mr. Biden’s focus on job creation and made-in-America manufacturing, and toward efforts to rein in the cost of living. But it will rarely break from Mr. Biden on substance.

Why would it be "relatively light on details" at this stage? Perhaps because Harris doesn't know what she wants to do yet. And that may be because all this speech will do is reflect what Harris thinks voters want to hear, and then wait to see how they react. Axios describes a candidacy with no ideological or philosophical anchor at all. Rather, Harris plans to just stick to popular clichés that might get her elected in a short cycle:

A big part of the Harris plan is to unapologetically change some of her more liberal positions, and claim her White House experience helped change her mind. Yes, when she was running for president in 2019, she was against fracking, for decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and for single-payer health care (Medicare for All).

A big and fair question is: What does Harris really believe?

  • Her bet: whatever she says in the small, three-month window of her snap campaign will be what sticks. Harris knows most people know little about her. So she believes she can define herself, even if it includes flip-flops and co-opts.
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So ... it's all ambition and no principles. Even Axios has trouble wrapping its collective head around this concept of reinvention without accountability:

So it's not always clear what core, unbendable beliefs animate her. No doubt, she was a liberal in the Senate and during her failed 2019 presidential campaign. But her new persona and policy shifts suggest a repositioning to the center of the modern Democratic Party. Basically, she's a Biden Democrat — even if she hopes to downplay that in some areas.

So she's a Biden Democrat, except when she's not, and you'll know when she's not a Biden Democrat because she'll say that, except when she says she is. Any attempt to pin her down on a political identity will be illegitimate unless she says it is. 

This is starting to sound like a gender-identity exercise, no?

Could this work? I suppose, but only if Harris never takes a question about her platform and never gets into a debate with Trump. At some point, Harris will still have to explain her policies and why she supports them. If she can't do any better than "they tested well in focus groups," no one will trust her with leadership. Kamala Harris will make herself into the epitome of a politician that will say anything to get elected and can't be trusted with power. She'll be the Joe Isuzu of presidential candidates.

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That's a vibe, I suppose, but not one that voters usually reward. 

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David Strom 8:00 PM | September 10, 2024
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