By: Kimberley A. Strassel – wsj.com – August 8, 2024

She’s been compared to John Kerry, but he was a relatively honest flip-flopper.

As in those 1980s sensations, readers have been provided the basic plotline—and an obvious conflict. We know Ms. Harris is a San Francisco prosecutor, with a Senate voting record and 2020 presidential bid that proposed a radical progressive agenda. We also know she’s spent the past four years as partner to Joe Biden, who at least officially still disavows some of those radical policies. How would a President Harris govern in the final pages?

Kamala isn’t saying. The candidate who no longer speaks impromptu is instead issuing backtracks and innuendoes via spokespeople. Readers can choose to believe she’s still the left-wing Kamala of old, faking a pivot, or the reformed Kamala of new, acolyte of “Scranton Joe.” How does this story end? You choose!

Ms. Harris in 2017 was the first senator to co-sponsor Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for all plan, and in 2019 she vowed in a primary town hall to eliminate private insurance. She then backtracked on that threat, then readopted it in a Democratic debate, backtracked again, then issued a hybrid approach (which helped blow up her campaign). Mr. Biden has continued declining to support single-payer healthcare. Where is Ms. Harris now? Campaign officials vaguely explain that she, too, no longer supports single payer.

Which means—what exactly? Would she, as promised in 2019, create a system in which private insurers can cover the “very little” that is “not otherwise covered” by Medicare “because almost everything will be covered” by government? Would she lower the Medicare age to 30? Pour money into the status quo? You decide. To muddle on under ObamaCare, turn to page 24. To succumb to European-style waiting lines, turn to page 33.

Ms. Harris in 2019 told voters “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” detailing her “day one” priority of eliminating it “on public lands” as well as ending “offshore drilling” and enacting further legislation, presumably to kill it on private land. A spokesperson now generically says she no longer wants to ban fracking. Any fracking? Certain categories? Where is she on other Biden policies that are killing the energy and auto sectors? The crackdown on federal leasing? The moratorium on liquefied natural gas exports? The de facto electric-vehicle mandate? Make your best conjecture and vote on.

Ms. Harris in 2019 cosponsored the Green New Deal and its promise of a “federal jobs guarantee.” Campaign staff say she’s changed her position. She came out for confiscating guns through a mandatory “buyback.” Campaign staff says she’s not there anymore. Asked if she favored abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she once said ICE was bad enough that we needed to “think about starting from scratch.” Campaign staff suggest she no longer holds that view. How would she handle jobs, guns, the border? It is Ms. Harris’s firmly held conviction that every voter deserves to wonder.

Republicans are already slamming Ms. Harris as the John Kerry of 2024. He was a relatively honest flip-flopper: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” She’s loosely disavowing certain policies while refusing to fill in the blanks. And it’s hardly correct to assume Biden policies fill those holes since she doesn’t mention him or his agenda on the trail.

Also, note that the positions from which Ms. Harris is detaching herself weren’t issued from a college debate stage. They were her views of five years ago, when she was in her mid-50s and serving in the U.S. Senate. That massive shift itself requires explanation. Has she had an epiphany? Been inhabited by an alien? Or are voters being asked to elect a woman who in her third decade in the political arena has yet to decide what she thinks about the most pressing policy questions of the day?

Of course not. This is deliberate evasion, and she learned it from a pro. Covid was nobody’s idea of a good time, but the 2020 Biden campaign realized its political upside. The benefit of the “basement campaign” was it allowed the team to control the message. On paper, the Biden agenda reassured progressive activists he’d be their man in office. On camera, his tightly scripted comments were all generalities—“leadership,” “hope,” “the middle class.”

The Kamala version is the teleprompter campaign. Every word is scripted, crafted around hazy themes of “freedom” and “the future.” “I’m running to fight for an America where the economy works for working people” and where “hard work is rewarded” “because that’s the America I believe in.” (Said every politician ever.) No questions. No interviews. No acknowledgment of the past four years. No answers. Choose your own Kamala.

Absent answers, voters would be wiser to look to Ms. Harris’s actual record and assume they already know how this boilerplate plot ends. Far-left governance, on steroids.

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Source: Choose Your Own Kamala – WSJ