I thought I was reading a headline from The Babylon Bee when I saw on Tuesday that Vice President Kamala Harris now wants to build the border wall.
But it wasn’t satire. Rather, the Democratic presidential nominee has decided she supports one of former President Donald Trump’s signature ideas − and one despised by progressives. Here’s how left-leaning Axios described Harris’ newfound desire to build the wall: “It’s the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past liberal positions such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking – proposals that aides say she now is against.”
We haven’t gotten any explanations, either, as Harris hasn’t done a single interview or press conference since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race last month. Finally, the campaign has agreed to an interview with CNN on Thursday, but it won’t just be Harris. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will be there, too. That makes it seem like Harris can’t handle an interview on her own and feels like a cop-out.
Just scheduling this one interview has caused a lot of consternation for Harris’ campaign. I’m guessing a lot of that turmoil has to do with the fact that Harris doesn’t have a coherent agenda for what her presidency would look like. (The rest of the angst is tied to Harris’ general incompetence on camera when off teleprompter).
From ‘un-American’ to full steam ahead
Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. In 2019, when Harris was running in the Democratic presidential primary, the U.S. senator of California had some thoughts on the border wall. Harris called it Trump’s “medieval vanity project” then and “un-American” in a 2018 social media post. She also posted in 2020 that “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”
Seems pretty straightforward. In addition, Harris is on the record during her first presidential run vowing to decriminalize illegal border crossings and offering undocumented immigrants health care under her Medicare-for-all plan. She also said she wouldn’t deport immigrants here illegally, if they hadn’t done anything else wrong.
Fast-forward to now.
Immigration has rocketed to one of the most important issues for voters – in no small part because the Biden-Harris administration oversaw chaos at the southern border amid record numbers of illegal crossings. Even though Biden appointed Harris as border czar in 2021, she accomplished nothing to deter illegal migration across the border.
So she knows she’s weak on this issue, and now her campaign is trying to make Harris look like a tough border enforcer. But that’s all hard to believe when one looks at her record the past four years and at what she has said.
Last week at the Democratic National Convention, Harris pledged to sign a bipartisan Senate bill that would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to continue building the border wall. And she has released a campaign ad that features the wall several times.
I guess that settles that.
Harris can’t make up her mind on anything
The border wall is just the latest example of Harris backtracking on former stances. Her convictions seem about as deep as what the polls tell her to support. Her few actual policy ideas since becoming the Democratic nominee, including price controls on groceries, are so terrible that Harris’ fellow Democrats are downplaying the idea by saying that price controls would never pass through Congress.
And the wall isn’t the only talking point Harris has stolen from Trump. Earlier this month, she pledged no taxes on tipped wages. Problem is, Trump already had proposed that idea weeks earlier. That means, of Harris’ limited proposals, one isn’t likely to go anywhere and two are copied from Trump, whom Democrats portray as the archenemy of democracy.
The general vagueness over what Harris actually believes and supports has led to confusion in the campaign over how to best leverage her running mate, Walz. As Politico reports, the “danger in sending him out to do big solo interviews is that he might not have a full command of where Harris is on every issue.”
Boy, I wonder why. I have one question for Harris: “Who are you?” I’d honestly like to know.