A year after Barack Obama took office, Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and John McCain’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, quipped at a Tea Party rally: “How’s all this hope and change stuff going?”
The room full of conservatives roared with laughter, because Obama’s dreamy campaign slogan of “hope and change” had now been replaced by a hard political shift to the far left.
The Palin question is a piece of history that 2024 voters should keep in mind when evaluating Kamala Harris.
The parallels between then and now are striking.
Like Obama, the current Democratic candidate has been shockingly evasive about her plans as president.
Nevertheless, she is riding a wave of enthusiasm that could carry her to the White House.
As with Obama, the major media are helping to promote her candidacy rather than vetting her with voters.
Take, for example, recent headlines from the New York Times: On Friday, alongside a huge, flattering photo of her, the paper declared: “Harris is making history while believing in the art of the possible.”
On Saturday, the same place said: “Harris faces the challenge of converting joy into votes.”
A Washington Post op-ed about Harris’ husband was headlined: “Doug Emhoff: Modern Sex Symbol.”
This is not journalism.
This is propaganda and it is a disgrace.
For Donald Trump the consequences are clear: his opponent is Hope and Change All Over Again.
Or, as Palin would put it, he’s dealing with Hopey-Changey 2.0.
In fact, Harris was even vaguer than Obama in 2008.
He had to compete against Hillary Clinton in at least numerous primaries and win and could not hide from debates, interviews and press conferences.
Harris, on the other hand, scored a political hit with the backroom deal brokered by her boss that earned her the nomination without her having to win a single delegate on her own.
One result of this is that she was able to get away with making sweeping promises about all the good things she would do on day one without revealing crucial details, such as price tags.
The credibility problems that this approach entails are obvious. This begins with the fact that she was vice president of an unpopular government for three and a half years.
A fundamental question is what she would do differently than what she and President Biden have done together.
If she has better ideas, why wait?
Why don’t you convince Biden to implement these measures now?
The more extreme policies she pushed as a senator and as a presidential candidate in 2020, such as a ban on fracking and the abolition of private health insurance, are no longer practical, her aides emphasize.
Light on the details
But all efforts to obtain explanations for her change and details of her current stance have been in vain, as she has not given a single interview or press conference since replacing Biden on the electoral list.
Harris’ only attempt at concrete policy was a speech in which she promised action against “price gouging.”
When even Democratic economists condemned the idea as destructive price controls, she remained silent.
Her speech at the convention was powerful and well-delivered, but offered little more than a litany of platitudes, such as promising to “forge a new path forward” and “be a president for all Americans.”
Apparently she had run out of ideas, but time was not up yet, so she added: “The future is always worth fighting for.”
Another parallel with Obama is that Harris is biracial, and the woke media that protected him is far wokeer today and even more determined to protect her, calling it racist and sexist to even question her willingness to do so.
In my view, there are only two possible explanations for their continued refusal to seriously engage with political plans.
Neither of these things offers any reason to hope that she would be a successful commander-in-chief.
Either she has no clear ideas that she wants to pursue, or she does have them but does not want the public to know about them.
Perhaps she hasn’t had time to formulate detailed proposals because she was riding Biden’s flagging wave until recently. But the cynic in me is inclined to believe the alternative: that she is hiding the ball because her instincts are so far to the left that if she were exposed, Trump would win the election.
That possibility is tied to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to endorse the former president. Kennedy explained his reasons for backing a Republican in a mostly persuasive speech Friday, pointing to the way Democrats peppered him with lawsuits to keep him off state ballots and refused to hold debates where Biden could be challenged.
He condemned the government’s use of Big Tech companies to censor news and opinions it does not like.
He also said Biden had rejected his requests for a meeting and Harris was not answering his calls.
It is also noteworthy that despite the tragic history of the Kennedy family, the White House rejected Kennedy’s repeated requests for Secret Service protection until after Trump’s assassination.
Be careful, Don F. Kennedy
As a result of all these unnecessary mistakes, Harris now faces the possibility that Kennedy’s support for Trump could be the deciding factor in one or more of the swing states and thus influence the outcome of the election.
Andrew Yang, the tech entrepreneur who ran for mayor in New York and is now chairman of the smaller Forward Party, said in a statement that Kennedy’s move means “Trump’s chances of winning just increased” because “the most significant independent presidential candidate of the last twenty years has just joined his team.”
Yang pointed to polls showing Kennedy receiving 7% of the vote in the general election in Nevada, 6% in Wisconsin, 5% in Arizona and Michigan, 4% in Georgia and 3% in Pennsylvania, noting that “the gap between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is well below those numbers in all of those states.”
Although Labor Day traditionally marks the start of the home stretch, early voting in about a dozen states means candidates have no time to waste and little room for error.
The only debate they have agreed to is scheduled for September 10 in Philadelphia, but Trump wants two more.
The vice presidential candidates, Republican Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Democratic Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz, will face off on October 1.
A potentially decisive event is Trump’s conviction on September 18 in the Manhattan accounting fraud case.
This case, like the three other pending Democrat cases, was constructed solely for the purpose of influencing the election and keeping him out of the White House.
Now that it matters, Trump’s lawyers have rightly asked for the verdict to be delayed until after the election.
The prosecutor, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, surprisingly did not object and said he would comply with the judge’s decision.
This gives Judge Juan Merchan, whose daughter is a Democratic activist who previously worked for Harris, a chance to partially restore his reputation by agreeing to a postponement of the sentencing.
Any other decision would bring lasting shame on him and the entire New York judicial system.
