1 week Ago
What if I told you there was a document – publicly available, but little read and widely ignored by the mainstream media – that explained one of the presidential candidates’ real positions on various policy positions? Sure, they might denounce these views today, but we all know it’s what they really think, no matter how vigorously they protest them. It would be nice if the mainstream media pressed the candidate on these positions, but reporters seem content to let them skate by, allowing them to say what they wish without consequences. If you’re a Democrat, you probably think I’m talking about Donald Trump and Project 2025 , the conservative policy agenda – but this description doesn’t really fit that document.
Project 2025, far from an official document produced by the Trump campaign, was a wish list dreamt up by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Indeed, this wasn’t the first time it engaged in such a project: The Heritage Foundation produced a similar one when Reagan was running for president. Trump and his current team didn’t have anything to do with writing it, and Trump has disavowed the document.
The document’s primary author has since stepped down from the Heritage Foundation. If you’re a Democrat, you may not believe a word of this. You may think that Trump and his staff had a secret hand in writing it, and he believes every word of it.
OK, you’re entitled to your beliefs, but ask yourself: If it was a secret plan, why did they publish it publicly? This wasn’t a leak, like the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion. A liberal group found it and started publicizing it. The document I’m talking about isn’t Project 2025, though.
I’m talking about Kamala Harris’ 2020 campaign platform when she first ran for president. It wasn’t particularly effective, which is why she’s since backed away from many of those positions, but it also wasn’t even consistent within the context of that one campaign. On health care, she started out by continuing her position as a U.
S. senator in supporting “Medicare for all.” When she realized that was untenable, she switched to supporting a public option.
Today, the sparse “issues” section of her campaign website mostly touts what she’s done, with vague promises to build on those accomplishments. During the debate, she rightly called out Donald Trump for having no real plan to replace “Obamacare”; he should have a detailed one by now. Still, he could have responded by pointing out her own fluctuating positions on the topic, going from “Medicare for all” to a public option to now, simply, doing more.
Instead, he floundered, one of the several times he did during that debate when he could have gone on the offensive. Health care isn’t the only issue area where Harris’ views have, shall we say, “evolved” over the years – or where they’re simply unclear. To take another example from the debate, she correctly criticized Donald Trump for sinking a possible bipartisan compromise on immigration.
Now, there were good policy reasons to be skeptical of that particular bill: it wasn’t some sweeping grand compromise that would have enacted a long-term solution. Instead, it was intended as a quick fix to give Democrats political credibility on the issue during an election year. Laying aside, for the moment, the protests from both the right and the left that it didn’t go far enough, there wasn’t much in it to appeal to the center, either.
It increased funding for immigration enforcement, for immigration judges and gave the president wider authority to shut down the border. Considering that it was the result of months of bipartisan negotiations, that’s not much at all, and Trump could have pointed that out; he also could have pointed out that Harris was one of three Democratic senators to vote against a broader bipartisan immigration bill when he was president. So, Harris went from being one of a few senators opposing a bipartisan immigration bill because she didn’t think it did enough to criticizing Trump for sinking a bill that did far less.
Now, if Harris is able to offer a distinct, and reasonable, explanation for exactly when, where and why her views shifted on these or other issues, that’s fine. The problem is that, right now, she’s getting by without even an explanation, through the combination of friendly media and inept opposition. The American electorate deserves real answers from Kamala Harris on her shifting views and her plans.
If we’re going to get them, somebody is going to have to start asking the questions. Jim Fossel, a conservative activist from Gardiner, worked for Sen. Susan Collins.
He can be contacted at: [email protected] Twitter: @jimfossel We invite you to add your comments. We encourage a thoughtful exchange of ideas and information on this website.
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