In CNN interview, Kamala Harris promised change - and also the status quo? | Opinion
Give it up for Vice President Kamala Harris. She can dodge and weave around questions about her record without devolving into one of the word salads “The Daily Show” so memorably satirized with its “Holistic thought advisor” sketch. But with Harris, there is always at least one part of each public appearance that makes no sense.
In Thursday’s CNN Dana Bash interview, Harris complained of an “era that started about a decade ago” when things in America went wrong. What? A decade ago was the waning years of the administration of our last normal president, Barack Obama, a basically good man who was not nuts and not in need of a restful rocking chair with a blanket on his lap. Then we had four noxious years of Donald Trump, then four declining years of Joe Biden.
By my math, shaky as it is, six of the last 10 years, our country has been run by Democrats. Funny how they are not responsible for this allegedly awful era.
That’s why Harris has decided we need to “turn the page” and find “a new way forward” as she said in her interview and had plastered across her campaign bus. Turn the page, from what? The last four years of the Biden administration? Find a new way forward, from what? Her own vice presidency?
It is an audacious move for a basically incumbent candidate to pitch herself as an agent of change. Bash gave Harris the opportunity to explain how she is going to turn the page on the conflict in between Israel and Hamas, but the vice president announced she’d keep the Biden administration status quo. “That’s not gonna change,” She told CNN. Then she fumbled around for something new. Coming up with nothing, she confidently stated, over and over, that we just need to get a deal.
Change is hard. In 2020, when Harris was such a perfectly awful candidate that she dropped out before a single vote was cast, she at least had positions different from Biden’s. Ban fracking, single-payer health care, a Green New Deal, decriminalize the border, she argued. If the previous Harris from four years ago were running now, she could certainly turn the page, but she says that Harris is gone — over the last four years, she’s the one who changed on all those policies.
So if she’s basically got Biden’s policies, how is she going to change things? That’s unclear. When asked what she’d do on her first day in the White House, she refused to answer, talking in generalities about bringing down prices on everyday goods, giving new parents a one-year tax break and a $250 billion plan to subsidize housing for first-generation and first-time home buyers. None of those things can you do on the first day in the White House, and surely no administration before hers has thought of fighting inflation and handing out tax breaks and free cash. That plan is old as time.
As Harris was taught by her holistic thought advisor, “When you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.” Indeed, that is true. In her CNN interview, time passed and great significance was put on the need for change, but very little change was actually promised.
David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com