Kamala Harris, with her radical liberal agenda, once charged full steam ahead towards the progressive wing of the Democratic Party during her initial presidential run. She hastily reversed her direction to catch the wave of social and racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, blending in with other Democrats while pushing forward increasingly progressive ideas. It wasn’t a surprising move considering the ostensible national shift on criminal justice at the time.
Now, Harris finds herself less than a week into another run for the presidency, and it’s abundantly clear that Republicans have their rifles laser-focused on her. Old video clips and statements she made previously have become ammunition for the opposition as they paint her as a far-left extremist, out of sync with average citizens and swing voters alike.
The first to utilize Harris’ past against her was not Trump’s campaign, but Mr. McCormick’s, who is attempting to dethrone Senator Bob Casey. His 60-second ad, broadcast on Monday, highlighted a string of positions Harris maintained in 2019 and 2020. Among these were her opposition to fracking and her willingness to consider the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Harris also publicly supported the addition of police officers as ‘wrongheaded thinking’, was open to the concept of felons voting, and supported a ‘mandatory buyback program’ for certain firearms. Furthermore, she brazenly encouraged the eradication of private health insurance, a stance that didn’t sit well with many voters who rely on such coverage.
The fracking issue is a particularly daunting one for Harris. Despite making the banning of it a central tenet of her 2020 primary run’s energy platform, this stance is disconnected with the reality of the economy in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state in the current race. Her campaign, in a bizarre flip, announced on Friday that Harris no longer wishes to ban fracking. A significant deviation from her position four years prior.
This sudden change to a stance more aligned with President Biden’s administration’s policies is a clear indicator of Harris’s inconsistency. Her campaign, predictably, will counter Republican assaults by claiming exaggeration or falsification about her record. Although, they would likely fail to consider the self-contradictions within Harris’s own statements.
While making attempts to highlight her past as a local prosecutor and state attorney general to improve her image, the Harris campaign continues to display strategic incongruence. In addition to a course correction on fracking, they stated she now stands by the Biden administration’s increases to border enforcement budget, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and parrots Biden’s calls to ban assault weapons without a mandate to sell them back to the government.
After joining Biden’s ticket in 2020, Harris ceased to offer any policy suggestions that significantly differed from his. She absolved herself of the push for a single-payer healthcare system. As if to add confusion to the mix, her campaign stated on Friday that she would promise to uphold Biden’s commitment to not raise income taxes for those earning less than $400,000 annually.
Although Harris has largely stuck to Biden’s tracks, she has tried, albeit vainly, to differentiate herself from Biden on abortion rights. Since the Supreme Court’s controversial 2022 decision to flip Roe v. Wade, Biden has claimed that he would sign legislation reestablishing a federal right to abortion.
In an attempt to build a separate identity, Harris made it clear in her initial speeches as a presidential candidate that she would go a step beyond Biden. She has committed to signing a law that nuanced ‘reproductive freedoms’, a more expansive term she used in Wisconsin last week which hinted at a potential agenda to expand protection for practices such as in vitro fertilization or contraception.
During her earlier 2020 run, Harris went even further down the rabbit hole of abortion rights. She suggested a plan that would require federal approval for any new laws seeking to restrict abortion rights proposed by states or local jurisdictions. This strategy eerily resembled the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s limitations on voting law changes in states with past racial discrimination.
This blatant overreach by Harris not only aligns her against the cherished value of state rights, but it also injects the federal government into an issue where it doesn’t belong. Her ideas are a clear display of her willingness to overstep the bounds of her authority and push a radical agenda onto the American people.
Overall, Harris’s radical views, inconsistency on key issues, and tendency to flip flop when politically convenient paints a picture of an extremist candidate out of touch with the average American voter. Aspects of her record that she may wish to hide are now being brought into the light.
Despite any attempts by the Harris campaign to deflect or reframe the narrative surrounding her record, the facts remain unchanged. The trail of contradictory statements, radical policy positions, and strategic reversals tells its own story, one of an ambitious but largely inconsistent politician.
The stories about Harris continue to unfold, painting an uneven picture of a candidate unsuitable for the highest office in the land. While the future, no doubt, holds many more twists and turns in this presidential race, Harris’s tale so far is one characterized by incongruity, radicalism, and a disconcerting affinity for overstepping boundaries.
Inconsistency Marks Kamala Harris’s Second Presidential Run appeared first on Real News Now.
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