Rudi Weingarten’s Perfect Candidate

Vice President Kamala Harris attends the Presidential Daily Briefing, Wednesday, September 1, 2021, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

Who’s Laughing Now

Why didn’t Kamala Harris, like other candidates, have to slog around New Hampshire? Why are there no debates or few opportunities for voters or journalists to ask Kamala Harris any questions? “Because the Democratic nomination for President fell into her lap when it became painfully clear that Joe Biden was far too old and too unwell to run for a second term,” explains Matthew Lynn in Spectator US.

That may turn out to be very lucky, at least for her. Later today, Harris will unveil her first new policy of the campaign. The trouble is this: it is completely idiotic.

Legislating against Price Gouging = Government Enforced Price Controls

Jay Nordlinger writes in NRO of the darling of populists, “Nayib Bukele, down in El Salvado:”

Salvadoran president Bukele, famous for his heavy-handed crackdown on street gangs, threatened to use similar tactics against price gougers. Since 2022, Bukele has rounded up tens of thousands of suspected street-gang members — often on little evidence — and filmed them being frog-marched in their underwear though vast new prisons.

In a speech late Friday, he threatened to use the same tactics on wholesalers and distributors whom he blamed for a recent steep rise in the prices for food items and other basic goods.

What Kind of Plan Is That?

Well, Kamala Harris has her own plan. It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala’s idea is. Mr. Lynn explains:

(Harris) wants to legislate against “price gouging,” with the Federal Trade Commission awarded extra power to investigate food prices, and to impose penalties on manufacturers and retailers who are judged to have put up prices unfairly. She will rail against “greedflation” and promise that her administration will get tough. Seriously?

Walking a Tightrope

Democrats face a tightrope challenge, Ben Domenech warns in Spectator US. Can they get their unwieldy candidate over the finish line before anyone realizes just how unqualified Kamala is?

What Kamala Harris theoretically endorsed:

• the Green New Deal

• a federal jobs guarantee

• an 80 percent marginal tax rate

• free healthcare for illegal immigrants

• banning non-electric cars within the next decade

It’s just fine and dandy for her to reverse all those positions based on nothing more than the whim of the current moment. Who cares if you were opposed to fracking on Tuesday? That was Tuesday. This is Friday and it is the future, in which we exist, having dropped from the coconut tree like a newfound babe.

Through all Kamala’s meanderings about yellow school buses, Venn diagrams and space, space — “it affects us all,” her beautiful musings were the amusing focus of her vice presidency, continues Mr. Domenech.

Everything was a laugh line, everything was a joke, especially the suggestion that she was a leftist (by Norah O’Donnell of CBS) or the implication that she needed to visit the border (by Lester Holt of NBC) or the fact that her foreign policy expertise extended to knowing “Ukraine is a country in Europe, next to another country called Russia” which she explained to the fine hosts of The Morning Hustle radio show. Who cared if the vice president was a walking punchline? She’d never have a chance to be behind the Resolute Desk anyway.

California Dreaming

No surprise here. Well, let’s put it this way: Republicans in California are not surprised. They understand that Kamala Harris’s rise has been indicative of the way the Democratic Party utterly abandoned its populist roots. The Democrat Party, argues Mr. Domenech, is now “the party of teachers unions, big tech and corporations that play ball with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion demands of the moment.”

So Kamala is the perfect candidate for Randi Weingarten and Netflix, Big Pharma and BlackRock, Disney and Apple, Stephen Colbert and the Pod Save America bros — unobtrusive, vacuous, a willing vehicle for everything that corporate leftism wants and nothing it doesn’t. She will be just as pro-trans as you want her to be, neither more nor less.

Big Problems for Kamala

She is particularly unpopular with the Rust Belt set — outside of Michigan, where her appeal on foreign policy is, how to say it politely, decidedly at odds with her husband’s religious affiliation (the pro-Hamas faction of the left is very ready to [s]ass this queen).

(Kamala)  also lacks any of the faux-centrist background that Scranton Joe used repeatedly, to great effect, as a shield against being called out for his culturally leftward veers during his presidency. How can you call him a leftist, he still goes to Mass!

… then there is the odd nature of her relationship with the black voter base of the Democratic Party, which ditched her for Joe in 2020 but now is trying to drum up enthusiastic support her. Harris’s ethnicity isn’t an issue for most voters of either party, though she lacks a strong connection to the African-American experience — when she affects a southern accent before an Atlanta audience, it is an incongruous bit of code-switching that makes no sense whatsoever for those who know she didn’t grow up eating collard greens.

Kamala’s Weirdness

She went from being a tough law and order prosecutor to being what one observer described as an “anarcho-communist” in 2020, parroting a litany of insincerity that is virtually unmatched in the history of American politics.

John Kerry’s claim that he was for something before he was against it pales in comparison to the issues Kamala has shifted on over the years, without any explanation why. The answer is simple: because it’s what she needed to do. And she’ll keep on doing it, shooting the moon all the way to the Resolute Desk if Republicans can’t figure her out.

Tomorrow, we’ll post from Michael J. Boskin, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and economics professor at Stanford. Mr. Boskin warns in the WSJ: Kamala’s proposals would lead to slower growth, more inflation, and no relief from the debt crisis. Voters know little of Harris’s economic or monetary policies. What would Kamala Harris do on spending, taxes, deficits, regulation, and trade? Stay tuned…