Harris Pivots to the Center
It's not 2019 anymore.
It was long a trope of American politics that candidates would tack left to win Democratic primaries (or right to win Republican primaries) and then move to the center in the general election. To the extent it was ever true, it hasn’t been the case in quite some time, as it’s next to impossible to get away in the modern media environment. But Kamala Harris hasn’t run in a primary in five years and is giving it a try.
AP (“The interview: Kamala Harris’ inaugural sit-down was most notable for seeming … ordinary“):
After avoiding a probing interview by a journalist for the first month of her sudden presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris’ first one Thursday was notable mostly in how routine it seemed.
CNN’s Dana Bash, sitting down with Harris and running mate Tim Walz in a Georgia restaurant, asked her about some issues where she had changed positions, the historical nature of her candidacy, what she would do in her first day as president and whether she’d invite a Republican to be a Cabinet member (yes, she said).
What Bash didn’t ask — and the Democratic nominee didn’t volunteer — is why it took so long to submit to an interview and whether she will do more again as a candidate.
With no clips from interviews or extended news conferences as a candidate to pick apart, Republican Donald Trump and his campaign had made Harris’ failure to take on journalists an issue in itself. She had promised to rectify that by the end of August, and made it in just under the wire.
In the interview, taped earlier Thursday at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia, Bash occasionally had pressed Harris when the vice president failed to answer a question directly. She asked four times, for example, about what led Harris to change her position on fracking — a controversial way to extract natural gas from the landscape — from her brief presidential candidacy in 2020.
“How should voters be looking at some of the changes in policy?” Bash asked, wondering whether experience led Harris down another path. “Should they be completely confident that what you’re saying now is going to be the policy moving forward?”
Bash asked Harris twice whether she would do something different, like withhold some military aid to Israel, to help reach a peace deal in the Mideast. Harris stressed the importance of a deal, but offered no new specifics on achieving it.
When Bash sought a response to Trump suggesting that Harris had only recently been emphasizing her Black roots, the vice president swiftly brushed it aside. “Next question,” she said.
CNN political analyst David Axelrod suggested that Harris, by not doing interviews previously, had raised the stakes on what is usually a typical test that presidential candidates face. But after the Bash session aired, Axelrod said that she “did what she needed to do.”
“What she needed to do was be the same person she has been on stage the past month,” said Axelrod, onetime aide to Obama when he was in the White House. He predicted the interview would ultimately make little difference in the campaign.
It has been a very long time, indeed, since presidential candidates had any need to sit down for tough interviews with mainstream journalists. Bill Clinton may have forged a new path during the 1992 campaign, famously going on The Arsenio Hall Show and other venues with friendly interviewers rather than sit-downs with more traditional journalists. Most, if not all, nominees since have followed variations of that model. While I understand why reporters for the AP, NYT, WaPo, and the like don’t like it, it’s rather clear that the voting public doesn’t punish candidates for it.
CNN (“Harris explains in exclusive CNN interview why she’s shifted her position on key issues since her first run for president“):
Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday offered her most expansive explanation to date on why she’s changed some of her positions on fracking and immigration, telling CNN’s Dana Bash her values haven’t shifted but that her time as vice president provided new perspective on some of the country’s most pressing issues.
In the CNN exclusive sit-down interview, Harris also said she would name a Republican to serve in her Cabinet if elected.
She described for the first time President Joe Biden’s telephone call informing her he was planning to abandon his bid for a second term after his disastrous debate performance. She stopped short of saying she would alter Biden’s policy toward arm sales to Israel.
[…]
In all, the joint interview in Savannah with her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – their first since becoming the Democratic presidential ticket – provided one of the clearest looks into Harris’ positions and her plans for the presidency.
Asked to describe her day-one objectives should she win, Harris did not list any specific steps, like signing executive actions or orders.
Instead, she reiterated her focus on strengthening the economy: “First and foremost, one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class.”
In the post-convention phase of the race, Harris is seeking to address scrutiny of her record and add substance to her pitch to American voters on how she would govern if elected president.
Harris had been under pressure to explain her policy positions in greater detail during a sit-down interview. Her last-minute campaign has been fueled not by detailed proposals or policy papers but by Democrats energized by the newly competitive election.
Pressed by Bash on her reversals on fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings, Harris sought to explain why her positions had changed.
“How should voters look at some of the changes that you’ve made?” Bash asked Harris. “Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information? Is it because you were running for president in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you’re saying now is going to be your policy moving forward?”
Harris said despite the shifts in position, her values had not changed.
“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” she said. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed – and I have worked on it – that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”
Her campaign later said Harris does not continue to support the Green New Deal, a wide-ranging proposal to address climate change first introduced in 2019.
During a September 2019 climate crisis town hall hosted by CNN, Harris was asked if she would commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking on her first day in office.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, and starting with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands,” Harris said at the time. By the time she had become Biden’s running mate, she had moved away from that stance and even cast the tie breaking vote to expand fracking leases, as she noted to Bash.
On Thursday, Harris pointed to the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provided record investments in combatting climate change, as an example of her climate record.
“We have set goals for the United States of America and by extension, the globe, around when we should meet certain standards for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as an example. That value has not changed,” she said.
“What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she added.
And she pointed to her record as California attorney general, when she prosecuted gangs accused of cross border trafficking, as an indication of her values on immigration.
“My values have not changed. So that is the reality of it. And four years of being vice president, I’ll tell you, one of the aspects, to your point, is traveling the country extensively,” she said, pointing to her 17 visits to Georgia since becoming vice president. “I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems.”
[…]
For Democrats, the economy remains a political weakness. Polls show more voters trust Trump to handle the economy and tame inflation, though they have been narrowing since Harris entered the race.
Harris laid out an economic policy plan earlier this month focused on bringing down costs on food, housing and childcare, in part by going harder after corporations. Her proposals included efforts to combat price gouging and ramp up construction of affordable housing.
Her plans did not amount to a wholesale departure from policies Biden has pursued over the course of his term. But she has chosen to focus more centrally on discussing affordability as a messaging strategy rather than job creation or manufacturing gains, as Biden did.
On Thursday, Bash pressed Harris to explain why those proposals hadn’t been executed during the three-and-a-half years of the Biden administration: “Why haven’t you done them already?
“We had to recover as an economy, and we have done that,” she said, pointing to efforts on containing inflation, cutting costs for prescription drugs and cutting taxes for families.
“There’s more to do, but that’s good work,” she said.
Harris also did not expose any daylight between herself and Biden on the Middle East when asked directly if she would be doing anything differently, including limiting arm sales to Israel.
“We have to get a deal done. This war must end, and we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out,” she said.
NYT (“In CNN Interview Excerpts, Harris Defends Ideological Shift to Center“) adds:
In her first television interview as the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday defended her ideological shift to the political center, saying she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet but promising “my values have not changed.”
[…]
Appointing a nominally bipartisan cabinet would be a return to tradition after eight years of more partisan White Houses. No Republicans are serving in President Biden’s cabinet. But President Barack Obama had a Republican secretary of transportation and two Republican secretaries of defense. President George W. Bush had a Democratic transportation secretary, and before that, President Bill Clinton had a Republican defense secretary.
Ms. Harris declined to name potential Republican picks, but two former representatives, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have become implacable foes of Mr. Trump. Democrats may feel in their debt if Ms. Harris wins in November.
It would be “really important” for her administration to represent “different views, different experiences,” Ms. Harris said.
“It would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican,” she said, according to a video clip released by CNN.
In the interview, Ms. Bash pressed Ms. Harris on why she had shifted some of her positions from the past. In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor then serving in the Senate, ran as a progressive. She now appears to be running a more centrist campaign, though she has yet to outline much of her platform in detail.
WSJ (“Kamala Harris Defends Policy Shifts in CNN Interview“) adds:
Vice President Kamala Harris declared that her “values have not changed” on key issues such as climate change and immigration despite shifting policy stances, as she and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat for their first major television interview of their 2024 campaign Thursday.
Harris and Walz, who have faced criticism that they have avoided close media scrutiny, spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash as they took a bus tour through Georgia. Harris addressed questions regarding fracking and other areas where her position has changed and defended President Biden’s economic record, but didn’t lay out significant new details on how she would govern if elected to the White House this fall.
Asked what she would tackle on day one, she pointed to previously announced efforts to cut housing costs and offer tax credits for families.
“People are ready for a new way forward,” Harris said.
[…]
During her earlier campaign for president that kicked off in 2019, Harris said she was in favor of banning fracking, a stance backed by environmentalists, but has since disavowed that position. Pressed on that shift in the interview Thursday, Harris said she had made clear in 2020 that she wouldn’t ban fracking. That year, she said in the vice-presidential debate that she agreed with Biden’s energy plan, which didn’t include a fracking ban.
“What I have seen is we can grow and we can increase a thriving green energy economy without banning fracking,” she said Thursday.
Inconsistency is treated like a cardinal sin in American politics by both opponents and the pundit class. But Harris certainly has a different perspective after nearly four years as Vice President than she did as a politician representing California. It would be disappointing, indeed, if she held exactly the same policy positions now as she did then.
Do I think some of her position changes are out of expedience rather than genuine Bayesian updating? Sure. Do I believe her when she says her core values haven’t changed? I do.
More importantly, given the nature of our system, her values and instincts are far, far more important than her actual policy positions. Regardless of whether she would like to, for example, ban fracking, she won’t have the votes to do so.
With regard to her policy positions, my primary concern is with regard to foreign and national security policy, where I really have no idea what her values or instincts are. As a prosecutor in California, it wasn’t on her radar screen. And, while she did briefly serve on the Intelligence Committee, her focus during her short tenure in the Senate was on domestic policy. So, she’s largely a cipher on that front.
Her opponent, by virtue of having served four years as Commander-in-Chief, has vastly more experience and record on that front. Alas, it’s mostly bad. So, I’ll take my chances with Harris.
As pointed out, much of it is expedience. And to paraphase Harris from 2020, “It was a campaign”
Harris’ values seem to have a moral flexibility to the point of being untrustworthy.
@JKB:
Nonsense. Don’t you ever get tired of this schtick?
Edited to ask: why is this edit thing taking 20 minutes now where before it took (already too long) 15 minutes?
@JKB: Well, at least your candidate is clearly trustworthy!
I am sure Ivana, Marla, and Melania would readily testify to that point, as would the many happy graduates of Trump University! I expect all of his aides who helped author Project 2025 know how steadfast he is, for that matter.
And his steadfast clarity on abortion should warm the hearts of the faithful.
@JKB:
On that note, what do you think of Trump’s recent embrace of a pro-abortion position and government-funded IVF position?
So was anti-abortion a stance he adopted for political expediency? Or is the “a six-week ban is too short and I am signalling I will support abortion as a FL constitutional right” a stance he adopted for political expediency? Which one should we trust? Especially on an issue of moral import as important as abortion?
BTW, what’s so bad about political expediency?
@JKB:
Luckily Trump has no such problems (cough, abortion, cough).
EDIT: Dr. Taylor beat me to it. Of course we could name 50 other things where Trump has said different things to different audiences, which is the *real* cardinal sin – he’s recently bragged about overturning Roe v Wade at one event while claiming he’s great for women’s reproductive rights in the same week.
I think there are 3 major parts to this. Campaign promises, what the candidates when elected will actually pursue and what they will actually be able to pass into law or policy. It’s a list that narrows down sharply. For example the idea about cutting taxes on tips seems like just a campaign promise. It starts out with Trump pandering to workers in Las Vegas so Harris matches it so she doesnt lose voters. Will either of them even use major political capital to try to enact this? No way.
While she is a bit of a cipher at this point she is not nearly as much as Trump was in 2016 and probably even less than Trump now as so much is transactional with him. I do think that Dems in general with the elections of people like Fetterman, the rejection of defunding police, the support of nuclear power again and failing to support the more radical progressives in liberal cities have learned or are learning that you can actually win elections if you lean a bit more to the center or at least tone down the most radical elements of your party. So, as an example, I really dont expect her to go after fracking.
Steve
I would like to pause a moment and marvel at how absolutely insane this is. Just idiotically bonkers. It’s as if we are a nation of paint huffers.
40-odd years of being force fed trickle down economics has made us stupider. Like a bunch of dogs happily dying in gods hot cybertruck.
JKB’s morning routine:
Brush teeth
Coffee
Write something moronic to maintain membership in the cult.
Re-read von Mises.
Be sad cuz no ladies.
@steve:
I would just like to point out that, very rapidly, a lot of young people are no longer going to accept centrist bullshit. Where you see sensible centrism, I see the same conservative lies I’ve been fed my whole life, but served with a side of lukewarm patronizing.
Moderation, centrism, those are all fin values to have, provided they are real and not covers for conservative bullshit which they are 90% of the time.
Im 46 and I’ve run out of patience for it. The 18-20 year olds just starting to vote will have none of it.
@JKB:
Bruh. You support and make excuses for a lying, immoral, self-serving, raw-dogging-pornstars-while-wife-in-postnatal-recovery cretin and have the unmitigated gall to launch a “moral flexibility” accusation at someone??? Gat-DAYUM, but that’s some self-unaware, morally flexible shyt!
@steve:
Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor: Then stop doing that.
@Matt Bernius:
The thing about JKB’s post is not that it is particularly sad, or funny (other than eliciting a brief chuckle from me due to his trying to compare Kamala’s trustworthiness to Trumps), it just shows me how clueless the opposition to Kamala really is.
What says it all to me is that I did not wake up to a flurry of blog posts and comments in blog posts pointing out how horrible the interview was, or linking to stories that once again say the sky is falling for Democrats. Nope, the interview seems to have come and gone and Kamala will just keep on trucking as she drives towards the finish line.
It felt like minutes after Biden’s debate with Trump folks on this site and others were posting about how frightened they were that Biden had just handed Trump the key’s to the White House, and while I have yet to check out more than a handful of regular blogs I hit up on a near daily basis, I am just not getting the vibe that Trump is back on top, in fact, Trump got his wish to overtake the news cycle, but this time his actions are getting some well deserved blow back for his attempt to turn a Sacred place into a campaign commercial.
I bet Kamala’s poll numbers (which are finally starting to worry the GOP, as they are actually breaking in her favor) barely move a millimeter in either direction. Also, if I am wrong I am sure JKB will crow about it, but last nights interview seems to be anti-climactic especially considering the build-up/anticipation to seeing her first “big” interview, maybe it would have been a bigger deal if Trump’s cemetery stunt did not turn into a complete debacle. So good for Kamala, and really not good for Trump.
One last thing to this long post, technically, I understand why JKB sees Trump as “trustworthy,” when Trump says he will lock-up his political opponents, and take revenge on anyone he deems unworthy of being considered a real American, etc., well….Trump really will follow through on his words, and JKB is unfortunately more than okay with that.
@Beth:
It is, on one hand, maddening.
On the other, it is not surprising: it is true that groceries were cheaper in 2019 than they are now (ditto the cost of borrowing money) and most people think very simply on these matters. “Past, better!” is about as sophisticated as it gets for most folks.
@Beth:
As soon as they start winning elections they can have or not have whatever they like.
@DeD:
Hmmm.
Some people say JKB is just a nom-de-plume for Rich Lowry.
Compared to Trump…
Harris has bad character/Harris has untrustworthy values.
I report, you decide.
I want XYZ.
Do you have enough support for XYZ?
No.
Are you doing anything to garner support for XYZ?
No.
Will you compromise and take X and Y and hold off on Z?
No. I want XYZ.
(Repeat)
Excerpt from How To Lose at Politics.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Wait, you see the edit text? Thank jeebus. I had been switching it between 15 and 20 while troubleshooting that bug.
@Michael Reynolds:
He mainly sends concerned about birthrate. To be honest, we have no idea how JKB feels about women (well beyond they hate marriage and are as a while way to leftist and oriented around material things and harridans… wait, I guess we do know a lot about what he thinks, but it seems more angry at them than sad about them).
@inhumans99:
100% agree with all points you raised.
@inhumans99:
Not even “Good interview performance a liability for Harris.” 😀
@inhumans99:
Trump turned into a bitter loser and a bad sport after his 2020 loss, and everyone who follows in his wake is too dumb to realize what’s happening.
There’s a difference between talking trash in the spirit of things and being a poor sport and a bad loser. Most pro athletes talk tons of trash, but they don’t act like Trump when they lose. All of this talk about fan culture is a way to elude the fact that some people handing winning and losing an actual game differently than others.
@JKB: HAHAHAHAHA.
OMG.
Let’s ask Romney about his position on abortion, from MA Gov. to presidential candidate.
Or, Bush Sr. about economic issues.
Or, Trump on…everything? Because when he was a Democrat, his positions on a lot of issues differed from his current mish-mash-mush of whatever TF is running on the hamster wheel at any given moment.
Please, just stop with this running joke you have about Harris or any Democrat being “expedient” on issues.
@Modulo Myself:
He didn’t turn into. He was like that at least since 2016 (I’d really paid him no mind until then, there being no reason to). even when he won in 2016, he was a sore winner. He knew he’d lost the popular vote, and that irked him, Hence all the lies about illegals voting, voter fraud, and his obsession with crowd sizes.
@Beth: What makes you think we aren’t a nation of paint huffers? Maybe not a whole nation, but surely one political party could very easily be majorly huffers and tweekers. No problem embracing that idea at all. Even the evangelicals in that camp.
@Jen:
In fairness, Bush and Romney got a lot of grief for their flip-flopping. Because Trump was always treated as a clown, not so much.
@DeD: Or the effects of paint huffing and tweaking. (I’m really grateful to Beth for having discovered the role recreational drugs play in Republican voter decision making.)
@James Joyner:
“Because Trump was always treated as a clown, not so much.”
If Trump is still being treated as a clown after a term as President and his third consecutive party nomination, it says something really horrific about our press.
Hillary Clinton, of countless NYTimes articles about emails, and Joe Biden, of hundreds of articles about how he is too old, might beg to differ.
Voters don’t directly punish candidates for not doing those interviews, but the paper of record that sets a large chunk of the agenda for the media as a whole does, and that affects voters.
A couple hundred articles about how each candidate is incredibly old, and how whoever we elect has a very decent chance of dying in office… that would be non-biased reporting. Comparisons of how age has affected each of them.
Incessant “some people say Biden is only conscious from 10:00 to 10:05 in the morning”? They just want a scalp.
I would really feel more comfortable if Team Harris treated the mainstays of mainstream media as effectively one more key demographic that needs to be coddled. A particularly hostile one.
@James Joyner: I think Bush Sr. caught a lot of grief for his position shifts. Romney was treated a bit better, his switching on the issue was generally seen as his views “evolving,” despite the fact that if any Republican had a reason to remain pro-choice, it was Romney, who had a member of his extended family die as a result of an illegal abortion (I think it was the sister of an in-law, or maybe a cousin?).
Regardless, my comment was more in response to JKB’s attempt to be high and mighty, as though Harris is the only politician ever to modify a position when running for higher office. It’s patently absurd, particularly with the reference to “moral flexibility,” which is just the cherry on top, given who he supports.
Considering that Trump is now trying to position himself as a champion of women’s reproductive rights, I wonder why we are even having this discussion.
@inhumans99:
Shorter JKB – “Another day of the campaign gone and we still have nothing…”
@anjin-san:
Indeed.
I think it would be hilarious if Harris were to essentially adopt all of John McCain’s platform for this election. She’d still be far closer to “the center” than TFG, and all the non-fascists would still vote for her. Let’s see Trump try to paint that platform as far-left commie un-American unpatriotic crazy.
So the Arlington Debacle is not going to be a subject that can easily be changed for Trump. Someone at Fox thought it would be a good idea to get involved in an effort to shore up Trump’s crumbling run for the Presidency by trying to turn the Arlington Debacle into a both sides issue, or something like that, as Kevin Drum has a post up that Fox News is now trying to help Trump by saying that Biden skipped out on a cemetery event in June to go on vacation that Trump attended.
First, what’s that you say, Kamala is the one running for President not Biden, well…Trump will be running against Biden two weeks after he has passed away as it seems it broke his mind a bit when the Democratic Party convinced one candidate to step down and another to run in his place, he really could not fathom such an event happening and is just permanently befuddled that Biden is not the person he is campaigning against. Next…no one at Fox News was smart enough to say, whoa, whoa, whoa! Do NOT Get Involved in the Arlington Debacle (seriously, no one???).
Jumping into the fray to try and help out Trump at this point in the campaign is just a terrifically bad idea.
I get it though, if Fox does not have Clinton and Biden to kick around, and it is looking more likely by the second, minute, hour and day that Trump is losing, they will need to fire over half of their on air talent because this on-air talent’s only skill set is to act as Trump fluffers and attack anyone with Clinton or Biden in their name.
A whole lot of folks at Fox are starting to see the writing on the wall and their picture will not be on that wall in the near future if they do not do something, anything, to try and create drama and the illusion of a horse race and make it seem like Trump is not losing the race. Anything to try and keep their faithful viewers from changing the channel or just turning off the TV.
@mattbernius:..EDIT Key…
I first noticed the return of the EDIT Key 4 days ago:
There have been many commenters celebrating EDIT Key return since then.
@inhumans99:
El Weirdo pretty much owns the Republiqan party now. If he loses, after he’s done throwing tantrums, failed coups, and maybe incites some kind of massacre, he’ll keep running for the White House until the day he dies.
If there were people in his party to tell him “you’re though,” they’d have done so after November 2020, and certainly after Jan 6. No one expects a one-term loser to run again. The only one with a good case was Cleveland, since he won the popular vote in all three elections. El Felón lost it both times.
@Steven L. Taylor:
The Republican Party survives on cum hoc, ergo propter hoc, “I’m not happy, Biden is prez, therefore…” They live on creating deficits, doing nothing effective about immigration, etc. and blaming the following D administration for the results.
Kevin Drum put up a nice post yesterday showing inflation wasn’t Biden’s fault.
@JKB:
Please, if I might, let me paraphrase the great British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, ‘conservatives are well-organized hypocrites.’
The CNN interview questions on energy, environment, and climate consisted of… a series of four questions on fracking. In her responses, Harris discussed the climate crisis, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the Inflation Reduction Act, the clean energy economy and clean energy jobs. But the questions were only on fracking and in reference to her 2019 town hall statement, despite, as noted by CNN’s Kevin Liptak, “by the time she had become Biden’s running mate, she had moved away from that stance and even cast the tie breaking vote to expand fracking leases.”
She finished answering the fracking questions by saying, “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”