Will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?
Kamala Harris seems to be channeling the old TV game show “To Tell the Truth.”
In the original version, three guests would all claim to be the same individual. As the celebrity panel asked the guests questions, the two impostors were allowed to lie to fool panel members. When the questioning ended, the show’s host would say, “Will the real (person’s name) please stand up?”
Well, that’s where we are in this election: Will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?
As the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has been taking policy positions that are very different from those of the pre-nomination Harris. Which Harris should voters believe on these issues?
“I’m a capitalist.” Harris recently told Pittsburgh’s Economic Club she’s a capitalist, presumably to counter Trump’s claim that she’s a communist. But what is capitalism? “Capitalism is an economic system in which profit-driven private actors, rather than the government, control economic activity,” according to the Motley Fool.
Harris and her progressive supporters, by contrast, want the government to control much, if not most, economic activity. That includes health care, retirement, education and now housing. And she wants government to guide economic decisions by subsidizing favored industries and personal activities. Harris’s agenda is almost identical to that of the Democratic Socialists of America, who are anti-capitalists.
“I was a prosecutor,” Harris says. To counter her soft-on-crime record — including support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings — Harris says she prosecuted people as a San Francisco district attorney and later as California's attorney general. But we have many George Soros-funded DAs in large, blue cities who routinely refuse to prosecute or hold any offender accountable, even for some of the most heinous crimes.
In 2022, San Francisco went so far as to oust its DA, Chesa Boudin, as public anger grew over rising property crime "and the visible despair and squalor on city streets.” And Alameda County (Oakland), Calif., DA Pamela Price is facing a recall election in November for the same reason.
The point is that Harris wasn’t the last of the tough-on-crime California DAs; she was, more accurately, the first of the new soft-on-crime DAs. Nothing in her Senate or vice presidential record indicates that she’s changed.
“I’m a gun owner,” she told Oprah Winfrey. But the issue isn’t whether Harris owns guns, it’s whether she and her progressive allies will let you own guns. There are countless progressive elites who have guns or hire bodyguards who have guns. But that doesn’t mean they will let you have or keep your guns.
It’s the same double standard when progressive elites fly around in private jets to scold the rest of us about the need to reduce our carbon emissions.
“I will be pragmatic,” Harris says. Don’t you believe it! Harris is nothing if not a progressive ideologue, much like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Was she pragmatic about the American Rescue Plan or the Inflation Reduction Act, for which she proudly cast the tie-breaking vote? This was the closest thing we have to a Green New Deal. The only negotiations were with two less-ideological Senate Democrats. No Republican voted for either bill.
Consider abortion. Has Harris displayed any pragmatism on that very divisive issue? Any effort to find common ground? She now wants to end the Senate filibuster so that Democrats can pass a pro-abortion law by simple majority vote. And she supports packing the Supreme Court to uphold her actions.
Committed ideologues don’t become pragmatists after winning an election. Rather, they double down on their progressive agenda.
“I will not ban fracking,” the new Harris says. But she doesn’t have to. As president, she can quietly instruct federal agencies to slow-walk drilling permits or impose so many fracking restrictions and regulations that it will effectively be banned. This has been President Biden's modus operandi.
Remember last January when President Joe Biden imposed a “temporary pause” on pending approvals of liquified natural gas exports? He didn’t ban liquified natural gas exports, he just put up roadblocks that could last months or years.
But hasn’t Harris claimed that crude oil production has increased during the Biden-Harris administration? Yes, and it has. But nearly 75 percent of that crude oil is produced on non-federal land, where the government has little control. In other words, Harris is taking credit for something she can’t stop.
In “To Tell the Truth,” two people were allowed to lie to the voters — er, to the panel. And panel members often chose one of the liars. The problem we’re now facing is that the real Harris won’t stand up and identify herself until after the election.
Merrill Matthews is a public policy and political analyst and the co-author of “On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff.”