Kamala Harris has yet to do an in-depth interview about how she plans to govern if elected in November.
In fact, with a little more than two months to go before the election, she hasn’t said anything of real substance.
That’s particularly the case when it comes to the top issue for most voters, which is the economy.
Her campaign website has no significant economic policy positions; her campaign hasn’t issued any definitive statements on where they stand on taxes, fracking, and a lot more.
What she has said is that she’s against price gouging for groceries, stopping excessive profits — unaware, it seems, that we have laws on the books already for that, and if enacted such policies would lead to rationing and higher prices.
She suggested she wants to raise corporate tax rates and tax rich people more, just like her boss does in his latest budget proposal. How much? No one really knows.
And yet her economic advisory team is preaching the gospel of Kamala to anyone who will listen. I was one of those people when I recently caught an earful from one of her top advisers.
This wise person assured me that Harris — despite her past embrace of all the lefty proposals (tax hikes, regulations, Green New Deal subsidies) — would make a competent centrist president on the economy, much more so than Donald Trump.
Kamala is a closet moderate, he tells me during a long DM exchange just before Harris spoke at the DNC Thursday, which was also (surprise!) devoid of policy substance.
His reasoning? Well, I’ll quote him directly: “I’m one of her advisers. So are a list of really strong entrepreneurs. We ain’t leftists. S—t, she was talking about policies needing a return on investment yesterday. Trump doesn’t know what ROI is anymore. LOL.”
I’m withholding the name of the adviser; he’s someone I like and admire, a billionaire entrepreneur who made it on his own merit. I also appreciate his perspective.
But he’s also completely delusional on Harris and the Democratic Party in general. Yes, he hates Trump and thinks The Donald would be a horrible president for all the reasons people hate Trump.
Not a clue
But you can’t escape the elephant in the room for any Trump hater who worries about the future of how average people make ends meet on a daily basis: Harris has no clue how to run a $25 trillion economy.
If she did, we would have heard about it by now. Instead, this is a candidacy based on vibe and theatrics, signifying nothing
If Harris is elected, her real advisers will be calling the shots and they are the tax-and-spend types who crafted Biden’s failed agenda.
It’s a sad and scary spectacle because the American people deserve more and so much is on the line. Even scarier because she just didn’t fall out of that coconut tree.
Kamala Harris has been a public official for most of her adult life, and she’s been VP for four years, yet she’s nowhere on a matter of existential national importance.
These are points I brought up to her alleged adviser. (I would be shocked if she really listens to him over, say, lefty Dem Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but work with me here.) He counters that I’m asking too much of her.
“She wasn’t planning on being the nominee,” he tells me. “So she didn’t have to start doing her own thing until a month ago.
“She wants to get it right. And there’s no reason to rush it out. She wants to do it the right way.”
Or maybe, my friend, she’s just clueless. Recall: she sat by and supported all of Joe Biden’s spending blowouts that gave us massive inflation, which forced the Fed to raise rates and possibly spark a recession.
Maybe this is what you get when your VP is chosen in 2020 not because she was great during the primaries — she was horrible when she ran to be the nominee — but because she fit the party’s intersectionality agenda.
Maybe this isn’t someone with the bandwidth to run the country.
DEI defense
There’s an interesting Bloomberg column I came across defending Diversity Equity and Inclusion — a management theory that sets rigid standards for employment based on race, sex and gender identification.
Once all the rage, more big companies are ditching so-called DEI for reasons ranging from lack of fairness to impediments to productivity to its dubious legality.
Yet the author of the piece argues there is scientific evidence that DEI is actually a better form of meritocracy.
Here’s a key paragraph: “Racially diverse juries deliberate more thoughtfully. Politically diverse debate teams prepare more diligently. Mixed-gender teams of scientists are more likely to produce breakthroughs . . .”
There are some valid reasons to support diversity, but “science” is not one of those, as I point out in my new book “Go Woke Go Broke.”
According to Robin Ely and David Thomas, two real researchers who have studied the “diversity is great for business” argument:
“The research touting the link was conducted by consulting firms and financial institutions and fails to pass muster when subjected to scholarly scrutiny.”