Kamala Harris left us completely in the dark about her plans for the presidency.
Will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?
After three nights of political hosannas where she was depicted as a cross between Eliot Ness and Mother Teresa, Harris finally took the floor to speak for herself Thursday night.
She spoke well and forcefully and electrified the Chicago convention hall, but color me as confused as ever.
Other than not being Donald Trump or Joe Biden, who is she?
What does she really believe and what would she do as president?
If she knows the answers, she’s keeping them a secret.
Promises to “chart a new path forward” and “be a president for all Americans” are so boilerplate they ought to be outlawed. Then there was this: “The future is always worth fighting for.”
You don’t say!
The economy is the top issue for voters, and as vice president for the last three and one-half years, you would think she would have nailed down some ideas that could improve upon the mess she and Biden made.
In which case you would be mistaken because she again limited herself to vacuous promises.
“We will create an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and succeed,” she said.
She also promised to “lower the costs of everyday needs,” citing health care and housing.
Those pledges carry more than a whiff of socialism, and sound suspiciously like a repeat of her plan to go after “price gouging” on food supplies. As economists from both ends of the political spectrum pointed out when she first made that vow, government price controls have failed everywhere they have been imposed.
They end up creating shortages, and thus lead to even higher prices. Yet even as Harris stayed away from the same words, she seems to be wedded to the same terrible idea.
Not that any of these shortcomings dampened the enthusiasm among delegates. Her 37-minute speech capped a remarkable shift in Democratic fortunes, made possible only by the political assassination of Biden, ostensibly by his friends.
Et tu, Barack Obama? Et tu, Nancy Pelosi?
Whatever the full story of how Biden was “persuaded” to withdraw, Harris is now in a virtual tie with Trump and is making inroads in all the swing states, including Georgia.
She has pumped life into a dead party, and Trump is still searching for a formula that will allow him to confront her on the basis of policy.
On that score, the entire Democratic convention has been a disappointment in that it relied on lies about Trump to attack him. Starting with Biden Monday and ending with Harris Thursday, many speakers accused Trump of planning to sign a national ban on abortion and of supporting an arch-conservative program called Project 2025.
The problem with those accusations is that Trump has said repeatedly that he will not sign a national abortion ban and has made it clear he wants all states to include exceptions in cases of rape, incest and the health of the mother.
He also publicly scorned Project 2025, saying he did not support it.
So the fact that Dems feel the need to distort the facts to have ammunition suggest they don’t have confidence in any honest argument against Trump.
The touting of his conviction in the rigged Manhattan bookkeeping trial further betrays their desperation. Ardent Dems such as Andrew Cuomo and Fareed Zakaria have spoken the clear truth when they said the case would not have been brought against anyone who isn’t named Trump.
Yet Harris herself cited the case as a reason why Trump can’t be trusted. Oddly, she didn’t seem to mind working with Biden despite his family’s influence peddling scheme, which netted it some $27 million.
Or that Hunter Biden is an accused tax cheat and has already been convicted of a gun felony.
Selective outrage based on partisanship might help get her elected, but it means she doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of uniting a deeply divided America.
