Will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?
After three nights of political hosannas in which she was depicted as a cross between Eliot Ness and Mother Teresa, Harris finally took the floor to speak for herself on Thursday night.
She spoke well and powerfully, electrifying the Chicago convention hall, but leaves me as confused as ever.
Aside from not being Donald Trump or Joe Biden, who is she?
What does she really believe in and what would she do as president?
If she knows the answers, she keeps them a secret.
Promises to “chart a new path forward” and “be a president for all Americans” are so boilerplate they should be banned. Then there was this: “The future is always worth fighting for.”
You don’t say!
The economy is the most important issue for voters, and as vice president for the past three and a half years, you’d think she would have put some ideas down that could improve the mess she and Biden made.
If so, you’d be wrong, because she once again limited herself to empty promises.
“We want to create an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and succeed,” she said.
She also promised to “lower the cost of daily necessities,” referring to health care and housing.
These promises carry more than a whiff of socialism and sound suspiciously like a repeat of her plan to go after “price cuts” on food supplies. As economists from both ends of the political spectrum pointed out when she first made that promise, government price controls have failed everywhere they have been imposed.
They end up creating shortages, thus leading to even higher prices. But while Harris stayed away from those same words, she seems wedded to the same terrible idea.
Not that any of these shortcomings dampened the enthusiasm of the delegates. Her 37-minute speech covered a remarkable shift in Democratic fortunes made possible only by the political assassination of Biden, allegedly by his friends.
And you, Barack Obama? And you, Nancy Pelosi?
Regardless of the full story of how Biden was “persuaded” to withdraw, Harris is now in a virtual relationship with Trump, making inroads in all the swing states, including Georgia.
She has pumped life into a dead party, and Trump is still looking for a formula that will allow him to confront her on policy.
On that point, the entire Democratic convention has been a disappointment, relying on lies about Trump to attack him. Starting with Biden Monday and ending with Harris on Thursday, many speakers accused Trump of planning to sign a national abortion ban and of supporting an arch-conservative program called Project 2025.
The problem with these accusations is that Trump has repeatedly said he will not sign a national abortion ban and has made it clear that he wants all states to include exceptions in cases of rape, incest and maternal health.
He also publicly disparaged Project 2025, saying he did not support it.
So the fact that Democrats feel the need to twist the facts for ammunition suggests that they don’t trust an honest argument against Trump.
The highlighting of his conviction in the false accounting case in Manhattan further betrays their desperation. Fierce Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Fareed Zakaria have spoken the plain truth when they said the case would not have been filed against anyone not named Trump.
Still, Harris himself 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 about $27 million. Or that Hunter Biden is an accused tax cheat and has already been convicted of a gun crime.
Selective outrage based on partisanship may help get her elected, but it means she doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of uniting a deeply divided America.