Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris breathed a collective sigh of relief when, for once, she managed to remember her rehearsed lines during the recent presidential debate with former President Trump. Her friends in the Fourth Estate gleefully joined the Democrats in declaring Harris the “winner” and gloated over Trump’s underwhelming performance. These people have forgotten that Hillary Clinton was celebrated as the victor of all her debates with Trump in 2016 and how little that mattered in the end. They would be wise to consider why Harris couldn’t answer the most important question of last week’s debate and what that failure portends for her campaign.
They know the answer to the question Ronald Reagan famously asked the voters … “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
The first question to Harris was asked by moderator David Muir: “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” Harris responded with a 330-word shaggy dog story consisting of irrelevant anecdotes about being “raised as a middle-class kid,” bromides about “the aspirations of the American people,” hopelessly vague promises about her plan to build an “opportunity economy.” Conspicuously absent from all of this nonsense was a straight answer to Muir’s question. Harris realizes that most voters believe they are worse off now than during Trump’s presidency as CNN recently explained in an uncharacteristically detailed and straightforward article:
From Trump’s inauguration in 2017 through February 2020, an average of 181,500 jobs were added on a monthly basis. The unemployment rate hovered around 50-year lows of 3.5 percent in the months just before the pandemic began, and the rate for Black Americans hit a record low of 5.3 percent … Before the pandemic, median household income saw the biggest spike in more than four decades, hitting a record high of $68,700 in 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The poverty rate fell to 10.5 percent, the lowest since records started six decades earlier.
All of this progress was made without putting upward pressure on the inflation rate, which stood at 1.4 percent when Trump left the White House. This is why, according to the most recent New York Times/Siena College survey, Trump enjoys a 16-point advantage (56-40) when registered voters are asked which presidential nominee they trust to do a better job on the economy. Nonetheless, during the only solo interview she has granted since her elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris couldn’t provide a coherent answer to a simple question about how she planned to make life more affordable for Americans. On Friday Harris submitted to a short interview with the local ABC News affiliate in Philadelphia.
Co-anchor Brian Taff tossed her a few softball questions, including the following: “When we talk about bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people, what are one or two specific things you have in mind for that?” She responded by serving up the usual salad of non sequiturs about being raised in the middle class, when her family bought their first house and how proud her neighbors were of their lawns. She finally mentioned the “opportunity economy” but once again failed to explain what it means. On the same day, veteran GOP strategist Mike Murphy—hardly a Trump apologist—outlined Harris’ most daunting challenge during a discussion with Ryan Lizza on Politico’s “Playbook Deep Dive” podcast:
The thing everybody’s missing is the country really wants to fire the Biden administration over the economy. And that is hard to find a moment or a campaign thing. But that wall of lava is out there and it can still eat the Democrats. So, can Kamala Harris convince people she’s different enough with an independent plan that they have permission to vote for her and not risk four more years of economic and inflation pain? If she can make that case, I think she will win … If she can’t sell that change deal in a way they’ll believe it … [Trump] can still win this thing.
Unfortunately for Harris, while she tries to “sell the change deal,” her boss is still making public statements that undermine that very argument. Saturday, during a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Dinner, Biden angrily refuted the objective facts: “We went big and we went bold. And, yes, we are better off than we were four years ago.” This is the problem with striking the King without killing him. The people who actually run the White House believed they could force Biden to withdraw from the presidential race and leave him in office without consequences. But, despite claims to the contrary, the President and his family are very unhappy with this arrangement and they will sabotage Harris if possible.
It’s important to remember that Biden’s entire case for seeking a second term rested on his claim that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump. This was an implicit rejection of Harris as a viable leader in the existential battle to save “our democracy” from the Bad Orange Man. So, we have Harris making the case for “turning the page” while Biden defends his legacy. Meanwhile, the election will be decided by ordinary Americans who couldn’t care less about White House intrigue. They know the answer to the question Ronald Reagan famously asked the voters on Oct. 28, 1980: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
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