As a matter of oratory, Kamala Harris’ address to the Democratic National Convention accepting the presidential nomination Thursday Aug. 22, was excellent — clear, articulate, enthusiastic, empty of cackling — and it excited the crowd.
Content was something else.
The address was largely about fooling the country into thinking that she represents change, that she shares no responsibility for the disaster of the administration in which she has been President Biden’s vice president.
“We’re not going back,” Harris said, describing her candidacy as “a new way forward,” thereby implying that the way pursued by the Biden-Harris administration has not been the right way. Indeed, no delegates chanted “four more years,” as is traditional when a political party seeks another term in control of the executive branch.
For despite assurances from Harris and other speakers that under the Biden-Harris administration the country never had it so good, the country emphatically believes otherwise, and did so even before the president collapsed in senility during his debate in June with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
Harris made some perfectly valid criticisms of Trump — like the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by the supporters he had summoned there, and his lack of seriousness about government. But she also spouted much nonsense, asserting that if they return to power in Washington the Republicans will outlaw abortion nationally and destroy Social Security and Medicare.
If the Democrats gain full control of the federal government they are far more likely to legalize late-stage and live-birth abortion nationally than the Republicans are to outlaw abortion. Indeed, most Democrats in Congress already support the proposed Women’s Health Protection Act, which would eliminate all restrictions on abortion.
If they really believed that the Republicans would outlaw abortion and destroy Social Security and Medicare, the Democrats would not be so eager to repeal the Senate’s filibuster rule, under which a minority can block legislation. If Republicans gain control of the Senate, the Democrats will use the filibuster rule as they have done many times over the years, just as the Republicans have.
‘We’re not going back,’ Harris said, describing her candidacy as ‘a new way forward,’ thereby implying that the way pursued by the Biden-Harris administration has not been the right way.
Harris promised to secure the southern border, apparently assuming that people will forget her administration’s disastrous open-borders policy, under which as many as 10 million people have entered the country illegally. She said Trump’s influence with Republican congressmen had killed bipartisan border security legislation, but the legislation wouldn’t have secured the border at all; it actually authorized much more illegal immigration.
Harris said “fundamental freedoms” are at stake in this election: “the freedom to live safe from gun violence” and “the freedom to love who you love, openly and with pride.”
For a moment it seemed as if the Democrats had forgotten that they were in Chicago, where there are dozens of gun-related murders every week, with the city and its state long having been under ruinous Democratic administration. Reflection on Chicago might lead to suspicion that gun violence is much less a problem of gun laws, the focus of the Democrats, than of the long failure to do much about poverty, especially among racial minorities, even as the Democrats claim that they should be kept in power because of their concern about poverty.
Their real concern often seems to be to keep people poor and thinking of themselves as victims forever dependent on government.
As for “the freedom to love,” if homosexuals were still oppressed, Democrats wouldn’t constantly be calling attention to homosexuals being elected to public office. These days minority status is usually a positive in politics, but here too Democrats seem to want to perpetuate a sense of victimhood even as hardly anyone cares anymore about the sexual orientation of candidates.
Harris played both sides of the war between Israel and Gaza, but the essence of her administration’s position is that it would keep the Hamas terrorist movement in power in Gaza, a mortal threat to Israel, even as it still holds U.S. citizens hostage.
Can Trump illuminate Harris’ many contradictions and far-left positions? And would it matter much as long as he remains his truculent, blustering, insulting self?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
