Exposing Chameleon Kamala Harris and the great US debate con job

Kamala Harris is attempting to win the US presidency via the most audacious identity theft in modern politics, as evidenced in her essentially preposterous performance in the debate with Donald Trump.

If Harris wins it will be a Harry Houdini moment of escapology, a politician escaping a lifetime’s ideological commitment and political values to campaign as somebody else entirely.

Except on abortion, where she’s making a strong and effective counter-proposal to Trump, Harris spent the debate both lying about Trump, just as he lied about her, and also ditching many of the policies and values that have defined her life and career.

Harris has been a strong advocate of gun control, including mandatory gun buybacks. But in the debate she declared: “Tim Walz (her vice-presidential running mate) and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”

She’s critical of Trump’s proposal for new tariffs, but as Trump pointed out, she and Biden kept all the tariffs he imposed during his first term and added some more. Are Trump tariffs bad, Biden/Harris tariffs good?

She’s been a super-keen green machine politician, net zero all the way, phase out fossil fuel, but quickly, and, until 2020, dead against fracking. Now she loves fracking.

Even more astonishing were her boasts: “I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.” Similarly, she and Biden oversaw “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history” and “the US must reduce its dependence on foreign oil”. She also boasted the US now produced more gas than ever before.

All this is a bizarre turnaround, and surely equals Trump’s many policy flip-flops.

The official position of the Biden administration is to phase out fossil fuels, not produce record amounts of them. The only reason the Inflation Reduction Act had provision for three new offshore oil and gas leases is because Joe Manchin, the retiring conservative Democrat senator from West Virginia, refused to vote for the act and its attendant five-year plan otherwise.

The Biden administration fought Manchin’s initiative, but gave in because there was no other way to get the legislation passed. So Harris is boasting about championing provisions she strongly opposed.

That’s chutzpah.

Had the debate moderators had the slightest interest in consistency, they would have fact-checked Harris on this, or on the many straight-out lies she told.

She said Trump left office with the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. That’s just untrue. The unemployment rate when Trump left office was 6 per cent. That’s nowhere near the highest level since the Great Depression.

Don’t get me wrong. Trump told loads of lies himself. He claimed, for example, that inflation under Biden was the worst in America’s history. That’s absolute nonsense. At its highest point under Biden, inflation was way below levels in the 1980s and the 1920s.

Harris in the past championed decriminalising illegal entry into the US. Now she styles herself a tough border enforcer. Previously, she favoured cutting defence spending. Now she pledges to the US having the strongest, “most lethal” military in the world. She once opposed private health insurance, now she’s all for it. There are countless other examples of Harris abandoning a solid left-wing past for what are almost notional centre-right positions.

To some extent, this is just the normal jigging and jagging of democratic politics, vastly exaggerated. To adapt Bismarck, politics is like a sausage. If you want to enjoy eating it, don’t look too closely at how it’s made.

However, the dynamics of the presidential debate, and the election generally, which is still desperately balanced and way too close to call, reveal deeper structural dynamics in US politics and society that have not been fully recognised.

For a start, Harris’s new positions indicate that on many points of policy and ideology, Trump has won the argument. Trump is probably the least intellectual of any modern US major party presidential candidate. Yet he has in several areas not only disrupted, but revolutionised the accepted wisdom on key policy positions.

Both sides of US politics now view China essentially the way Trump does, as America’s single most formidable and dangerous strategic competitor.

Harris had almost nothing to say about climate change, and certainly no mention at all of that nebulous security blanket, the rules-based international order, but she did want America “to win the competition with China”. Similarly, as outlined above, for the moment at least she’s embraced Trumpian energy policy. She’s newly tough on the border with Mexico. She doesn’t like Trump’s new tariffs but loves his old ones and wants to use tariffs and industry policy to repatriate manufacturing jobs to America.

Second, Harris is receiving lavish, in my view almost wholly unjustified, praise for her debate performance because her supporters feel she disconcerted and discomfited Trump.

Not for substance. Pay attention to the customarily savage dog that hasn’t barked. Harris can turn on a dime to embrace Trump-lite positions on illegal immigration, guns, defence, China, even Israel, and there’s no blowback from the left.

Of course, she plans big tax ­increases on corporations and the rich, which Trump certainly doesn’t favour. But just the statement that as president she would always ensure Israel has the means to defend itself would have been enough to earn Biden the epithet “Genocide Joe” and would be regarded as one step from fascist militarism from Trump.

But Harris gets a clear pass. This is partly because the left of the Democratic Party, and American society generally, doesn’t believe a word of Harris’s new centrism, and thinks if she becomes president she’ll govern as a committed progressive.

That’s the likely reaction of many working-class voters in Pennsylvania and other Midwestern battleground states. If you really want a pro-fracking, gun-toting, oil drilling, border-controlling president, is Kamala Harris your pick?

Harris has stolen some of Trump’s clothes, but she looks weird in them.

The lack of left-wing blowback to Harris’s sharp rightward tilt in the debate offers a clue to another element of America’s deep social and political polarisation. Both sides of US politics have convinced themselves that the other side is so inherently, quintessentially, at its very core, evil, that anything goes in defeating them.

When Trump first emerged, he did break numerous norms that hadn’t been broken before, especially in the way he lied and abused people. Democrats are now convinced Trump is uniquely evil in the history of America. In fact, Democrats demonised George W Bush and Ronald Reagan in similar fashion, though less intensely.

But Democrats and their media backers have got into such a moral panic over Trump that they now fully equal him in their own ­norm-breaking, such as through politicised legal prosecutions, politicised mis-use of intelligence agencies, rank unprofessionalism amid much media, and much more.

For the bulk of the American left, Harris telling brazen lies, and adopting positions at odds with everything she and they believe in, (which she’s likely to drop 10 minutes after election), is acceptable because it serves the higher purpose of defeating Trump.

What’s a white lie, or a phony policy, compared with stopping the greatest threat to democracy in American history, after all?

Trump and his supporters are just as bad and have their own ends-justify-means apologies for Trump’s lies and excesses. Their version of the syndrome has it that America is failing, enduring a uniquely dangerous moment, because of the politics-as-usual Washington swamp, led by left-wing Democrats.

That’s why both sides of US politics see the same debate in such radically different ways. For Trump supporters, there was just the usual bit of Trump linguistic imprecision and overstatement in a noble battle to save America. For Harris supporters, a fine leader may need to stoop to dissembling and verbal gymnastics to preserve democracy itself.

Both sides see themselves fighting a moral crusade of purpose that involves moral compromise of methods. In reality, the two sides of politics are routinely behaving worse than at any stage in more than half a century.

This also reflects the culture. Reality has become fluid, the culture plastic. Social media, with its toxic fantasies, is ubiquitous. No one believes in objective truth. There’s no cultural penalty for lying.

The big issue where Harris confronts Trump with strong disagreement is abortion. Harris told numerous lies about this issue during the debate and in her Democratic Convention conference speech. She claims Trump plans a national ban on abortion. That’s not true. Trump has been consistent in wanting the issue resolved, democratically through legislatures and referendums, at the state level. Harris claims Trump wants to limit the availability of IVF fertility treatments. Also not true. Trump has promised to have all IVF treatments paid for by the federal government, or by mandated insurance companies.

Harris and Biden, on the other hand, take the most liberal position regarding abortion law, believing there should be no legal restrictions at all. Many state Republican legislatures, following the overturning of the Roe v Wade ruling, and the subsequent Supreme Court decisions which further liberalised the law, are imposing, or trying to impose, abortion restrictions.

Conservatives have had a bitter experience over abortion politics since Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022. Conservatives long argued that the intensely divisive abortion issue, in which both sides passionately and conscientiously believe they’re defending fundamental human rights, should not be decided by courts but by the democratic political process.

In 1973, when Roe was decided, the courts were more liberal on abortion than the society. Not now. A big majority of Americans, it seems, are substantially if not completely laissez-faire on abortion. This shatters a familiar conservative myth, that there is a vast silent majority of social conservatives in society who are manacled by government rulings and regulations, and if liberated to vote on an issue will generally vote conservative.

This is true on some issues, but absolutely wrong on others. It’s certainly wrong on abortion. A better social issue for conservatives politically was the Supreme Court ending race-based affirmative action. This resulted from a legal case brought by Asian students against discrimination in favour of African-American students. Like the Australian referendum vote against the voice, it wasn’t born of racial hostility but of a desire to affirm universal citizenship and diminish, if not abolish, the divisive civic role of race.

There could be two Supreme Court vacancies in the next presidential term, which provides a huge motive for conservatives to work for Trump’s election.

So who will win?

At time of writing the RealClearPolitics poll average has Harris fractionally leading Trump, 48.4 to 47.3. Tellingly, on that vote, RCP has Trump winning the presidency in the Electoral College, by the tight margin of 281 to 257 (270 Electoral College votes are needed for the presidency). Just before the debate, a New York Times/Sienna poll put Trump 1 per cent ahead. Just after the debate, Policymarket has the race at 50/50.

The Economist/YouGov and Pew polls also call a dead heat. A number of polls have Harris slightly ahead. The RCP average may understate Trump because it includes some polls before the Harris bubble deflated a bit.

Harris is seen as the debate winner, though watching it I thought it a low-performance functional draw or even that Trump might have won narrowly. It’s unlikely to change votes hugely. Biden’s disastrous debate performance only resulted in a very slight drop in his vote. It was all the Democrats demanding he stand down that hurt his numbers more.

Harris got a big bounce from Biden withdrawing and her becoming the candidate, but no bounce at all from the Democratic National Convention. She has rigidly avoided interviews and even in 17 minutes of soft ball tripe from CNN managed to look meandering and vacant. She certainly did better in the debate.

Conventional wisdom thinks Harris needs a 51 or 52 per cent poll vote to be safely assured of victory.C There’s a small rural bias in the Electoral College (resulting from small states having as many senators as large states) which favours Republicans, but this isn’t the main reason Democrats sometimes win more votes but lose the presidency. Rather, Democrats win by huge margins in California and New York, while Republicans win by smaller margins in Texas and Florida. It’s like a parliamentary system. A party can “waste” votes in safe states.

Only seven battleground states are in play – Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada. All other states are spoken for. The battleground states are almost all nearly dead even, with Harris having a small edge in Michigan and Wisconsin. RCP’s Electoral College model with Trump winning 281 to 257 has Harris winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada, but Trump winning all the other battleground states. If everything else stayed the same and he lost either Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Georgia, he’d lose the election.

It’s desperately close. This could even explain Trump’s bizarre “illegal immigrants are eating pet cats and dogs” moment in the debate. Trump succeeds when he gets people to vote who don’t normally vote. Such a bizarre video clip could go viral in the wildest reaches of boys’ only digital swamplands – and lead to a few thousand more Trump votes.

Trump has one big advantage. The polls understated his vote by 2 per cent in the last two elections. If that holds, Harris would have to be much further ahead in the polls than she is now to win.

But Harris has one big advantage. She has much more money than Trump. Democrats, like the teals in Australia at the last election, have so much corporate backing they can hire more people to implement the all-important ground game.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/exposing-chameleon-kamala-harris-and-the-great-us-debate-con-job/news-story/de5596246a5f4b1172bfe5bbb4a7591c

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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