PREVIEW FROM OUR PRINTED AUG. 1st EDITION:
By Grace Vuoto
Vice President Kamala Harris has been crowned as the Democratic presidential nominee, without resolving her identity crisis. Who is the real Harris?
Following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic delegates swarmed to the vice president’s side, rendering her the presumptive nominee—regardless of her radical stance on key issues. She now faces the task of explaining who she is: Is she the radical progressive from California or a tough-on-crime former prosecutor who can diminish the standing of “convicted felon” and Republican nominee Donald Trump?
Her strategy will be to downplay her legislative positions, her past extreme left-wing statements and instead accentuate her previous role in law enforcement as District Attorney of San Francisco (2004-2010) and Attorney General of California (2011-2017).
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said in her first rally in Milwaukee as presumptive nominee, before a crowd of approximately 3000 attendees.
“Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” said Harris.
But we know her type, too. For the last three years she has enabled a primordial kind of law breaking with impunity: illegal border crossings. These have also contributed to a crime wave in our nation.
How can she successfully present herself as a tough cookie, a righteous upholder of law and order, when she and Biden have presided over the largest transgression of our national sovereignty since the inception of the nation? Good luck with this reinvention, Kamala.
Harris supports de-criminalizing all illegal border crossings, giving amnesty to illegal immigrants and providing them with free healthcare. She’s not tough on crime but a marshmallow. In fact, her policies reward those who break the law. She is the living embodiment of the opposite of law enforcement.
Moreover, she also remained silent in light of mounting evidence, presented by Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, that Biden has been involved in bribery and influence peddling for years with his son, Hunter. In addition, Biden mishandled classified documents in his previous roles as vice president and senator. Where was her regard for law and order when these facts emerged? An honest patriot, committed to upholding American standards of justice, would have resigned in protest when this information surfaced.
Hence, her newly crafted act, as America’s Sheriff vs. Donald Trump, is simply hollow rhetoric.
In addition, her statements throughout her 2020 presidential bid are even more damning. In June of that year she applauded the Los Angeles Mayor’s decision to cut $15O million from the budget of the Los Angeles Police Department. Then, she sought to curry favor with the left wing of her party that sought to defund the police.
“The status quo has been to determine and create policy around the idea that more police equals more safety. And that’s just wrong,” she stated on MSNBC.
“You know what creates greater safety? Funding our public schools, so that, currently, two-thirds of our public school teachers don’t have to come out of their own back pocket to pay for school supplies,” Harris said. In other words, she propagated the notion that crime is best handled by social programs rather than cops doing their job.
Even Democratic primary voters smelled a phony in 2020. She was quickly routed and forced out of the campaign, despite a strategy of “all in on Iowa” that included dozens of public events across the state. Her first presidential bid, based on the assessment of her own party’s voters, turned into a giant failure.
Four years later, Democrats are desperate to present a vigorous, youthful, dynamic campaign—hoping voters will forget the failed Biden presidency and disastrous Harris Vice Presidency. Just a few days ago, they were Biden-Harris as one ticket, heading to defeat together. And for three years, they have been united in unpopular policies leading to a broken border and skyrocketing inflation.
Thus, you can place a failed candidate into an office—as Biden did making Harris his vice president—but you can’t put real character and conviction into her when it is missing from the start. Harris is simply an empty vessel, sailing into the next opportunity, buoyed temporarily alongside fools who are hoodwinked by her malarkey and political chicanery.
-Grace Vuoto, Ph.D. is a political commentator and columnist. She can be heard Wednesday mornings at 9:00 am on The Kuhner Report WRKO-AM 680. She is also Co-host of “The Conversation with Stephen and Grace,” Saturday mornings, 11:00-1:00 pm, on iHeart’s WXTK 95.1 FM.
