“BREAKING NEWS: Elon Musk’s recent poll on 𝕏. Over 5.8 million people voted, with 73% in favor of Donald Trump. https://t.co/W92EzeXjsi” / X | 5:57 PM · Aug 21, 2024
Comrade Harris is no longer the Vice President who failed to secure the border.
She’ll now be tough on illegal migration.
Kamala Harris takes the Chicago stage on Thursday in the culmination of one of the most audacious bets in recent political history: That in 100 days Democrats can turn the co-pilot of an unpopular Presidency into the reincarnation of Barack Obama’s movement for hope and change.
On the present course they might even pull it off.
That’s the message that Michelle and Barack Obama were selling as they extolled Ms. Harris in their Tuesday speeches in Chicago. And it’s no accident that the Vice President has recruited Mr. Obama’s campaign operatives to advise, if not entirely take over, her campaign. Out go the bad memories of her association with Joe Biden, and in come the gauzy slogans about “our future,” the “contagious power of hope,” and “fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion.”
She’s no longer the Veep who said “Bidenomics is working” while inflation reached a 40-year high. She’s now the candidate who will reduce your family’s food bill by going after your grocer for “price gouging.”
She’s no longer the candidate of 2020 who questioned the need for cash bail and blamed police for urban violence. She’s now the tough prosecutor who as California Attorney General dared to investigate . . . Exxon.
She’s no longer the presidential candidate of 2019 who wanted to ban fracking, endorsed Medicare for All, and questioned whether the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should exist. Her campaign suggests she’s changed her views on all that, although she hasn’t said why—or even been asked. Americans are expected to take her expedient leap from the left to the center on faith.
The Democratic Party has a history of nominating candidates who are relatively unknown and offer hope and change. Jimmy Carter was a one-term Georgia Governor who promised a more honest politics in 1976. Bill Clinton “the man from Hope,” Ark., whose character flaws were overlooked in 1992. Mr. Obama was a first-term Senator promising to unite the country in 2008. His divisiveness in office paved the way for Donald Trump.
The difference this time is that all of those men were more vetted than Ms. Harris, who was handed the Democratic nomination without a primary contest. She hasn’t done an interview of note since her elevation as the nominee, much less one with any hard questions. Her speeches are scripted and more Teleprompter-safe even than the remarks of the declining President Biden. She is the least known presidential nominee in modern times. What does she really believe?
On domestic policy, it’s possible to infer that she’d pursue President Biden’s agenda, perhaps even more aggressively. Her few distinctive policy hints so far suggest she is a California progressive who favors higher taxes and even greater spending to complete the President’s Build Back Better agenda.
But she has largely avoided specific proposals that carry a price tag and open her to criticism. This is no doubt by design as she runs a campaign about “vibes.” In a version of Nancy Pelosi’s famous crack about ObamaCare, the public will have to elect Ms. Harris to see what’s in her plans.
How Nancy Pelosi became one of America’s richest and most powerful politicians. whose most infamous quotes was something she said during a 20-minute speech to the National Association of Counties’ 2010 legislative conference.
Congress was considering the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the endless, breathless coverage of the contentious process, Pelosi explained, was preventing people from appreciating the significance of its contents. Did Nancy Pelosi Say Obamacare Must be Passed to ‘Find Out What Is in It’? | Snopes.com
“We have to pass the bill,” she said, “so that you can find out what is in it — away from the fog of the controversy.”Yes, you’re referring to Nancy Pelosi’s quote during her speech at the National Association of Counties’ 2010 legislative conference. She said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy”12. This quote was about the Affordable Care Act and has been widely discussed and often misinterpreted over the years.
Learn more 1mediaite.com 2dailysignal.com 3youtube.com
Conservatives — abetted by dozens of political journalists who should have known better — immediately seized on a truncated version of the quote. Pelosi was really expressing her confidence in the underlying merits of the bill, but it became instead a shorthand for the allegedly dodgy process through which Obamacare was passed.
But Pelosi never said the bill was enacted in secret or under cover of night, because it wasn’t. She said it was enacted in a fog of controversy. The controversy, naturally enough, focused on the most contentious aspects of the bill rather than on the most broadly popular. Much of it was about misunderstandings or misconceptions — claims that the bill contained death panels or did nothing to restrain health care costs — rather than on the Affordable Care Act’s concrete benefits.
Once the bill was in place, Pelosi was saying, people would come to value and appreciate its contents. She was mocked for this relentlessly for years. But everything that’s happening this winter shows she was right all along.
Republicans didn’t even challenging the “patient protection” part:
The ACA itself contained many, many, many moving pieces. The most discussed elements of it expanded health insurance coverage to millions of previously uninsured Americans. But most Americans who aren’t on Medicare get their insurance through their jobs, not in the individual market or through Medicaid, and so the parts of the law relevant to the largest number of people dealt with regulatory changes.
A ban on “lifetime limits” on insurance coverage that’s saved thousands of families from bankruptcy. A ban on “rescission,” or retroactive cancellation of an insurance policy, a practice by which insurers used to seek out any possible pretext for dumping customers who fell gravely ill and became unprofitable.
A guarantee that young adults could stay on their parents’ health insurance plans up to the age of 26, increasing their early-career flexibility and providing valuable peace of mind to millions who don’t wind up incurring large health care bills while delivering lifesaving care to the relatively small number who do.
Guaranteed coverage of a full suite of preventive health care services that it’s in the long-term economic (and public health) interest of the country to cover, but that don’t always deliver an immediate benefit to the insurers covering them.A guarantee that insurance companies actually spend the bulk of their revenue on providing health care services by requiring them to offer rebates to consumers if they don’t.
These and other consumer protections were added to the law over the course of the legislative process by various congressional Democrats who’d been fighting for them for years but had never been able to overcome opposition from insurance companies. The big push for a major overhaul became the perfect vehicle for them — the lifetime limits ban is largely due to the work of just one former senator, North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan — but the ideas themselves were not hotly debated during the legislative process.
Republicans would, of course, have been embarrassed to say that they were fighting for the right of an insurance company to cancel a cancer patient’s coverage because the patient hadn’t disclosed some earlier, unrelated illness or injury.
But it’s notable that now that the law is in place and Republicans are fighting to repeal it, absolutely nobody is talking about repealing this stuff. That’s in part because these regulations can’t be undone in a budget reconciliation package, so Republicans will need 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster.
Still, Republicans will propose a lot of legislation over the next year and a half that requires 60 votes to pass. There are nine Democratic Party senators up for reelection in 2018 in states Trump won. When Republicans have ideas that they think are popular, they’ll try to either pressure those nine Democrats into voting for them or else use them as cudgels with which to win midterm elections.
A legislative program of large-scale deregulation of a widely despised health insurance industry would have just the opposite effect — a total political bailout for Trump Country Democrats. Any Senate Democrat facing an uphill reelection campaign would be able to brag about stopping Republicans from taking away health care from 23-year-olds or sick people. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s “patient protection” provisions are very popular. But Congress had to pass the law for people to see and appreciate these benefits.
Obamacare is popular when you try to take it away
The original version of the Social Security Act passed in 1935. Because Social Security has proven over the decades to be one of the largest and most popular federal programs, we’ve forgotten that the literal specific content of the Social Security Act of 1935 was never especially beloved.
Conservatives hated it, of course, because they hated the idea of a big new federal guarantee of financial security in retirement. But liberals, too, had little reason to be enamored of the actual legislation, which was incredibly cramped and limited compared with the program we know today.
Benefits weren’t paid to the widows and dependent children of beneficiaries until 1939. In 1950, domestic laborers (maids, nannies, and the like) became eligible for benefits, along with nonprofit workers and the self-employed. Four years later — nearly two decades after the law’s initial passage — hotel employees, agricultural workers, and most state and local government employees became eligible.
Harris Planning Bold Action on Climate Change, Advisor Says (msn.com)
Foreign policy is where the Vice President’s known unknowns are most troubling. The U.S. faces the greatest security risks since the end of the Cold War, and probably since World War II. The Cold War at least had the relative stability of bipolar competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Today there are multiple global risks from multiple adversaries working together with menacing new weapons.
Yet Ms. Harris hasn’t had to explain her security views on much of anything. Does she still favor cutting the defense budget, as she did as a Senator? She has criticized Israel more aggressively for the war in Gaza than her boss has, but what does she think of Iran’s role as the main instigator of Middle East terrorism? What would she do about its drive for a nuclear weapon, and how would she restore American deterrence in this dangerous world?
The Vice President can try to slipstream behind Mr. Biden’s foreign policy for the rest of the campaign, but as President her personal instincts and decision-making will be paramount. She hasn’t explained to the public what her core principles are, or even who she relies on for foreign-policy advice.
***
Perhaps Ms. Harris has qualities of leadership we haven’t observed. Vice Presidents called on unexpectedly have sometimes risen to the occasion, as Harry Truman and Gerald Ford did. Perhaps, too, she will show some of those qualities in Thursday’s speech or in the campaign to come. But so far she is a vessel for the triumph of hope over experience, whom Americans are expected to embrace mainly because she isn’t Donald Trump.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez full speech at 2024 DNC (Aug. 19, 2024) | wfaa.com
Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to lend her credibility to the Biden-Harris administration’s false narrative around Gaza was a stinging slap in the face. Kareem Elrefai
2016 was the start of a monumental political shift on the American left. Bernie Sanders’ promise of political revolution electrified a disaffected generation of voters yearning for a complete overhaul of the status quo. The ensuing movement went on to elect a handful of members of Congress as well as hundreds of similarly inspired democratic socialists across state and local governments.
None were able to capture the movement’s frustration with the Democratic Party and the political establishment, or the hope of creating something new, more than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her victory in 2018 had a profound effect on the democratic socialist movement. Groups like the Democratic Socialists of America swelled in size, with thousands of new organizers hoping to replicate the success of her victory in New York.
The game plan seemed clear: while the left pushed for change in the streets, Ocasio-Cortez and her allies would bring the priorities of the movement to the halls of power. She proved how effective this strategy could be with her famed sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office with the Sunrise Movement. Ocasio-Cortez also used her newfound clout to help expand the Squad and back progressive challengers to the party status quo—including Sanders.
Ocasio-Cortez is a once-in-a-generation political talent.
She has an innate ability to communicate with a broad audience about the struggles working-class people face, and to link those struggles to a movement for institutional change within the Democratic Party. Now, though, it’s hard to escape the sense that her partnership with the movement that carried her into office is fading.
***
This shift was on full display on Monday night, when Ocasio-Cortez gave a rousing speech in support of Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention. The crowd, many of whom might have viewed her as a mortal enemy just a few years ago, cheered wildly for her. And the speech was tailored to please as broad an audience as possible.
References to Medicare for All, Green New Deal, and taxing the rich were virtually absent. The brightest burst of populism came when she tore into Donald Trump as a “two-bit billionaire union buster.” Though the speech was powerfully delivered and contained encouraging vestiges of radicalism, the contrast with the Ocasio-Cortez of earlier years was palpable.
But the biggest, most dismaying indication of the widening gap between Ocasio-Cortez and the democratic socialist movement might have been the way she chose to handle the issue of Gaza in her speech.
Her only reference to Gaza was a line in which she credited Harris with “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.” The moment was quickly clipped and posted to TikTok by the Harris campaign—a clear attempt to use one of the most popular young, left-wing politicians in the country to win over younger, left-leaning voters concerned about Gaza. “
@Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” the campaign account commented.
But Ocasio-Cortez’s statement was simply not true. There have been no indications that Harris is playing a central role in any ceasefire negotiations. And there is mounting evidence that those negotiations are more fantasy than reality.
Moreover, while Harris may have called for a ceasefire, the actions of the Biden-Harris administration have consistently enabled genocide. Just last week, as famine in Gaza continued and the reported Palestinian death toll rose to over 40,000, the Biden-Harris administration approved an additional $20 billion in military aid for Israel. The administration has placed practically no limits on acceptable behavior for the Israeli regime and has used stronger language to condemn campus protesters than the blood-soaked Netanyahu government. Harris has not distanced herself from any of these decisions.
***
Given that reality, any Democratic politician who claims this administration is meaningfully working to end this conflict is either misinformed or lying. It would have been galling to see anyone engage in this fiction. But to see Ocasio-Cortez—a movement politician and a self-described democratic socialist—do so was a genuine blow.
Worse: it was an outright betrayal.
Reasonable people can disagree about the value of Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to work a more inside track within the Democratic Party. There are undoubtedly benefits to having someone like her moving up the ranks, and she could very well help elevate a whole host of progressive causes.
But Gaza is not just any cause. It is a red-line, defining issue of our time, and Ocasio-Cortez has found herself on the wrong side of it.
Given her skill as a political synthesizer, Ocasio-Cortez could have used her time to plot a new course for the Democratic Party on Gaza. Poll after poll shows that Americans, especially those in swing states, overwhelmingly favor a ceasefire, and disapprove of the administration’s handling of the conflict. She could have spoken about the pain that Americans, particularly Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans, feel.
She could have called for an arms embargo against Israel.
And even if she felt she couldn’t take such a bold step, she didn’t have to help Harris push a narrative that is not true. She could have done what Bernie Sanders did in his speech on Wednesday night, when he said, “We must end this horrific war in Gaza, bring home the hostages, and demand an immediate ceasefire.” When one considers the realm of what is possible, even at a DNC speech, it is hard not to feel entirely let down.
On the same day that Ocasio-Cortez spoke, thousands rallied in the streets of Chicago to demand that not another bomb be sent to Israel on the US dime. DSA-backed Chicago Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez and DSA National Co-Chair Ashik Siddique spoke about the importance of ending US support for a genocide that a Democratic administration has backed to the hilt. The movement was clear about its demands: permanent ceasefire now, arms embargo now.
In order for an inside-outside strategy to be effective, you usually want to see the demands of the outside be articulated clearly and fearlessly on the inside. Instead, Ocasio-Cortez opted for an intensely disappointing and borderline sickening approach.
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Even Joe Biden went further than Ocasio-Cortez by saying that the protesters “have a point.” Ocasio-Cortez didn’t mention the protests at all. To be outflanked by Biden in that way was outright embarrassing.
Being asked to speak at the DNC is a milestone for a self-identifying democratic socialist politician. It is an opportunity to talk to millions of working people who are looking for a vision, for someone to speak truthfully about the issues they face and the horrors they are witnessing.
I like to think the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of 2018 would have been able to rise to that occasion and speak with clarity on behalf of the movement that sent her to Congress about the rights of all people, especially those subjected to the worst excesses of the American empire. Instead, we saw the 2024 AOC.
She tacked away from the movement in favor of her own rising star within the Democratic Party and gave left-wing credibility to an administration facilitating the genocide of Palestinians without hesitation. It now seems clear: she still does great things as an ally, but I fear that the era of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a movement standard bearer is coming to an end.
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