The mainstream media is waking up to the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris’s steady drift to the middle is beset by a whole lot of policy changes that amount to “flip flops,” in the estimation of one former CNN staple anchor.
Chris Cillizza, a memorable name on the network from 2017 to 2022, ripped into the vice president on X, outlining nine examples of campaign promises that run up against her previous statements. Some of the changes swing Harris from deeply unpopular progressive policies back into the center of American politics, such as her previous desire to ban plastic grocery store bags and even plastic straws. “Kamala Harris has changed positions on a WHOLE lot of things,” Cillizza, a Substack author, wrote Friday morning.
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Some items on the wish list are so extreme as to be downplayed by other leading Democratic figures for their unfeasibility. During her 2019 campaign for president, the former prosecutor pledged total support for the Green New Deal which demands that all automakers produce only electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles by 2035. After the Biden-Harris ticket won in 2020, she added that all medium- and heavy-duty vehicles would be required to be “zero-emission” by 2030, according to Fox News.
Despite declaring her “values have not changed,” Harris appeared to back away from her previous position in a sit-down interview with CNN last week. “The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash Thursday. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.” Shortly after her interview, the Harris campaign put out a statement that she “does not support an electric vehicle mandate.”
On immigration, a pillar of progressive policy has been to decriminalize illegal crossings of the border. The problem has required Harris and most Democrats to speak of “undocumented” immigrants to underscore that their crossing the border was not a crime. Today, Harris states that she no longer supports such a measure, according to Cillizza.
During her time in the U.S. Senate, Harris backed legislation that would have established a commission to explore the potential for federal reparations to descendants of slaves. More recently, Jasmine Harris, the campaign’s Black media director, pivoted when asked about the VP’s current stance on reparations, declaring her focus is on lifting the economic prospects of all Americans. “And so the vice president and those that she will bring up with her to help her run this administration will, you know, work every angle possible to make sure that hardworking Americans have things a little bit easier because we know the costs are too high,” said the spokesperson, according to The Hill.
Other ideas dropped by Harris include a mandatory buyback program for assault weapons, a federal jobs guarantee as part of the Green New Deal, and Medicare-for-All, a policy otherwise referred to as single-payer health care.
Kamala Harris has changed positions on a WHOLE lot of things pic.twitter.com/m4MfzWkI0T
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) September 6, 2024
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