Does It Even Matter What Kamala Would Do as President?
Up to now, Kamala Harris’ 2024 U.S. presidential campaign has been somewhat notorious for almost completely policy free.
Most of the policy positions that have been belatedly added to her website are just copied and pasted nearly verbatim from Joe Biden’s site. Others were shamelessly cribbed from Trump. There are few original ideas she seems to be adding to her predecessors’ own plans.
Simultaneously, Harris has sought to distance herself from her own previous positions, on everything from criminal justice reform, to immigration, guns, healthcare, fracking, and gender affirming care — albeit, without being specific about what her current position is, or what was wrong with her previous positions.
Consequently, it’s hard to tell what Harris would actually do if she were elected president, much less how a Harris / Walz White House might differ from the incumbent Biden/ Harris administration.
Exacerbating this problem: Harris, like her current boss, has largely avoided media interviews and other unscripted events. She seems to be hoping she can just ride into the White House based on vague but positive messaging and public disdain for Trump, and then let folks figure it out her agenda (and perhaps, figure it out herself) after she’s already in office.
Exemplifying this tendency, in a recent (rare) interview, Harris was asked what she’d do to lower prescription drug prices. She answered:
“Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother raised my sister and me. She worked very hard. She was able to finally save up enough money to buy our first house when I was a teenager…. I grew up in a community of hard-working people, you know, construction workers and nurses and teachers. And I try to explain to some people who may not have had the same experience. You know, a lot of people will relate to this.”
As a point of fact, although she regularly claims affiliation with Oakland, California, Harris’ grew up in Berkeley. There’s a slight geographic difference between these communities, but a vast sociological one. And at 12 years old, Harris moved to Montreal, Canada – where she would remain until college. Neither of these communities are hardscrabble towns, to put it mildly. And contrary to her repeated insinuations, her parents were not normie workers either. Her mom was a prominent scientist at Berkeley and then McGill University (one of the top schools in Canada). Her father was a tenure-line economics professor at Stanford University (the median salary for tenured economics professors in the U.S. is $228,000 — a salary that puts one well into the top 10% of all U.S. income earners. And at Stanford, the pay is significantly higher than most other universities). You know, “middle class.”
But setting these blatant distortions aside, anyone keeping their eye on the ball would notice that Harris completely dodged the question. Not only did she decline to provide concrete details on how she would lower prescription drug prices, she didn’t meaningfully address policy at all.
This is a case where the details actually matter because the president cannot just decree that drug prices come down. Making progress on this issue would require major shifts in investments and nontrivial changes to policies in the U.S. and abroad. Moreover, there are aggressive forces, many of the deeply tied to the Democratic Party and its core base, that would resist the most effective measures to reform the system. It isn’t clear if or how Harris could actually surmount these challenges in practice. And her (non) answer should not inspire confidence.
In fact, there seems to be no actual plan here. Perhaps not even “concepts of a plan.” Instead, she seems to be offering fundamentally empty gestures to signal she “cares” and “understands” the plight of working people — even if any policies she ends up adopting won’t do much in practice. This has been Kamala’s M.O. from the jump (see also: Harris “plan” to lower the cost of food).
And so, it was refreshing when the Democratic nominee recently declared, “For far too long, our nation has encouraged one path to success: a four-year college degree. As president, I will get rid of the unnecessary degree requirement for federal jobs.”
This is a concrete policy. It’s also a good policy. As I detail at length in my book, college degree requirements are a core driver of contemporary inequalities. And typically, these requirements don’t even select for people who have relevant specialized knowledge and skills.
Indeed, most who hold jobs that require degrees do work that is, at best, only loosely related to their college major. They primarily learn how to do their jobs while on the job. And, of course, people who didn’t go to college could do the same.
The main function degree requirements serve, in practice, is to freeze lower-class people out of jobs they are perfectly capable of doing. They make sure that only the “right” kind of people have access to better paying, higher prestige positions with good working conditions and stability. The requirements make sure elites only have to compete for these positions against other relatively advantaged people (regardless of whether they are the “best”).
In short: eliminating superfluous degree requirements is a great thing to do.
The best part is that, unlike some other implausible and vague promises Harris touted during the recent U.S. Presidential debate – which are unlikely to get passed through Congress and/or to stand up in court – this is something Harris could actually accomplish through her own executive authority if she won in November.
But, of course, precisely because this is something that is within the power of the executive to accomplish at any time, the proposal acts as an indictment of the administration she currently co-leads. Given that she and Joe Biden are currently in office, they could literally do this right now. They could lock it down today, with a few strokes of the pen, rather than rolling the dice and trying to nail it down after the election (if they win). Which raises the question: why aren’t they?
Is it because, despite Harris’ own convictions, Joe Biden is deeply committed to superfluous degree requirements for federal jobs? Is it that this is something that both agree with in principle, but it simply isn’t a priority because their core electoral constituency is college-degree holders who are eager to protect their sinecures (in which case, the policy would be unlikely to be much more prioritized in a Harris/ Walz administration than it is under the Biden/ Harris regime)?
In short, when we contemplate the proposal for just a minute, it turns into an incredible self-own. It seems, if anything, to illustrate that Biden and Harris are disinclined to follow through on good policies they ostensibly support — even when it is completely within their power to fulfill those promises without much effort.
And with rudimentary research, the picture gets even worse.
It turns out, Trump already did the thing Harris is currently pledging to do. In 2020, he issued an executive order dictating that the federal government and contractors could only require degrees in job solicitations when state or local laws independently mandate formal training for those positions. The order also forbids employers to even consider applicants’ college credentials when making hiring decisions, unless their education and training directly bears on the specific duties of the job (enforcing this latter element, however, is a bit more tricky than the first).
It makes sense that Trump would pursue this policy, given that non-degree holders (across racial and ethnic lines) are the primary base of the contemporary GOP. But the fact that this executive order is already “on the books” makes it unclear what Kamala is actually proposing here.
Is she promising to better implement the existing policy, established under Trump, which the current administration is apparently failing to do? If so, this would be another major self-own given that she is, herself, a core player in the incumbent administration.
Is she simply hoping that the public is unaware of Trump’s executive order (while also banking on a lack of media scrutiny to call attention to the existing policies), so that she can later claim credit for something she had no role in enacting – for a policy that was, in fact, put in place by her opponent years ago? That would mark her as incredibly cynical. Was she simply unaware that this policy had, in fact, already been implemented by her predecessor? This would seem to speak volumes about the competency of the candidate and her team. And it doesn’t say anything good.
There really doesn’t seem to be a way to explain Harris’ proposal that doesn’t also serve as an indictment of the candidate herself. If this is what voters can expect when Kamala offers concrete policies, it’s no wonder that her campaign has been more-or-less policy free. Fortunately for her, she’s running against an incompetent opponent who seems unable to capitalize on this lack of substance. He’s not exactly a “wonk” himself, to put it mildly.
Indeed, in 2016, he famously declared he didn’t have any official positions. He merely had loose “suggestions” that he’d iron out if he won. And he was able to win, because voters cared more about keeping Hillary out of the White House than fretting over the details of her opponent’s agenda.
8 years later, Kamala Harris may actually be able to coast, policy-free, all the way into the White House based on uplifting vibes and widespread distaste for Trump. In a world where American voting behaviors are increasingly driven by a desire to keep power out of the “wrong” people’s hands rather than advancing any kind of positive agenda, perhaps it doesn’t matter what the vice-president would actually do if she were to win a promotion to the top job.
At least she’s not Trump, am I right?