Introduction: Learning from Kamala Harris
I want to start this podcast with what we can learn about Kamala Harris and what she would be like as President. In the article by Time entitled “What kind of President Would Kamala Harris Be,” they covered her comprehensive-economic-policy speech at Carnegie Mellon University on October 10, 2024, 7:00 AM EDT. Charlotte Alter/ Pittsburgh wrote this article. She was assisted with the reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah. After this speech, Time spoke with “20 current and former Harris campaign advisers, former aides in her vice presidential and Senate offices, senior officials from each of the past five presidential administrations, and a range of policy experts.”
By far this is a thorough look at Harris, and it also give us a chance to hear some of the major points she made in her speech. Here is the description from Time, who was in the audience, and some of her comments: “Addressing a sedate audience in suits and ties, the Vice President outlined plans to strengthen small businesses, cut taxes on the middle class, and build more affordable housing. “I am a capitalist,” she told the Pittsburgh crowd, detailing how she would invest in startups and increase public-private partnerships, and describing an approach to economic growth that stressed stability.
Understanding Harris’s Vision for America
Some of the comments that came out of the audience were that people wanted to know more about Harris. To examine this question is the reason they decided to interview the people already mentioned. One of the comments was that “ Harris is more practical than ideological, and she is running a campaign that is focused on change. She has chosen to focus on her opponent, and so “for Harris, policy specifics are in service to the larger goal of her campaign, which is to present a credible alternative to a second Donald Trump presidency.”
Harris’s Economic Strategy: A Path to Growth and Stability
“At Carnegie Mellon, Harris offered the most detailed look at her economic plans since taking over as the Democratic nominee. She’s proposing a $50,000 tax deduction to help Americans start more small businesses, and a $6,000 Child Tax Credit for families in the first year of a baby’s life. She plans to extend $35 insulin to all Americans and eliminate degree requirements for 500,000 federal jobs. She wants to invest in research and development in new manufacturing industries, and trim red tape to further the Biden Administration’s overhaul of America’s infrastructure. Perhaps more than any other presidential candidate in recent memory, Harris has focused on solving America’s housing crisis. She plans to offer $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers, a tax credit to incentivize builders, and pledges to build 3 million affordable housing units in her first term.”
A Harris Presidency: Continuity with a Fresh Perspective
One of the ways I can understand her statements is to imagine the Harris presidency as an upgrade from the current Administration. There will be new features and better packaging of ideas and concepts. There is a difference in Harris from Biden. She more easily speaks about abortion rights than Biden ever did. She “speaks with more empathy about the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and has put housing and small business at the center of her plans for strengthening the middle class.”
Harris today is different from her past, again, the word “pragmatic” is used again. “When asked on 60 Minutes about her shifts since 2020, she said her time as Vice President has included a lot of ‘listening’ and consensus building.’ Forging compromise is ‘not a bad thing, she said, ‘as long as you don’t compromise your values.’ What she means, according to her aides, is that her goals remain the same—affordable health care, a strong middle class—but she is flexible about how to achieve them.”
Harris vs. Trump: A Stark Contrast
What is interesting about her is it is easy to see what she stands for and how she is different from Trump and his MAGA Republicans. “Harris is running on what she won’t do as much as what she would. She won’t curb abortion rights, as Republicans want to do. She won’t impose Trump’s blanket tariffs, which most economists believe would raise prices and could throw the country into a recession (hers are more narrowly targeted). She won’t initiate the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, as Trump promises, or fire legions of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. She won’t attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election, as Trump did.
Campaign Realities: Pragmatism as a Winning Strategy
The Time article reminds me of what it was like in the past when Trump was not on the political scene. “Once upon a time, presidential candidates compared health care plans or tax policies when competing for votes. These days, a policy-heavy campaign can weigh you down.” Elizabeth Warren’s loss to Biden was due to her policies were not as inspiring as Biden’s campaign of ‘Restoring the Soul of the Nation.’ When we look at Trump’s own campaign, it is constructed around one-liners. Trump showed in his debate with Harris that ‘he had no plan ‘for overhauling the American health care system. “None of that has cost him an iota of support. Instead of policy, many voters are making their decisions based on tribal allegiance or vibes.”
“Which is one reason Harris’ approach may be a winning strategy. For many, the fact that she is not Trump is reason enough to vote for her. Running against MAGA has boosted Democrats to victory in scores of elections since 2016—whether those candidates had well-defined policies or not. “She knows that very few people are going to choose between her and Donald Trump based on some details of economic strategy, or some full-fledged proposal, so she’s not presenting them,” says David Wessel, director of fiscal and monetary policy at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank. “It’s a strategy to win the election. What reason is there to put out a detailed economic plan if your opponent is just throwing snowballs?”
It is interesting to hear what happens when someone joins Harris staff. The example in the article is an example of Harris challenging the staff member to see if they can vision what they would be looking for in a photo album of a wedding. Harris’s question is rhetorical, since she knows that the person will be looking for themselves in the pictures. Rohini (Ro hi ni) Kosoglu (Ko so glu), Harris former domestic policy advisor said, ’you want to see if you’re in their vision of what their day was.’ Harris makes her point with the staffer by acknowledging, “That’s how the American people feel when they’re listening to us talk. Are they in our vision when we see the future of our country?”
Here are more direct quotes from the article:
- “This approach, more than any ideology or economic theory, animates Harris’ style of governance. How does policy feel to the people who are experiencing it? One aide recalls a conversation about transportation infrastructure in which the Vice President asked how the outcome would work for a mother pushing her stroller down the street. Another ally recalls how, after hearing small-business owners tick off the burdens of paperwork, Harris worked to automate the way small businesses pay taxes. When discussing abortion restrictions, she often describes how painful it must be for a patient to wait in line at TSA while flying out of state to get reproductive care. ‘She puts a tremendous amount of capital on having people make sure they’ve really thought through the everyday life and experience of Americans, says Kosoglu.
- Harris has put abortion at the center of her campaign, ’with a promise to suspend the filibuster to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade. She would extend Biden’s initiatives on infrastructure, climate, and jobs, while adding new ones to build more affordable housing, invest in small businesses, and cut taxes on working families. On Oct. 8, she proposed a new Medicare benefit to help families pay for home health aides for seniors and the disabled. To finance all this, she proposes increasing the long-term capital gains tax on people who make more than $1 million a year, and restoring the 28% corporate tax rate that existed under previous Democratic and Republican Presidents. The goal is ‘to lower your costs by cutting your taxes; to lower housing costs; to lower pharmaceutical costs, says Brian Deese, who served as director of the National Economic Council under Biden and is now one of Harris’s top economic advisers.
- By many measures, the economy has thrived under the Biden-Harris Administration, with 16 million new jobs created, unemployment hovering around 4%, and manufacturing jobs at a 10-year high, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. GDP growth is around 3% this year, and the stock market keeps hitting all-time highs. But even if the data is good, the economic vibes are bad. Housing costs in particular have skyrocketed over the past decade, which is why Harris has put housing affordability at the heart of her economic agenda.
- In addition to that proposal for first-time homebuyers—which could be whittled down to pass in a divided Congress—she’s proposing a significant expansion of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, a popular and long-standing bipartisan initiative that incentivizes developers to build more affordable rentals. She’s also proposing a tax cut designed to encourage more homes to be built for first-time homebuyers, and a $40 billion innovation fund. Housing experts say no other presidential candidate in recent memory has proposed such a detailed plan. For years, housing affordability was a ‘silent crisis,’ says Dennis Shea (shay), who leads the housing program at the Bipartisan Policy Center. ‘Now, it’s a front-burner issue.
- Harris has also proposed several ways to ease burdens on small businesses, which provide half of American jobs. Helping small businesses was part of her White House portfolio, and even conservative critics acknowledge she’s been attentive to the issue. In addition to offering a $50,000 tax deduction to help new small businesses offset startup costs, she proposes easing permitting and automate processes, with a goal of 25 million new startup applications in her first term. ‘If you ask small businesses what they don’t like, they will always say, It’s really hard to get permits and hard to get this licensing. The paperwork has gotten to be too much,’ says Karen Mills, who ran the Small Business Administration under President Obama. ‘It’s the first time I’ve heard someone listen to that.’
- Goldman Sachs announced in September that they estimate a stronger economy and more job growth under a Harris presidency than a second Trump term. At the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, they forecasts that Trump’s plans would increase the deficit five times as much as Harris’ would.
- Taken together, Harris’ economic plans are “good for lower- and middle-income Americans and small businesses, and tough on high-net-worth households and corporations,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, who has predicted a Harris victory. Her proposals are “not going to change the growth rates of the economy in a meaningful way,” Zandi adds, “but it does change who benefits the most from that, and that’s going to be low- and middle-income households.”
Harris’s Leadership in Foreign Policy and Immigration
There is an interesting contract between Biden’s views of the world and Harris’s view. Biden’s view is the world is a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, “Harris, a former prosecutor, sees it through the prism of rules and norms: a fight between those who uphold the rules-based order and those who undermine it. As a Californian who once represented Silicon Valley, she sees technology as a crucial part of America’s global leadership, and would put it at the center of her foreign policy.”
One of her major achievements was accomplished in her first diplomatic assignment from Biden. She stemmed “the flow of migrants arriving in the U.S. by addressing the economic and security conditions in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In an effort to improve life in the region, Harris helped launch a private public partnership that drove big companies to invest more than $5 billion there.”
The immigration issues for the U.S. could have been resolved if Trump had not interfered with the passage of the bipartisan immigration bill, which Harris supports. “That would have hired 1,500 new border-patrol agents, improved the asylum process, and paid for new fentanyl-inspection machines. Though she is a daughter of immigrants, ‘Harris is not as sympathetic to some of the immigration advocacy,’ says Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. ‘She’s sympathetic to immigrants, but she’s also going to be strong on the fact that there needs to be control and discipline and consistency to the way that we do it.’”
When we look at the Middle East crisis, “Harris has condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, promoted Israel’s right to defend itself, and called for a cease-fire with the return of the hostages. Some supporters glean signs of greater sympathy for civilians in Gaza, even if the distinctions are subtle and rhetorical. ‘What I sense from her is that she will be less accommodating of Israel even than Biden was,’ says Michael Allen, who served on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council. ‘She’s more progressive than Biden is, so I think she’d be more inclined to the point of view that the Israelis, especially [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, have prosecuted the war too aggressively.’ A Harris aide said in a statement that ‘she has a lifelong and unwavering commitment to the security of Israel,’ and added that she shares Biden’s larger goals of de-escalation, a hostage deal, and a cease-fire.”
“Harris has not given an address focused solely on foreign policy, and she is viewed mostly as a supporting character in the Biden Administration’s overseas dramas. “I don’t think anybody with a straight face could really say that she’s considered a foreign policy powerhouse,” says Elbridge Colby, a national-security expert who served in the Trump Pentagon and argues for a tougher approach on China. Her closest foreign policy adviser, Philip Gordon, has served Democratic Presidents since Bill Clinton, and he and his aides are more likely to stay the course than seek to remake American strategy. A Harris presidency, says Colby, would mean a “generation younger, more progressive version of the current foreign policy.”
The Stakes of the 2024 Election
“To Republicans’ dismay, Harris’ careful policy rollout appears to be working. When she entered the race, Trump had a decisive lead on many of the issues voters say they consider most important: immigration, the economy, the cost of living. Polls show Harris beginning to erase this edge. Harris is virtually tied with Trump on who voters trust to handle the economy, and only narrowly trails him on immigration, according to a September AP poll. She continues to lead by broad margins on health care, abortion rights, and climate change. Two recent polls found that more Americans see Harris as the candidate representing “change.” Whether it’s change from Biden or change from Trump, Harris supporters have seized that mantle; the chant at her rallies is “We’re Not Going Back.”
I appreciated the comments from her aides that argue “her current platform is rooted in political reality. She is ‘guided by pragmatism, not ideology,’ says Deese, a top economic adviser. That ‘doesn’t mean we can’t set big goals, but it means we need to be highly practical and constantly ask ourselves the question, Is this working? And if it’s not, try something else.’”
This is the final paragraph from the article: “As Harris left her economic-policy speech at Carnegie Mellon, students lined up along the street, waiting silently for her motorcade. As the line of black cars passed the crowd, Harris appeared in the window, waving through the glass, her face framed by the window like a living postage stamp. The crowd began to cheer, and the girl standing next to me began to cry. Her name was Noemi (no e mi) Barbagli (Bad bari a), an 18-year-old with long curly hair. I asked Barbagli if there was a particular policy proposal of Harris’ that excited her. “Honestly? Not that much,” she said. “She brings a lot of hope and optimism. I know what I don’t like about Donald Trump.”
Harris vs. Trump: A Stark Contrast
You can go read Colbert I. King with The Washington Post, who wrote an article entitled, “This election isn’t about changing minds—There’s no convincing Trump’s supporters that he shouldn’t be president. But he can still be beaten, which was published on October 4, 2024, at 1:27 PM EDT. His clear and concise statements about what Trump is best described by these statements: “The presidents of my lifetime—from Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Regan, Barack Obama and Joe Biden—have taken care to honor the oath of their high office. Richard M. Nixon resigned in disgrace. Jimmy Carter, who has outlived them all, served with great dignity and purpose. “
“The twice-impeached, criminally convicted Trump belongs in a separate category: a pompous, overblown underachiever who cultivates worshipful behavior and openly believes he is due praise as a matter of right. Said Trump a year ago: ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.’ “Such dictatorial language, of course, is not rare in the annals of world history. It has led to dangerous places and desperate suffering. But never before have we heard it form a person who once held, and seeks to hold again, the highest office in America. Never before Trump.”
“The decision is not Trump’s to make. He cannot crown himself. His MAGA cohort cannot praise and adore him into the White House. The choice is yours. Vote.”
In the article, “A Steely Liz Cheney, at Harris’s Side, Calls it ‘Our Duty’ to Reject Trump, by Erica L. Green and Katie Rogers on October 3, 2024, appears in The New York Times (In section A, Page 15 with the headline, Determined Cheney, at Harris’s Side, Says It’s ‘Our Duty’ to Reject Trump) provides us a clear and new message: “During her speech, Ms. Cheney brought up the fresh details, including Mr. Trump’s apparent nonchalance when he was implored to ensure the safety of his vice president, Mike Pence, whom rioters had threatened to hang on Jan. 6, 2021. ‘So what?’ the former president said, according to the brief. Ms. Chaney told the crowd, ‘We have the responsibility, all of us, to remind people that our institutions don’t defend themselves.’ She added, ‘We the people defend our institutions.” This is a major step in a woman devoted to the United States of America, who stand to defend our nation. As described in the article, she is “a staunchly conservative former lawmaker, who is pro-gun, anti-abortion and hawkish on national security issues.” Days later, her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, said “he would also vote for Ms. Harris.
In The Atlantic on October 3, 2024, by David Graham is the article, “There’s No Such Thing as an October Surprise—Jack Smith’s new filing shows why January 6 should hurt Trump.” Here is the information that Liz Cheney was referring to in her speech with Kamala Harris: “In Smith’s account, Trump knew he was lying about having won the 2020 election. He instigated the riot at the Capitol. And of course, these actions had nothing to do with his official role as president. Smith also asserts that he has forensic and other evidence proving that Trump spent the afternoon of the riot doing exactly what many people assumed: siting at the White House, watching Fox News and scrolling through Twitter for hours to do anything to pacify the rioters or rather than defending the Capitol.
I will end with Bill Penzey’s comments in his newsletter on Sunday, October 6, 2024, 7:08 AM:
“Four years ago, so many of us saw the election as the finish line where if we just came in first the nightmare would be over. But Biden’s win never stopped the assault on goodness and decency. The blatant lies and open rejection of truth only grew these past four years to where now real hope of working tougher to solve the very problems we face is gone.
We really are on the brink of losing our democracy. Climate change is no longer the future, it’s here now. Much of America is now uninsurable and if we don’t find a way to break the Republican defense of the fossil fuel industry, in a decade or two much of America will be unlikable.
The good news is that your voice still matters. You care for others. People notice that. People see your wisdom. People trust your voice. Use your voice to run out every vote 11.5.24. Make sure everyone around you has a well thought out functional plan to have their vote be counted.”
Penzey ends by saying, “But I’m telling you right here right now that the work won’t end that day. We have to get back to America where the truth once again matters. It’s our only hope.”
Concluding Paragraph
Kamala Harris’s vision for America is defined by pragmatism, progress, and hope. Her policies aim to uplift middle- and lower-income Americans, protect reproductive rights, and ensure a stable economy. But as Harris herself acknowledges, this election is about more than policy—it’s about defending democracy. As November 5th approaches, it’s critical that every voice is heard, every vote counted. The choice is clear: a future built on sensibility, hope, and practical solutions, or a return to chaos and division. Your vote has the power to shape the direction of our country, and now is the time to act.