How Biden and Harris Degrade the Democratic Process
Seth Mandelfor commentary.org.
Whose Line Is It Anyway? was a lot funnier with Drew Carey and Wayne Brady than in this new adaptation starring Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
Biden is still technically the president of the United States. But when he speaks to the press about ongoing policy decisions, he sounds more like the town crier—not the decider but the messenger who brings the royal court’s message to the public square. His answer given to the final reporter’s question yesterday as he was walking into the White House was that he would find out when he got inside and let them know as soon as the palace had an answer for its loyal subjects.
Yet even that is preferable to what we get from the team waiting to replace him. On the campaign trail a couple days ago, Democratic veep nominee Tim Walz was asked about Hamas’s execution of six hostages, including an American. A video shows Walz listening intently to the question, getting a whisper from an aide (presumably to run, Tim, run like the wind), and then waving goodbye and retreating as fast as a high-school defensive coordinator can retreat.
Walz’s defenders claimed—again, absurdly—that he didn’t hear the question. He certainly did, and there was some blowback to this preposterous excuse.
The lesson Kamala Harris took from this was not that a candidate for high federal office should pretend not to hear questions from the press, but rather than she should pretend convincingly not to hear questions from the press. Hence her rather pathetic move yesterday to go from her car to her plane with headphones on, even clumsily pointing to them as if the press couldn’t see the wires running from her ears to her phone.
It is not actually a defense to say you couldn’t hear the question. If you are the second-in-command to the leader of the free world, and the odds-on favorite to take over as commander-in-chief in a matter of months, you should put yourself in position to hear the questions because this is a self-governing democracy in the middle of a very important election, and these adolescent stunts are unbecoming even, believe it or not, of adolescents.
Being an American is starting to feel as if you’re asking for the customer-service representative’s manager and the same customer-service representative merely switches accents. (Something Harris is prone to doherself.)
One of the complicating factors here—and one that makes clear why Harris has a responsibility to talk to the public far more than she is currently doing—is that Harris doesn’t plan to retain the top national-security advisers if and when she takes office. And those advisers are the ones currently engaged in diplomacy around the world, including the Israel-Hamas ceasefire negotiations.
Back when Joe Biden was president, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent a lot of time briefing the public on what was happening and what was expected to happen in the near future. Now that Biden has essentially been demoted to acting president, his team can tell us less and less about what the future holds. Since Harris isn’t president (yet?), she does not have a team able to brief the public.
And yet, there is simply no question that some kind of policy shift is coming. We don’t know the full extent of it, because Harris won’t tell us—you have to elect her to find out what’s in her heart. But she has made crystal clear that her foreign policy will not be the same as the one currently being prosecuted by the administration of which she is a part.
The Harris team made it known that, as the Washington Post dutifully reported straight from Kamala’s inner circle, she “would probably conduct a full analysis of U.S.-Israel policy to determine what is working and what is not, according to several people familiar with her thinking, with [national security adviser Philip] Gordon leading the effort. It is unclear what would come of that process, but those familiar with conversations between Harris and Gordon say she could be open to imposing conditions on some aid to Israel, a policy that President Joe Biden has largely rejected.”
We are told not to expect a wholesale shift in U.S. foreign policy: Most of our allies will still be treated as such, Ukraine and Taiwan included: “The area where Harris is most likely to differ from Biden, allies and analysts say, is on Israel.”
To be clear: Kamala Harris wants to the public to know a shift against Israel is coming. But don’t quote her on that, because she and the public are currently not on speaking terms.
Harris’s signal that a change is coming obviously affects the calculations of our allies and rivals abroad. Which means the official policies of the U.S. government are Biden’s policies, while Harris’s perceived policy preferences are the ones global leaders are reacting to. At the very least, it is some combination of the two.
Biden is the president and can only talk about Biden’s policies. Harris isn’t president and therefore refuses to talk about Harris’s policies. Tim Walz doesn’t hear the question. Mere days after an Iranian satrapy executed an American citizen in cold blood, this state of affairs is untenable and, frankly, immoral. And a self-governing people should not stand for it.