As Kamala Harris flashes her dental work, steers clear of policy specifics and makes nice centrist noises, many Americans are beginning to feel she’s a safer bet than Trump.
His campaign seems in disarray, and he himself is either suffering from PTSD or just being even more eccentric than usual. Trump’s campaigning techniques are bizarre. Instead of talking policies, he keeps throwing epithets at Harris, but none of them seem to connect. On the other hand, her own counter, ‘weird’, landed with a huge thud.
If the polls are any indication, the electorate seems to believe that Harris straddles the middle ground of American politics, which is where most elections are won. Candidates seen as extreme, either left or right, tend to get trounced, as our own Jeremy Corbyn could testify in 2019.
That’s why left-wing politicians try to keep their true red colours hidden from prying eyes. This is done by either subterfuge or, as in Harris’s case, reticence. Once the election is won, however, the camouflage falls on the floor and the real Left step out in all their frightful nudity.
When that happens, some voters feel disappointed, some cheated, some enraged. But there’s precious little they can do at that point. Socialist mayhem is upon them and there it’ll stay for the next few years at least.
Americans thinking that Harris isn’t so bad after all ought to remember her record both as senator and vice president. Contrary to what Bertie Russell argued, the past is the most reliable predictor of the future.
Thus, Kamala Harris was ranked as the second leftmost member of the Senate, next only to Bernie Sanders, the American answer to Jeremy Corbyn.
That position was richly merited. Kamala was in favour of defunding the police, abolishing private medical insurance, mandatory buyback of rifles (which is to say a de facto repeal of the Second Amendment), ban on fracking (which is to say on American energy independence), federal jobs guarantee, softened stance on immigration, a whole raft of anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian (which is to say pro-Hamas) policies.
As VP, she was given the immigration brief, which enabled her to put some of her ideas into practice. As a result, some 10 million illegals crossed the border on her watch, ready to vote Democrat once they’ve qualified.
Her PR people are spreading the news that Kamala has repudiated all such notions – she has seen the centrist light. But I’ve got different news for you: people don’t usually change their views dramatically in their mid-50s. They do sometimes conceal them for tactical purposes, while always remaining ready to whip them out at a propitious moment.
Would Kamala have any chance of being elected if she were frank about her real views and how she’d act on them as president? Almost definitely not: she’d claim the left fringe and some ethnic vote, but no other swathe of the electorate. She knows it, her campaign managers know it, and hence her obvious intention to trick the people into buying her new centrist self.
Americans could do worse than look at our recent general election, which Labour won by using exactly the same strategy. Keir Starmer expertly came across as a sensible, moderate leader worthy of the people’s trust.
That got him an almost unprecedented landslide (on the back of a mere 20 per cent of the popular vote, but we shan’t go into the peculiarities of our electoral system now) – and a chance to act on his convictions that on close examination aren’t all that different from Corbyn’s.
In the first six weeks since winning power, Labour have announced a full complement of socialist or otherwise destructive policies that weren’t in their manifesto. Some of them are things they explicitly said they wouldn’t do.
In other words, they claimed power on false pretences. Had the people known six weeks ago what they know now, Labour wouldn’t have won a whopping majority, if any. Now they are in for the next five years, and the direction of their journey has only one destination: Britain’s suffering.
For example, when Rachel Reeves was merely Shadow Chancellor, she promised taxes wouldn’t go up “for working people” if she moved into 11 Downing Street. Now she’s ensconced there, working people are bracing themselves for the forthcoming hikes in taxes on pensions, capital gains and inheritance, in addition to rises in council tax and stamp duty.
“I think we will have to increase taxes in the Budget,” says Reeves. Would have been nice to know this six weeks ago.
While at it, the chancellor has lashed out against some ten million pensioners by taking away their winter fuel allowance. Whatever you may think of such frugality, it certainly wasn’t in the Labour manifesto.
Meanwhile, the horn of plenty has been tipped over workers in the public sector and those represented by powerful unions. Junior NHS doctors have been given a pay rise of 22 per cent over two years, while train drivers have received a 15 per cent hike to an average of almost £70,000 a year. That’s about twice the starting salary of a doctor, who has to train somewhat longer than a chap who operates a choo-choo.
The Tory plan to deport some 90,000 illegal aliens to Rwanda has been summarily dropped, and it’s now believed that at least 60,000 will be allowed to stay as asylum seekers. And Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has announced an immediate ban on North Sea drilling for oil and gas, the first step on his way to beggaring Britain with green madness.
Suddenly Starmer doesn’t look nearly as moderate as he did in the run-up to the election, and exactly the same will happen in the US should Americans fall for Harris’s legerdemain. I’m not proposing to psychoanalyse her or the Left in general, but her political spots aren’t for changing.
Socialist ideas wrapped in resentment and rancour reside in the viscera – as, for that matter, does conservatism. The latter encourages people to preserve everything worth preserving, ditch everything that’s not, while moving forward steadily and prudently.
Left-wingers, on the other hand, are innately in favour of any radical change, provided it gets them closer to the socialist ideal: an omnipotent state lording it over a sheepish population. The US situation is different from ours in many details, but not in this overarching principle.
I hope, rather than confidently predict, that American voters will prove smarter in three months than the British were six weeks ago, not as easily duped. That hope, I’m afraid, is likely to remain forlorn, especially since Trump isn’t making it any easier for the electorate to see what’s what than our Tories did in the general election.
I was chatting with an American expat the other day, and he told me that Trump had no policy ideas. He had a point in that Trump hasn’t been flagging his policies as much as he should. But he already served as president for four years, when he didn’t exactly hide his political light under a bushel.
Anyone wondering what Trump would do if elected can just look at what he did the first time around – and vote accordingly. With Harris, the vote ought to be based on her left-wing notions that are still clearly visible under the moderate clothes she’s trying to put on. But they don’t fit.
The OberStarmerFührer’s assault on respectable elderly people came as a shock even to me, who expected nothing but evil from him and his gang. In the winter of 2024/25, there will be some elderly people, too proud to suck on the State’s nipple by claiming Pension Credit, who will die of cold for the lack of the extra £200 or £300. But Starmer won’t care, because old people tend to vote Conservative, and may even be guilty of having voted for Brexit.
American voters, take note!
Trump either has the worst campaign staff, ever, or his ego will not allow him to take their advice. Everything he says should be couched in terms of his policies versus the Biden-Harris policies. Period. The author is correct in that Trump’s name-calling has fallen flat, while Harris’s “weird” epithet seems to have taken hold. Vance is weird in their eyes: a practicing, non-Biden, non-Pelosi Catholic. Any religious fervor is painted by the Left as anti-modern and anti-intellectual. I have seen in some interviews that Vance has, indeed, pointed out that what Harris is saying now is the opposite of what she has said before, or done while in office. We need much more of that, or we’re going to start down a socialist path towards tyranny that will be hard to change.
I, personally, would take time during interviews to remind people of the idiotic statements that Harris has made, such as regarding school buses (they’re yellow!) or the significance of the passage of time (it’s significant!).