Vice President Kamala Harris appeared Thursday in her first major interview since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. Harris sat for the CNN interview alongside her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).
Analysis by Aaron Blake
Below are some takeaways.
1. Harris suggested that, while her policies have changed, her values haven’t
One of the big questions was how Harris would address the various changes in her positions from her 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, when she aligned with liberal causes that she has since distanced herself from.
Harris expounded somewhat — emphasizing that her values have stayed constant — but didn’t provide too much clarity on why she has changed the specifics.
Among the positions she has moved away from are banning fracking and establishing single-payer health care, along with her sympathetic comments about both overhauling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the “Defund the Police” movement. (Harris back then stopped shy of calling for abolishing ICE and actually defunding the police, as some on the left advocated.)
“My values have not changed,” Harris said Thursday, repeating a version of that phrase four more times.
CNN host Dana Bash suggested Harris might have come to view those ideas as impractical as she’s understood them better, or embraced them for short-term political gain in the Democratic primaries. (Such positions were more in vogue in the Democratic Party back then.)
Harris didn’t grant either premise, but her answer hewed closer to the former. She suggested she’s still working with the same set of values in mind, but employing different tools in changing times.
She suggested some of the goals of the Green New Deal, which she advocated in 2020 but no longer does, were addressed by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, including setting goals to deal with climate change.
“We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act,” Harris said. “We have set goals for the United States of America and, by extension, the globe around when we should meet certain standards for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as an example.”
Harris said banning fracking was no longer necessary because of advances in clean energy.
She also spotlighted illegal immigration, an issue where she once pushed decriminalization of unlawful border crossings but where she has of late played up border security.
“My value around what we need to do to secure our border, that value has not changed,” Harris said. “I spent two terms as the attorney general of California prosecuting transnational criminal organizations, violations of American laws regarding the passage — illegal passage of guns, drugs and human beings across our border.”
Harris did not directly respond when asked whether she still supports decriminalization, saying instead, “I believe there should be consequence.”
They weren’t the most edifying or enlightening explanations, in that they didn’t really address how much she still might believe in these past policies. Supporting border security, for example, doesn’t explain why you don’t still talk about reforming ICE or decriminalizing illegal immigration.
But politically, you can’t really say that you abandoned a position for expediency or because you realized you were wrong. The former would call into question your sincerity, while the latter would call into question your wisdom.
2. She walked a very fine line on ‘change’
Harris has walked a very fine line in this campaign. She has sought to run as something of a “change” candidate despite her high-ranking role for the past 3½ years as vice president to Joe Biden, who is not a popular or well-reviewed president.
And she certainly massaged that distinction Thursday. She pitched the Biden administration as a successful one that would come to be viewed more positively over time. But she also sought to play up how her presidency could be different and even better.
Perhaps most strikingly, she repeatedly used the kinds of catchphrases you usually hear from a challenger. She twice referred to a “new way forward,” and she twice held up “the last decade” as something to be moved beyond.
“One, I am so proud to have served as vice president to Joe Biden,” Harris said. “And two, I’m so proud to be running with Tim Walz for president of the United States, and to bring America what I believe the American people deserve, which is a new way forward and to turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies.”
When Bash noted that the last decade included 3½ years under Biden’s presidency and Harris’s vice presidency, Harris suggested she was talking more about the ethos that began with Donald Trump’s election.
When Bash pressed her on why she hasn’t already done the things she’s pitching using her current perch, Harris suggested that the Biden administration has been limited because of what it needed to do to emerge from Trump and the covid pandemic.
“Well, first of all, we had to recover as an economy, and we have done that,” Harris said.
