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| Harris, Getty Images |
Asked during an address he had given at Western Connecticut State College shortly after President Richard Nixon had returned home from a triumphant visit to China, “What was Nixon really like?” Bill Buckley replied, “Which one? There are at least three, maybe four.”
American politicians do like to change faces, especially
during election periods.
There are at least four separate faces of Kamala Harris –
attorney general (hard bitten prosecutor), U.S. Senator, Vice President of the
United States, and soon to be the Democrat National Convention’s choice for
president.
Current President Joe Biden, who lame ducked himself by
declining to run for reelection, has worn out nearly all his many faces. Over
his own strenuous objections, “elites” within Biden’s Democrat Party pushed him
out of office to make room for the canonization of Harris, to the
disappointment, Biden has said, of the 14 million Democrats who voted for him
in the Democrat presidential primary.
Lately, Biden has busied himself by introducing ideas that
will be dead-on-arrival in the U.S. Congress.
The lame duck president wants to persuade congress to slap
term limits on Supreme Court justices. This cannot be done without amending the
U. S. Constitution, and amendments to the Constitution cannot be effectuated
without a two-thirds vote of approval in both houses of Congress. This is not
likely to happen.
Biden’s measure also may be approved by a Congressional
convention called by Congress at the request of two-thirds of the state
legislatures. The amendment must then be ratified, as determined by Congress,
by either the legislatures of three-quarters of the states or by ratifying
conventions conducted in three-quarters of the states. This farfetched process
has been deployed only once in American history, during the 1933 ratification
of the 21st Amendment that repealed the 18th prohibition
Amendment. Henry Menken said prohibition was easily overturned because the
public had become thirsty for hooch.
Neither option is likely. No one, we have all been told
repeatedly by the friends of democracy, is above the law. Maybe yes, maybe no,
most people think. But everyone is certain that no one in the United States can
be above or below a law that cannot and will not be passed.
The Biden proposal is, some suspect, little more than a
campaign advertisement to show how far left Democrat Party presidential
candidates have drifted since pre-President Barack Obama days.
Few people will protest if it is suggested that former President
Obama was a left leaning politician. Obama was followed by President Donald Trump
– no lefty -- who was followed by President Joe Biden, a far left political chameleon,
who in due course may be followed by President Kamala Harris, nature’s God and
the American public willing.
The question arises: How many different political personas –
public faces – has Harris presented during her 20 years in politics, first as
attorney general of California, then as California U.S. Senator, then as U.S.
Vice President, and lately as a prospective Democrat Party President?
The Telegraph, a British publication
notes that Kamala Harris has abandoned previous leftist positions after having
been challenged by the Trump administration: “The Vice-President, who is the
presumptive Democratic nominee for November’s election, has abandoned her
opposition to fracking and private healthcare, and is claiming a tough record
on crime and the illegal migration on the southern US border… Since she
replaced Mr. Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee on 21 July, Ms. Harris
has sought to downplay her previous liberal views while serving as a senator
from California. In 2017, Ms. Harris co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’s
‘Medicare-for-all’ bill, which would have scrapped private health care in the
US and replaced it with an NHS-style system… During the 2020 campaign, she said
there was “no question” she was in favor of banning
fracking, which produces a substantial proportion of U.S. natural gas
and oil. Her campaign said on Friday she would “not ban fracking” if elected
later this year… She has since rowed back on her 2020 statement that cities
should “redirect resources” away from policing in the aftermath of the murder
of George Floyd… Ms. Harris’ previous statements on the US migration crisis, in
which she called for a more humanitarian approach, [are under revision]… On
Saturday, her campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said that Mr. Biden’s
plan for a tough new border crackdown ‘will continue’”
Republicans are convinced that Harris’ astonishing about-faces
on so many issues of importance to American voters will eventually clip her
wings.
Abraham Lincoln once responded humorously to a possible
opposition party plant in his audience who had accused him of being two-faced.
“If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” Lincoln jibed to
howls of laughter. He was not the prettiest of presidents.
But Lincoln could also be serious, never more so than when
he said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the
people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the
time.”
Americans generally allow for the usual tools of the
political trade – trimming of the truth, hyperbole, sloppy tear-soaked appeals
to empathy, bloviating partisanship – and a tolerant public expects them to be
deployed during political campaigns. But there are lines that must not be
crossed, red flags that must not be waved.
Tomfoolery is OK, but fooling most of the people most of the
time, is not OK with most people – all of the time.
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