Staff Reports
Vice President Kamala Harris is on a campaign trail that resembles a political circus, where she juggles contradictory narratives with the finesse of a seasoned performer. With one hand, she takes credit for the so-called achievements of the Biden-Harris administration, and with the other, she flings former President Donald Trump into the ring as if he were the current heavyweight champion of all things unpleasant. This bizarre tactic would be humorous if it wasn’t so transparently misleading.
The crux of the issue lies in the uncomfortable fact that Harris is trying to play both sides of the political aisle. She can’t very well run on solutions to crime, inflation, and border security without acknowledging that these crises have exploded under the Biden administration — a government she’s been a part of since day one. However, the need to assure voters she has something to offer requires her to neglect the reality that these issues continue to festers. It’s a classic political conundrum: talk about policies that fix problems while simultaneously saying the existing administration has done a bang-up job.
Kamala Harris takes credit for Trump’s successes and then bashes him for what she actually did. pic.twitter.com/SCZyNqYreZ
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 27, 2024
In a glaring show of media favoritism, Harris has gone 36 days without being probed about her actual policies, a silence that would make a statue seem talkative by comparison. Journalists appear to be more supportive of her ambiguous clarifications than of their civic duty to hold elected officials accountable. It is as if they’re taking cues from a magician’s handbook: don’t let the audience see how the trick is done.
In a peculiar twist, articles praising her conflicting messages are popping up, claiming she is striking a harmonious balance between established success and future change. This could be the first time in history that political contradictions are celebrated like some avant-garde art installation. The idea that Harris is simultaneously a continuation of the Biden legacy while also being a breath of fresh air puts her in a league of her own—one that might just be in orbit around a black hole of public opinion.
With critical issues like crime and inflation playing center stage in voters’ minds, Harris’s double-dipping strategy could very well end up backfiring. Recent polls indicate that a sizable chunk of the electorate sees crime as a major voting issue, with inflation and immigration right behind it on their lists of grievances. Yet, here comes Harris, hitching a ride on a train that most passengers would prefer to abandon. If her aides are mistaking her for a trailblazer, they might want to check the train tracks for sanity first.
As the Biden-Harris duo moves through this rocky political terrain, Harris’s strategy might look clever in the short term, but long-term success is anything but certain. An administration marred by economic mismanagement, border chaos, and a crime spike under its surveillance can hardly be spun into a beacon of hope. It might just be a matter of time before this political juggling act comes crashing down, revealing the void that is her actual platform.
