One-time Democratic hopeful and long since vilified by her own party, Tulsi Gabbard, should serve to remind us of Kamala Harris as a flip-flopper who runs from her record instead of standing on it. In Gabbards own words when she shared a debate stage with the now-Democrat nominee, “Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record.”
“There are too many examples to cite,” Gabbard went on. “But she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence — she blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep a cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”
Harris really should have been prepared for Gabbard’s allegations. Instead, she appeared flabbergasted and flat-footed. From the stage, she delivered a lengthy boilerplate answer about how proud she was of her work as attorney general of California, failing to respond even to a single point Gabbard had raised.
Gabbard’s comments went viral.
At around the same time, Senator Kamala Harris broke out with a couple of viral moments of her own. Among other things, she heavily insinuated that former Vice President Joe Biden was a racist for working with segregationist senators to oppose busing.
These two events marked the beginning of the end of her 2020 campaign. Harris peaked in July, and it was all downhill from there until she ended her campaign in December 2019, before a single primary vote had been cast. Who could have imagined that she would have failed-upward to become the Vice President and now four years later, leading the Democratic ticket?
And yet, this flawed candidate, this DEI hire, wants the American public to think that somehow, she and her record have changed.
Republicans and Donald Trump seem to be having trouble identifying who Harris is, where she is most vulnerable, and how to best attack her. They should take a page for Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard’s targeted attacks were and are revelatory – a reflection of the chameleon-like malleability of Harris’s political principles that have been part of her being throughout her career. Harris began her career in politics as a tough-on-crime — or rather, as her campaign put it in 2003, “Smart on Crime” — prosecutor. She upset Terence Hallinan, a bleeding-heart, soft-on-crime incumbent San Francisco district attorney with the help of former boyfriend Willie Brown’s political machine. Seven years later, Harris was amassing a conviction record as bad if not worse than Hallinan’s.
The old Harris was cautious, calculating, ambitious, happy to call herself California’s “top cop. The new Harris, who first appeared about six years ago, is an entirely different animal — not just a lot more progressive but someone always eager to prove just how far left she could go. This Harris wants to show that if you’re woke, she’s even woker, the first to jump on every leftist bandwagon.
This ideological transformation, and her current attempts to backpedal from many of these positions she took up just a couple of years ago, exposes Harris as someone whose political ideals change easily to suit the political situation. And that is what the Trump campaign needs to exploit if they want to derail her momentum.