Kamala Harris’ campaign rests on a “word salad” still hiding in plain sight. It goes back weeks to her August 29 media “coming out” party on CNN, when she tried to differentiate between changed positions and unchanged values. Coming right out of the gate and so short, this futile attempt is still overlooked. Yet it is crucial to Harris because she can’t win as the extremist she was and must instead fabricate the fable that she wasn’t and isn’t.
Even Harris’ first interview with a seemingly friendly CNN did not go well. It didn’t because Harris has too many campaign contradictions to ignore. One of these regards her stance on fracking. When gently but repeatedly pressed on, claiming to have reversed her position to ban fracking, Harris replied, “Well, let’s be clear. My values have not changed.”
Next, she was pressed on her past stance to decriminalize illegal immigration. Again, she used the “values” parry: “I think the — the — the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed.”
We are accustomed to Harris’ long, nonsensical stringing of meaningless words when trapped by what she perceives to be tough questions. Finding these “word salads” has become a Where’s Waldo game when Harris goes before the public. Whenever she encounters a microphone, they are sure to follow.
In this verbal game of Harris hide-and-seek, where the longest and most elaborate capture attention’s prize, we overlook the importance of her disingenuous dichotomy between positions and values because it is seemingly too simple.
Political necessity has forced Harris to make this distinction without a difference between positions and values. How can values not change when positions have changed? This is especially true if, as Harris asserts, her values guide her positions. One or the other must not be true: either her values don’t influence her positions, or her positions didn’t change. Yet we know that Harris claims her positions have changed—on many topics. Harris is careful not to say how this disconnect can be explained.
Even if Harris’ words are purposely unclear, what is patently clear is that Harris is an extremist. In addition to supporting banning fracking and decriminalizing illegal immigration, Harris has opposed building a wall on the southern border, cosponsored the radical Green New Deal, and endorsed transgender surgeries for prison inmates. The list goes on and on—and always away from her extremist past. In a curious twist to this theme, there are also questions regarding Harris’ plagiarism—rather than denying what she has done before, she is accused of claiming credit for something others have done before.
Because extremism cannot win in a national election and outside deep blue environs, Harris must claim that she has changed. So, she concocts a way to claim she has—without really admitting she has done so.
Kamala Harris likes word salads because they extricate her from responsibility. By throwing words together to avoid saying anything, she says everything and, thereby, nothing. We laugh at them. But really, the last laugh is hers. Because she gets to move on and away from the responsibility of taking a position at her roots, Harris is a politician who wants office without accountability.
However, that is a difficult thing to achieve for someone seeking to be America’s commander-in-chief. Here, her difficulty is far more incredible. By needing to claim she has changed her positions, she faces the liar’s conundrum: Were you lying then, or are you lying now? She must claim to have changed her old positions to win new voters, but she cannot be seen to have changed them for fear of losing former voters.
Harris must have it both ways. And her simplest of word-salads is her attempt at doing so. She claims to have changed her position but not her values. The simplest of Harris’ word salads, as far as its ingredients are concerned, is her most important one. While we reject her others, we gloss over this fundamental one. In so doing, we allow her to avoid her ultimate responsibility: admitting she is the extremist she is.
J.T. Young is the author of the upcoming book Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left from RealClear Publishing and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, and OMB, and representing a Fortune 20 company.
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