Don't Get Obama'd Again

Then-Sen. Barack Obama's 2008 run, a classic identity play, emphasized the history-making potential of electing the nation's first Black president. No one knew or cared much about Obama's policy positions, and he didn't bother to share them. Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 bids were policy arguments focused around a succinct set of issues: student loan debt, the minimum wage and health care. The fact that he would have been the first Jewish president was scarcely noticed.

If I were one of the Democratic strategists advising Vice President Kamala Harris' 2024 campaign for president, I would focus on an identity play emphasizing her race and gender over a run about a set of policies. Which is exactly what she's doing. "The longer the Harris campaign can portray her as a cultural phenomenon," The New York Times reported on July 31, "the longer she can avoid articulating details of her policy agenda that could divide her support. ... For now, the Harris team intends to skip some of the traditional markers of a presidential bid. While Ms. Harris released a host of policy papers during her 2020 campaign -- some of which she has since disavowed -- this time she plans to cast herself as a policy extension of Mr. Biden's administration."

"I think we are three weeks from knowing whether she can ascend the Obama ladder to where it's about her and not any specific policies she has," Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain in 2008, told the Times.

If Harris can get elected without making policy promises, good for her. But we, as individual voters, have different interests than she does.

"I'm with her," a Hillary Clinton campaign slogan quickly adopted by Harris supporters, is exactly the opposite of what representative democracy is supposed to be about. She should be watching our backs. A politician ought to be there for us, fighting like hell to improve our lives.

Just as Harris is attempting to do now, Obama ran as a rock star, long on charisma and short on specifics. Progressives and other leftists who gave him their votes quickly learned that being young, Black and cool enough to enjoy weed is no guarantee that a candidate will govern any better or differently than a boring old white guy. As president, Obama did exactly what a Republican would have done. He refused to codify Roe v. Wade (he called abortion rights "not the highest legislative priority"), granted full immunity to Guantanamo torturers, sent tens of thousands more troops to the losing wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, used assassination drones 10 times more than Bush and supported the military coup against the democratically elected, left-leaning president of Honduras.

Obama's decision to bail out Wall Street but not Main Street after the 2008-09 subprime mortgage crisis prompted pissed-off progressives to form the Occupy Wall Street movement in late 2011. True to right-wing form, Obama had his Homeland Security Department partner with Wall Street banks, real estate companies, local police and the FBI to ruthlessly crush hundreds of Occupy encampments in violent coordinated raids.

Obama is still a rock star. But he gravely wounded the Democratic Party. Obama-ism led directly to the surprise success of Sanders' insurgent 2016 campaign -- and the intraparty schism that allowed Donald Trump's surprise win.

Let's not get fooled again. If the left-leaning Democrats who comprise the majority of the party's voters want to avoid getting conned into supporting another DINO like Obama, they must insist upon a clear and coherent policy agenda for a first Harris administration. "She is not Trump" is not enough. Nor is "we need a Black woman president." By those standards, we could have elected former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

We don't know nearly enough about Harris' stances on the issues. The little we have learned so far on matters like Gaza (she supports Israel), universal health care (she's against it) and the long-frozen minimum wage (she doesn't talk about it) doesn't give much reason for optimism from a leftist point of view.

It's been more than two weeks since she became the Democratic standard-bearer. Yet she still refuses to give any press conferences -- something every candidate and every president ought to do 365 days a year -- or interviews with reporters. Like the senile President Joe Biden, every word she utters in public is read off a teleprompter.

If she won't tell us what she thinks, and we don't like what she says, she shouldn't get our votes.

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Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited. You can support Ted's hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.