The Hierarchy of Democratic Deceit by Stephen Hayward
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/10/the-hierarchy-of-democratic-deceit.php
It is a well-known pattern going back decades now that Democratic candidates conceal their leftist views from the voters, running as moderates, and sometimes, like Democratic Senator Bob Casey in Pennsylvania right now, practically denying they are even Democrats! We’ve seen how Kamala Harris has disavowed her previous far-left issue statements wholesale, while winking to the progressive base that “my values haven’t changed.”
I’m not sure it is working. Last weekend when driving around Berkeley, where there are always a ton of lawn signs ahead of an election, I noted how few Harris-Walz signs there were. If you delve into left-wing social media, you find out very quickly that a lot of progressives are furious with Harris for moving to the middle and abandoning her previous positions. The Bernie-swills are convinced that this is why she is slipping! For example:
One of the issues most conspicuously missing from the Harris campaign is climate change, which we are told is the greatest existential crisis facing humanity evah! If they really believe this, don’t you think they’d be talking about it more? Of course, as we reported back in June, there is solid survey evidence, from Democratic pollsters, that talking about electric cars actually reduced support for Joe Biden. (And now several Democratic candidates are saying “What electric car mandate? Never heard of it. . .” Even though their votes are on the record.)
On Monday, the Harris campaign “climate coordinator” made the mistake of saying that Harris doesn’t support additional fracking or giving out more leases where more fracking might take place. The campaign walked it back within hours.
One source of candor—and ratification of the hypothesis of Democratic deception—comes unwittingly from the New York Review of Books, which asked last issue, “Silent Spring: Why Aren’t the Candidates Talking About Climate Change?” The answer is clear: Because we want to win the election!
But it also asks why climate activists aren’t making a fuss. This is where it gets interesting:
Kamala Harris . . . doesn’t mention climate change in her stump speech. As of this writing the only climate policy she has announced would accelerate warming: her full-throated endorsement of fracking and offshore oil production. At the Democratic National Convention, Harris made a single oblique reference to the subject, tucking it into a list of the “fundamental freedoms at stake” in November (“the freedom to…live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis”). At the presidential debate she did not mention it until the final question prompted her to do so. Even then, instructively, she could not tout the IRA without, in the same sentence, boasting of having increased “domestic gas production to historic levels.”
When three major environmental groups—the Environmental Defense Fund, Climate Power, and the League of Conservation Voters—launched the largest advertising campaign in support of climate policy in presidential history, they made certain that none of the spots mentioned climate change. . .
Strategists have been forthright about this rationale. “We have to defeat Donald Trump,” Brett Hartl, chief political strategist with the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, told Politico. “We don’t want to sabotage her campaign for no valid reason.”
It falls to the campaign’s surrogates to translate this sleight of hand to their constituencies.
It’s rare that a party’s core supporters admit they are practicing deception because they know their policies are unpopular. And yet there are bipeds who walk among us who wonder why Americans are cynical about politics.
Comments are closed.
