OPINION:
Joe Biden ran as a moderate during the primaries, and he’s been running to the far left ever since he sewed up the Democratic nomination. His pick of Sen. Kamala Harris is another example of how he has outsourced his agenda to the radical element of his party.
During her brief time in the Senate and as a presidential candidate, Ms. Harris has staked remarkable radical positions. Newsweek ranks her voting record as more liberal than Sen. Bernie Sanders.’ She was one of the first to sign on as a co-sponsor of Mr. Sanders’ extreme plan to eliminate private health care plans and allow the government to take over our health care system.
Tragically, we’ve seen how incompetent government can be when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered people who tested positive for the coronavirus into nursing homes. Sadly, thousands needlessly died. Letting the federal government run our health care system will likely lead to long waits for medical attention, rationing of care and many medical professionals leaving their positions.
The cost of the so-called Medicare for All exceeds $32 trillion when the national debt has grown to more than $26 trillion. To pay for their plan, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris will raise your taxes. Their support of repealing the Trump tax cuts will lead to a tax increase for nearly every hard-working taxpayer across the nation.
Ms. Harris’ ideas will also cost us jobs. She is a co-sponsor of the radical Green New Deal that would lead to a loss of manufacturing and agricultural jobs in states like Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
On the day of Ms. Harris’ announcement, The New York Times tried to label her as a “pragmatic moderate.” Strange language about a politician who is neither pragmatic nor moderate. She supports sanctuary cities and open borders. She supports abortion on demand. And she even said she would have a “conversation” about whether felons should be allowed to vote from prison.
None of that sounds reasonable to swing voters. The Biden-Harris ticket reflects the views of the coastal elites. President Trump’s passion for the forgotten men and women and Vice President Mike Pence’s roots in America’s Heartland are more aligned with voters in the battleground states.
The Biden-Harris ticket represents the views of two senators. One longtimer, who was first elected in the 1970s, and the other just working through her first term. The Donald Trump-Mike Pence ticket, with a chief executive officer and a governor, represents the kind of executive experience that gets things done. In 2020, it’s doers versus talkers.
The importance of executive experience, combined with political courage, was revealed again last weekend with Mr. Trump’s actions. When it was clear that Congress had failed the American people yet again, the president took action to give the hard-working people of our country the help they deserve.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer played a game of political chicken while real people were suffering across the country. The president took action to provide tax relief and higher take-home pay for middle-class workers, assistance for unemployed workers and help for college students with loans due.
Mr. Trump completely outdid liberal Democrats. Their argument was to challenge the process and claim that his orders are not legal. It will be interesting to see which Democrats are willing to go to court to take unemployment benefits away from people during these trying times.
The president needs to continue to be bold and aggressive like that if he wants to get reelected. Voters are tired of the inability of Congress to get anything done. While they may not always like his tone or tweets, they like how he shakes things up in our nation’s capital.
In contrast, Joe Biden is a creature of Washington. He is not someone new who can solve our problems. For more than 40 years, he’s been part of the problem. Oddly enough, even Kamala Harris knows that to be true. During a Democrat presidential debate last June, she took on the former vice president on race. She talked about Mr. Biden’s words being “hurtful” when he spoke of wanting to return to a time of civility and mentioned two members of the Senate he worked with early in his career — both men were fiercely opposed to the desegregation of public schools.
Ms. Harris went on to note in that debate that Mr. Biden authored legislation to ban busing for desegregation. And he worked with those same senators to try and pass the bill. This is further evidence that Mr. Biden will say and do just about anything to get elected president. He showed that in his previous two campaign attempts at the presidency.
With the selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate, after assigning Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to work on policy, it is clear that Joe Biden has outsourced his agenda to the radical left. Reasonable voters should take note.
• Scott Walker was the 45th governor of Wisconsin. You can contact him at swalker@washingtontimes.com or follow him @ScottWalker.
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