Harris’ problem: She’s a complete phony

OPINION:

If you’re a candidate for president of the United States and you avoid the media for a week or two, you can reasonably call it a strategy. If you avoid them for almost six weeks, it’s a problem. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has a problem, even after she was finally shamed into breaking down and talking to CNN.

It’s not like the difficulties that President Biden had that led his team to keep him away from cameras as much as possible; his problem was clearly his advancing decrepitude. But now that the current holder of the office of president has been shoved out of view, his vice president is seeking a promotion, and her handlers have a different concern: She’s a complete phony. 

And so they conspired to keep her away from the media until her CNN appearance on Thursday with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, 39 days from the day she became the presumed Democratic nominee for president. They likely did this for two main reasons: They needed time to begin to erase her radically leftist record, and they didn’t trust her to go out and help build her own new fake persona.

It’s not that she’s liable to pull a literal face-plant the way Mr. Biden was; it’s that she has a tendency to get stuck in catchphrase loops when she speaks about subjects with which she is not comfortable or familiar. When she’s out of her depth on a topic, she sounds like it, and everyone listening knows that she has no idea what she’s talking about.

That could happen a lot if you’re going to campaign on ideas you opposed only 39 days earlier. 

Her political problem was always simple to identify but difficult to solve. Her policy positions, many of which have been part of her public record for decades, are radically out of step with those of most Americans, and trying to renounce them won’t be remotely believable.

So, in the lead-up to the CNN interview, her staff laid the groundwork for her and notified reporters on background that the candidate had allegedly changed her views on some big things.

Mind you, these new positions aren’t true or accurate because, as a California Democrat, she has never believed such things. But this will be her strategy, and it is dishonest.

For example, how will she ever convince natural gas workers in western Pennsylvania that she supports fracking to protect their jobs when she hasn’t and doesn’t?

In fact, she was adamantly and emphatically against fracking when she ran for president early in the 2020 Democratic primary cycle (she bowed out in December 2019), and she was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, which sets its sights on eliminating fossil-fuel use.

She’ll never sound credible on the subject because she has never believed what she now has to say to try to fool voters.

In that vein, she’s been a major cheerleader for the Biden-Harris efforts to force Americans to buy electric vehicles they clearly do not want, regardless of how much her campaign says she doesn’t want to require that anymore.

She stole former President Donald Trump’s proposal to stop taxing tips for service industry workers and somehow discovered a child tax credit proposal even though she voted against it as a senator when it was part of the Trump tax cut package in 2017.

Placed in charge of the Biden-Harris administration’s alleged strategy to address illegal immigration, she has overseen the unsecuring of our southern border. Now, she is masquerading as an immigration hawk. Her television ads even have images of Mr. Trump’s border wall, a national security measure that she once called “un-American.”

She has been quite clear in her views on illegal border crossing and has said multiple times that she does not believe it should be a crime. Today, of course, that tune has changed.

She has consistently supported the “defund the police” movement but is now desperately trying to walk that back.

The list goes on, one item after another, and she repudiates herself over and over.

The truth is that Ms. Harris has never held any of these points of view, and she doesn’t hold them now. There is no reason for anyone to take her word on any policy pronouncement because she has often lied about her intentions.

Breaking her media boycott in a joint CNN interview with Mr. Walz, serving as a human shield of sorts by his presence, does nothing to alleviate all of this, because the facts are what they are.

Ms. Harris has a problem. She’s a San Francisco liberal pretending not to be one. And no one should buy it.

• Tim Murtaugh serves as a senior adviser to the Donald J. Trump for President campaign.