Legacy media are beginning to recognize that Vice President Kamala Harris’s gradual shift toward the political center involves numerous policy changes that one former CNN anchor has described as “flip-flops.”
Chris Cillizza, a notable figure on CNN from 2017 to 2022, criticized Vice President Kamala Harris on X, highlighting nine instances where her campaign promises contradicted her earlier statements. Cillizza pointed out that Harris has shifted from unpopular progressive positions, such as her former push to ban plastic grocery bags and straws, back toward more centrist stances in American politics. “Kamala Harris has changed positions on a WHOLE lot of things,” Cillizza wrote on the Substack platform Friday morning.
Some items on Harris’s wish list are considered too extreme even by other prominent Democrats, who view them as impractical. During her 2019 presidential campaign, Harris pledged full support for the Green New Deal, which calls for all automakers to produce only electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles by 2035. After the Biden-Harris ticket won in 2020, she further committed to requiring all medium- and heavy-duty vehicles to be “zero-emission” by 2030, according to Fox News.
Despite declaring her “values have not changed,” Harris seemed to back away from her previous position when she finally sat for an interview last week. “The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.” Shortly after that interview, the Harris campaign put out a statement that she “does not support an electric vehicle mandate.”
On immigration, a core progressive policy has been to decriminalize illegal border crossings, leading Harris and many Democrats to refer to individuals as “undocumented” immigrants to emphasize that crossing the border is not a crime. However, according to Cillizza, Harris now claims that she no longer supports this measure.
While serving in the U.S. Senate, Harris supported legislation to create a commission to examine the possibility of federal reparations for descendants of slaves. Recently, however, Jasmine Harris, the campaign’s black media director, shifted the focus when asked about the vice president’s current stance on reparations, stating that the campaign is now prioritizing efforts to improve the economic prospects for all Americans. “And so the vice president and those that she will bring up with her to help her run this administration will, you know, work every angle possible to make sure that hardworking Americans have things a little bit easier because we know the costs are too high,” said the spokesperson, according to The Hill.
Other proposals that Harris has abandoned include a mandatory buyback program for assault weapons, a federal jobs guarantee as part of the Green New Deal, and Medicare-for-All, also known as single-payer healthcare.
Kamala Harris has changed positions on a WHOLE lot of things pic.twitter.com/m4MfzWkI0T
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) September 6, 2024