Kamala Harris is at it again

There’s an obvious flaw in Harris’s premise. There most certainly are bad ideas. One way to know if an idea is bad is to see what Kamala Harris thinks about it. If she thinks it’s good, it’s probably bad.

One useful thing about listening to interviews that politicians do with friendly sources is that the politician is often relaxed and will speak freely and without the guard she might maintain with a less friendly outlet. Harris was certainly that way with Win With Black Women.

But what is remarkable about Harris’s talk is how much it feels like 2019 all over again. Back then, Harris was making her first run for president, and the 2020 Democratic primary race was in its early stages. If there was a bad idea, she embraced it. Green New Deal, Medicare for all, mandatory assault weapon buybacks, amnesty — the whole lot. (Harris also said she was “open” to the idea of packing the Supreme Court.)

Harris’s 2020 campaign didn’t last long. It didn’t even last until 2020. After announcing her candidacy on Jan. 21, 2019, her support gradually grew, and by July she briefly overtook Bernie Sanders for second place in the race with 15% of the vote, behind leader Joe Biden, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. But Harris did not wear well. Her support ebbed, and by the end of the year, she had fallen to 3.5%, in sixth place. She withdrew from the race on Dec. 3, 2019.

Of course, Harris ended up as vice president after Biden picked her as his running mate and won. But then, in 2024, when Democrats could no longer ignore Biden’s senility, Harris ended up as the Democratic Party nominee. And when she became the party’s candidate for president, Harris’s old positions came back to bite her.

Remember when, in her only debate with Donald Trump, the then-former president accused Harris of taking all sorts of wild positions? “She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical left liberal that would do this.”

Immediately a number of commentators on the Left declared Trump’s statement to be a fantasy. Harris would never adopt a crazy position like that. “What the hell was he talking about?” wrote the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. “No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point.”

Then Trump turned out to be right. In 2019, candidate Harris answered an ACLU questionnaire which asked, “As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care?” Harris answered yes, she would, adding that, “As [state attorney general], I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates.”

Oops. The 2024 Harris campaign tried to run away from her 2019 self, but to no avail. And now, especially after her “No bad ideas brainstorm” proposal, it appears that if Harris does run again in 2028, it will be the same old show.