THE WHITE HOUSE, GOP, RNC & FOX, ARE TOTALLY CONFUSED ABOUT KAMALA HARRIS

…Biden & Harris at their live announcement press conference

The Trump administration and the GOP may remain confused up until November 3^rd.

On Wednesday, August 12^th, Joe Biden declared Kamala Harris as his 2020 running mate.  As expected, a Trump campaign aide immediately tweeted that there was serious liberal resistance, (insert Bernie Sanders fans here), but there was no official comments from the Trump organization.

Around exactly the same time, though, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ms. Ronna McDaniel said something quite different. “Kamala Harris’ extreme positions … show that the left-wing mob is controlling Biden’s candidacy, just like they would control him as president,” McDaniel said in a statement.

But by late that evening, the RNC was back to making a very different case. “Liberals revolt against Biden - Harris ticket,” an RNC news release said. It pointed to Bernie Sanders supporters and others who attacked Harris as being not progressive enough. “Even if Joe Biden’s campaign handlers gave their base the same notes they gave Biden for his video chat with Kamala Harris, it’s highly unlikely the left’s reception of Kamala would have gone any better,” it said. “Talk about embarrassing.”

The reality is that the Trump administration has no idea how to go after both Biden and Harris as a team.

Trump’s backers response to Harris’s selection has been totally dizzying. They have mostly painted her as the kind of radical that Ms. McDaniel did, even labeling her a socialist.  But as with the man whose ticket Harris is joining,Trump’s supporters have offered mixed messages by also suggesting she is a disappointment to Sanders supporters and even a tool of Wall Street.

At the same time, many reporters on the street are saying that droves of Bernie supporters have already said that a vote for Biden & Harris would be a great improvement over another Trump term.

Even at Fox News’ prime-time airwaves on the day before the announcement, they were full of dire warnings about Kamala Harris’s so called “liberal hostile takeover of the party”.  But on the man that makes up his own facts, Tucker Carlson’s show, he asserted that Harris was, in fact, an entirely principle-free politician who would be bowing to all big businesses.

“Susan Rice is a hardened partisan,” Carlson said of another top VP contender who was passed over. “But she is not stupid, and more to the point, Rice has sincere beliefs whether you like them or not …and we at Fox don’t.  But Kamala Harris is the opposite of that.  Harris may be the single most transactional human being in America.”

But of course, as usual, there was no explanation as to just what that statement about Harris was supposed to mean…..?

Carlson then added: “If you’re choosing a presidential nominee, you think you’d want someone with a built-in constituency, a base of passionate voters you can count on Election Day. But as it turns out, that is the last thing the leaders of the modern Democratic Party wanted. They already had a candidate like that, in fact, his name was Bernie Sanders, and they did everything they could to stop him.”

Also as usual, Carlson failed to mention that after Biden had announced that Harris was the candidate, they had the single biggest day of donations to the campaign.  It was twice the size of their previous biggest donation day.  That seems to show that many Democrats were hoping that Harris would be chosen and those people that supported Harris were just waiting for Biden to make the announcement.

Carlson had concluded: “Voters may not like Kamala Harris, but Wall Street does… just in case you’re wondering who is actually in charge.” 

But as a counter to that B.S., most of the donations in support of Harris were not from Wall Street donors, nor were they big donations.  They were thousands of mostly grass-roots small donations from everyday Americans all over the country.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) picked up on this line of attack, tweeting, “Of course Wall Street is delighted with Biden/Harris. Right back to the #China appeasement, unfettered globalism, and ruinous trade policies that have transferred billions from working people to Wall Street. That’s the Biden agenda.” 

Trump campaign aide Matt Wolking retweeted this message.

But isn’t it interesting that Donald Trump always takes the time to tell all his followers as to how well Wall Street and the stock market is doing.  If there’s so much concern about Ms. Harris and Wall Street, perhaps the GOP should be more concerned about their president in the White House and his connection and adoration of Wall Street.  Trump sees Wall Street as the US economy, even though only a small percentage of his supporters have Wall Street investments.

So according to the White House, Harris is simultaneously proof that the “left-wing mob” is taking over the Democratic Party and that the Biden campaign is embracing radical socialism.  But they think Harris is also a thumb in the eye of the people who support such policies and that she will let Wall Street run rampant.

So, which is it?

If this attack seems familiar, it is because it has essentially been a copy-and-pasted approach from the GOP strategy against Biden.  As The Washington Post’s, Ashley Parker wrote this week, Republicans have attempted to argue that Biden’s more pragmatic record is beside the point, and that he will be a “Trojan Horse” for the liberals in his party.  The issue with the GOP’s disparate attacks on Harris is that they cannot seem to decide whether she is an empty vessel, or the smart leader of all the forces inside that Trojan Horse who will soon be spilling out of the horse.

The confused mixed messaging has also been applied to Harris’s past, as a prosecutor and as the California Attorney General.  Conservatives have simultaneously argued that she was too tough on crime, but that she will also set aside those principles to appease the left wing of her party and be a conduit for de-funding the nation's police departments.

This will continue to be a positive for Ms. Harris as the competition just can’t decide as to how to go after the VP candidate.

“Phony Kamala will abandon her own morals, as well as try to bury her record as a prosecutor, in order to appease the anti-police extremists controlling the Democrat Party,” the RNC said.

These confusing and contradictory lines of attack reflect the GOP’s dilemma in running against Biden and Harris.

Some vote rankings have Harris as far to the left in the Senate, but those can be misleading. She is clearly not in the mold of a Sanders or even an Elizabeth Warren. The conventional wisdom about why Harris’s presidential primary campaign faltered, in fact, was that it did not have the needed defined message and it was not clear what she was about.  As it turns out, even though that was against her in her quest for the presidential role, it has helped her in confusing the GOP.

Now she can easily become a supporter of Joe Biden and his plans, without having to deal with a confused RNC.

You can spin that in a positive way as pragmatism, or you can spin it in a negative way as a lack of principles. But to suggest she’s some kind of radical socialist infiltrator is difficult to square with the idea that she has got non-radical principles and that she has abandoned them out of expediency, and by-the-way, is also beholden to Wall Street….?

Trump himself doesn’t know how to attack Harris.  And his campaign has regularly employed what The Post’s Jacqueline Alemany has properly dubbed a “spaghetti-on-the-wall campaign.”

The GOP and the RNC are apparently trying to see which lines of their attack sticks, but the way they are going, they may be scratching their heads on that all the way to November 3^rd.

Copyright G. Ater 2020