Low-rent US presidential race

Cartoon: Johannes Leak

The thumbs-down Kamala Harris got from normally committed supporters such as The Washington Post’s editorial board after Friday’s much-anticipated speech on the economy was not what she hoped for ahead of Tuesday’s (AEST) Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

But it reflects the questions that continue to dog her suitability for the Oval Office.

Despite her dramatic surge in the polls, pro-Democrat papers dismissed her address as disappointing gimmickry. “The times demand serious economic ideas,” the Post said.

“Unfortunately, instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.”

That referred to Ms Harris’s nakedly populist attempt to flog big business for allegedly making “excessive profits”, causing price gouging that has sent US food prices soaring.

The Wall Street Journal lambasted Ms Harris’s plan to impose national price controls on groceries as “Venezuelan-style left-wing populism” that would disrupt supply chains and lead to empty store shelves. “Price controls have led to shortages everywhere they’ve been tried, from Moscow to Caracas,” the paper noted, recalling Richard Nixon’s failed effort to impose wage and price controls in the 1970s.

Ms Harris should not ignore the reaction. As Cameron Stewart wrote on Saturday, it may be that everything in the race for the White House is currently favouring Ms Harris. “It was once said that this election was Trump’s to lose, but increasingly it looks as if it is Harris’s to lose,” he wrote.

After her surge in the polls, and Donald Trump’s discombobulation, Ms Harris will enter the Chicago convention with an aura of possible victory few Democrats would have anticipated only four weeks ago.

But they should be clear about the perils that remain if Ms Harris persists with populist left-wing claptrap. As the convention convenes, the best thing Ms Harris has going for her is that she is not Mr Trump. Polls show swing voters welcome a younger candidate who is neither Joe Biden, 81, nor Mr Trump, 78. Mr Trump’s gender- and race-based attacks are seeing women coming out strongly for Ms Harris. In swing states she is 14 points ahead of the Republican candidate.

Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Picture: AFP

The momentum is with her, but the sort of nonsense she articulated on Friday reeks of her ill-fated 2019 run for president. That campaign included abolishing immigration and Customs enforcement at US borders, providing full government benefits to millions of undocumented migrants, defunding police, eliminating private health insurance, banning fracking, and mandatory government buybacks of certain firearms.

Her way of dealing with what Wall Street Journal commentator Gerard Baker described as “this albatross of widely disliked politics” has been, for the past four weeks, to say she no longer believes any of it. But her speech on the economy suggests otherwise.

Mr Trump is doing a great deal to damage his own campaign. His references to Ms Harris as a “bitch”, a “raving lunatic” and a “radical communist” are at best unwise and at worst unhinged when the US wants a sensible, rational policy debate between two adults.

The schoolyard-type exception he took to a WSJ column that listed Ms Harris’s appearance as one of her political assets was immature. “I am much better looking than her,” he huffed.

The Chicago convention gives Ms Harris an opportunity to show she is not the “radical communist lunatic” Mr Trump claims her to be. She needs to show she has the gravitas and grasp of complex policy to lead the US and the free world.