Kamala Harris is polished, but her platform is pathetically vacuous compared to Donald Trump’s plans

US Vice-President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz and his wife Gwen Walz at the final night of the DNC.

“Hope and change” worked for Barack Obama. Will “freedom and joy” work for Kamala Harris?

The presidential election is shaping up as a battle between feel-good abstract nouns and a long list of policy proposals, whatever their merits, from Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris’s keynote speech on the final night of the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago underscored the unprecedented contrast in visions and policy platforms American voters face this November.

Can you think of a single abstract noun with which Trump laces his speeches? I can’t.

Harris’s speech, which she almost certainly didn’t write, read faithfully from the teleprompter, was polished and creditable, one from Democrat central casting.

Where Trump indulgently droned on for 90 minutes at the Republican National Convention a month ago, in his trademark apocalyptic, dystopian style, Harris was beaming, happy and optimistic, delivering a 40-minute address that enthused the party faithful beyond what anyone could have expected only a month ago.

The criticism of Harris by Trump and Republicans as “dumb” and “Marxist” has proved to be ridiculous. She’s an appealing frontwoman for a party that’s become the epitome of the US establishment. That’s why she’s three percentage points ahead in the polls nationally, a not-huge-but-significant lead in what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama predicted would be a tight election.

Criticism of Democrats for providing few polices less than three months out from polling day is unfair in a sense: they’ve been in power in the White House for all but four years since 2008, controlled the congress almost the entire time.

Theirs is the party of “more of the same”. Republicans, reflecting a global political trend, are increasingly the “left wing” political force, the ones motivated by demands for drastic change that the establishment would hate.

No doubt, Trump says a lot of crazy things, but it’s much clearer what he would seek to do: crush the flow of illegal immigrants on the southern border including “carrying out the largest deportation in American history”, abolish the electric vehicle mandate, slash impediments to fossil fuel production, institute a less interventionist foreign policy, mandate a more traditional delineation of males and females in sports and schools, and perhaps, most critically legislate for “same-day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship” across all states.

It’s all laid out on his campaign website, in stark contrast to Harris’s, www.kamalaharris.com, which still lacks any mention of any policy.

Indeed, Harris’s speech foreshadowed what’s shaping up to be the most vacuous Democratic Party campaign ever.

Harris’s harebrained promise last week in North Carolina to crack down on “price gouging” by supermarkets, and gift $US25,000 to first-home buyers, didn’t get a mention. She didn’t say anything new whatsoever, except giving a notable shout out to the left-wing of her party by over sympathising with the plight of Palestinians.

Democrats’ one concrete promise (a pretty silly one) has been to exempt tax on tips for hospitality workers, which they brazenly pinched from Trump. The party’s whole platform bizarrely revolves around legislating a national right to an abortion, which is practically speaking legislatively impossible, given the make-up of the Senate, and casting Trump as determined to ban abortions nationwide, which is extremely unfair given he’s repeatedly denied it and clearly cares little about the polarising issue.

Sadly, Democrats have learned from experience. Hillary Clinton listed hundreds of policies on her website during her 2016 campaign and lost.

All week Democrats have fearmongered about the Republicans’ supposed 900-plus page Project 25, a policy platform produced by a Trump-aligned Washington think tank the Heritage Foundation. But at least they have policies.

Focusing on policy arguably saved Trump’s life in Pennsylvania last month, as he turned his head just in time to miss an assassin’s bullet in order to explain a detailed chart of immigration arrival.

But it remains to be seen if it helps him get re-elected. US politics, as everywhere, is increasingly about “values”, not policies, and there’s no question Democrats offer the more appealing outlook, however shallow and divorced from America’s manifold problems it is.