If the last four years of presidency can tell us anything about the next four years, what are the American people in for? With presidential candidate Kamala Harris being our nation’s current Vice President, we can use the Biden administration as a reference point for what it might look like if Harris takes office in January, and a repeat of the past administration might not be what our country needs.
Harris was nominated as the primary candidate for the Democratic party after President Joe Biden’s dropout from the race, but many wondered if this last-minute nomination was planned as a method to get Harris into office. With former President Trump’s entire campaign being built on an anti-Biden narrative, and with the large question of if Harris would have even been able to succeed as a candidate herself in the Democratic primary after her performance as a primary candidate in 2020, the last minute switch seemed like a very smart and calculated move by the Biden administration.
Shortly after she took office, we saw Harris go radio silent, and the American public heard virtually nothing from her for months at a time. This silence was also seen after receiving her endorsement from President Biden. She was endorsed by President Biden on July 21st, but yet she did not do a sit down interview with any organization until August 29th. Is this something we would want in a president? Someone who does not communicate with the public? It is a very real possibility that she would go into hiding from the media again after being elected.
Another large point of criticism for Vice President Harris is her effectiveness or rather lack thereof. When she came into office in 2020, she was appointed border czar, but from 2020 to 2023, we saw over seven million illegal border crossings (the highest per year rate of the last twenty-five years). While it is true that the Biden administration deported more immigrants than the Trump administration, he still allowed a far greater number of them to remain in the country illegally. According to The Cato Institute, a liberal think tank, President Trump deported 47.4% of the illegal immigrants that entered the country under him, while President Biden deported 50.9%. While this does mean that this administration has been more successful in the deportation rate, there is still the fact that Biden allowed 1.7 million more illegal immigrants to remain in the country. As the nation’s border czar, Vice President Harris handled the situation so poorly that there was an investigation launched by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. So, with Harris promising to fix the border if she were to become president, it leaves one question: why hasn’t she, or rather the administration, already fixed it, and why was it ever allowed to get to this point? There is also the concern of her consistent flip-flopping on major issues. While she was the Attorney General of California, she changed her stance multiple times on topics like sex workers, recreational marijuana, and criminal justice reform. She also recently has given conflicting viewpoints on fracking and gun ownership, saying that she supports fracking and will not implement a ban, but at the same time being one of the major advocates for the Green New Deal, which directly opposes fracking. This switch on her view was largely taken as a political move in an attempt to appeal to the people of the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Then comes the undeniable fact that the cost of living for the average American has skyrocketed in the last four years. In the final year of the Trump administration, we saw the nationwide inflation rate sit at 1.23%, and in the first year of the Biden administration, we saw the second-highest inflation rate in the history of our nation at 9.1%. One aspect of Harris’ campaign includes giving $25,000 for first-time home buyers’ down payments, and a $6,000 tax credit for families with newborns. However this plan has been criticized by many economists on whether it will worsen inflation or not, and during her 60 minutes interview Harris was unable to answer how she was going to afford this new tax plan, and how she was gonna take care of the already existing cost issues facing our nation. This poses the question of whether the administration that caused this issue is the best-suited to fix it.
I’m not here to tell you to go vote for the other guy, or to spew a right wing agenda, and I’m not here to explain to you why he may or may not be the better option. My goal is to simply tell you that whether you’re a first-time voter, or you’ve voted in previous elections, take a cautious approach, and look at what the last four or even eight years can tell you about each candidate. Is Kamala Harris truly the golden woman that President Biden has made her out to be, or will she be a continuation of the policy and ideology we have seen displayed by her and the Biden administration?
