Van Jackson read the Harris campaign’s new “policy” page and he was not impressed:
It pains me to observe this because I want better, we need better, and I’m very invested in her beating Trump. But we are well and truly in the territory of HBO’s Veep and nobody wants to say it for fear of harshing the vibes that appear to be central to the current strategy.
The foreign policy section was notable for saying very little about anything. Most of the text on foreign policy issues seems to have been lifted verbatim from Harris’ acceptance speech, complete with the same hollow words on Gaza that we have seen before. Like the foreign policy remarks in the speech, this “policy” page comes across as a box-checking exercise to satisfy the party’s hawks. It talks about having “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” and reaffirms Harris’ willingness to bomb Iranian allies, but there is precious little about non-military policy tools and there is no mention of climate, migration or pandemics in the foreign policy section. If you didn’t know that the Harris is the Democratic nominee, there wouldn’t be much in the foreign policy section to let you know. Put another way, there is nothing in here that would make Dick Cheney uncomfortable.
Each section of the “policy” page includes a paragraph that focuses on Trump’s agenda, and the attacks on Trump’s record are not nearly as strong as they could and seem to be aimed at pleasing other people in the Biden administration. The Harris campaign repeatedly hits Trump for his unfitness for office, and that’s fair, but when it comes to criticizing what he did wrong as president they are reduced to saying that he “cozied up to dictators and turned his back on allies” and they refer to his disparaging remarks about U.S. servicemen. Like the rest of this section, it all comes across as hastily thrown together and half-baked.
No one expects a campaign website to have every policy spelled out in detail, but for a candidate with limited foreign policy experience it is important to demonstrate that she has something like a coherent foreign policy vision or agenda. As Jackson says, rattling off a list of foreign countries that you have visited as vice president doesn’t cut it. We don’t really care if she has been to the DMZ in Korea. What we want to find out is what her North Korea policy is going to look like. Is it going to be defined by knee-jerk hostility to engagement as expressed in the party platform, or will it be something else? It’s anybody’s guess at this point.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.