In a roundtable discussion at this week’s Democratic National Convention, presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ senior policy adviser Brian Nelson was peppered with questions about the policies at the heart of her campaign.
Will Harris try to revive the Iran nuclear deal? How will she pay for expanded child tax credits and her plans to help first-time home buyers? Again and again, he gave the same
answer.
“I am not going to get ahead of the vice president,” Nelson said eight times during the 45-minute event.
When Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination on Thursday night, she laid out a series of muscular foreign policy principles – stand up to Russia and North Korea, and defend Israel’s right to self defense while also backing Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
She also promised a middle-class tax cut at home, an end to America’s housing shortage and a secure southern border.
The speech delighted her Democratic supporters and was tougher than most observers had expected, but still more focused on broad principles than details.
Harris, 59, has not had much time to formulate detaileGd plans – she only became the Democratic candidate a month ago after President Joe Biden abandoned his failing reelection campaign under pressure from his own party.
Part of it is by design, too. The vice president and her aides have avoided offering up clear examples of where she may depart from Biden’s policies.
Buoyed by a wave of enthusiasm, donations and much better polling numbers since Harris entered the race, her team is wary of providing enough detail that Republican candidate Donald Trump and his campaign find new ways to attack her.
With particularly thorny issues like energy policy, Harris’ aides describe their deliberately vague approach as “strategically ambiguous.”
One campaign aide told Reuters that Harris will lay out more “value statements” than granular policy and “let voters connect the dots.”
Harris will face mounting pressure to flesh out her policies in the last 75 days of the campaign.
Chauncey McLean, founder of the super PAC known as Future Forward, the largest outside group backing Harris, said earlier this week that voters are already asking questions: “What’s her plan? What’s she going to do? And specifically, what is she going to do to make my life better?”
With Reuters inputs
