Kamala Harris cautiously rolls out her policy, more details to come
Global News
After four years of following President Joe Biden's lead, Kamala Harris is taking a cautious approach to unveiling a policy vision in her own right.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to outmaneuver former president Donald Trump and address old vulnerabilities on her policy positions as she starts to fill in how she would govern if elected in November.
Vice presidents rarely have policy portfolios of their own — and almost always set aside any views that differ from those of the Oval Office occupant. Now, after four years of following President Joe Biden’s lead, Harris is taking a cautious approach to unveiling a policy vision in her own right.
But her surprise ascendance to the top of the ticket after Biden dropped his reelection bid also means her policy platform is being pulled together just as quickly.
When Harris inherited Biden’s political operation in late July, the campaign’s website was quietly scrubbed of the six-point “issues” page that framed the race against Trump, including expanding voting protections and restoring nationwide access to abortion. Instead, Harris has peppered her speeches — so far heavy on biography for herself and her running mate — with broad goals like “building up the middle class.” She has called for federal laws to provide abortion access and ban assault-style weapons, but has been thin on the details of what specifically they would entail or how she would persuade Congress to make progress on some of the most hot-button political issues.
Asked by reporters on Saturday when she would unveil her policy platform, Harris promised more details this week and added, “It’ll be focused on the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs and also strengthen the economy overall.”
The first major window into her thinking came this past weekend, with a proposal pulled not from the policy backwaters of the Biden administration or the cutting-room floor of the legislative process but from her rival: Trump.
Harris announced that she, like Trump, wants to end federal taxation of tipped earnings for workers — with the added caveat that she would limit the plan to those in the lower- and middle incomes. The idea has drawn bipartisan support in recent months and is particularly salient in service industry-heavy Nevada.
It’s also one of the most prominent ideas embraced by Trump in his 2024 bid to get back into the White House — a bonus in the view of the Harris camp, which has tried to needle the Republican into making unforced errors.
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