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As I was frolicking through my daily mass email purge last Friday evening, one subject line caught my eye: “The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks.”
Ouch. It was, I was a little surprised to find, from the Washington Post Editorial Board. When I opened it, I found the subject line repeated as the headline, along with this teaser: “Harris’s most outlandish plan is her proposal to ban ‘price gouging,’ but that’s just one of many misguided ideas.”
Double ouch. I was only a little surprised because I had been wondering when the mainstream media (MSM) would get around to firing a shot across Kamala Harris’s bow or nailing a chicken over her front door.
She has, after all, more or less given the media the finger while surfing the wave of voter relief and love that has seen her reverse the Democrats’ fortunes on a dime and take a lead in the bell lap of what is shaping up as very much a “vibes” election.
As president, Joe Biden has been notoriously stingy with press conferences and media access in general, and it has not made him great friends in high media places — the New York Times, for example. But Harris — who, conventional wisdom would have it, should have been eager to engage the press in vetting her and telling her story — has taken the MSM-free campaign concept to yet another level.
You don’t tell the fourth estate that your people will get in touch with their people. It’s like telling a mafia don to hold their horses, you’ll pay up “one of these days.”
In response, a chorus of outlets and pundits at first whispered and then howled that Harris “needed” to hold a press conference or two — right now! — so the poobahs of the media world could decide whether she was the real deal, tough enough to win their “gotcha” game, answer all of their shouted questions about Donald Trump or why she didn’t pull the 25th Amendment on her doddering boss, and then pass all that wisdom on to the electorate.
Harris, in so many words, said “No, I don’t.”
Actually, she didn’t even bother to say that. She just went on her merry, busy way, building a campaign that didn’t exist a month ago, vetting and choosing a running mate, holding rallies, answering a few stray questions between flights, and working email and social media to engage with voters, who were lapping it all up and sending lots of money.
Well you just don’t do that! You don’t tell the fourth estate that your people will get in touch with their people. It’s like telling a mafia don to hold their horses, you’ll pay up “one of these days.”
If you do, watch your kneecaps. Of course the Post deals in words, not baseball bats or crowbars. Specifically in headlines, which is as far as the vast majority of readers get in forming their impression of the target. In this case, the editorial itself actually is something of a mixed review, though of course you’d never know that from the headline.
The Post board takes aim at a speech Harris gave the same day in Raleigh, NC, in which she explained in some detail her economic policies and priorities and called for the building of “an opportunity economy.”
Specifically, she proposed eliminating the medical debt of millions of Americans; a ban on price gouging for groceries and food; a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs; a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; a first-year child tax credit to families of $6,000 per child; and raising taxes on the super-rich to defray the substantial costs.
Of these proposals, the Post board picked out the price gouging ban for skewering, likening it to Richard Nixon’s “failed price controls from the 1970s” and claiming that it had been “met with almost instant skepticism.” After citing inflation as “a very real political issue” for Harris, the editors make this recommendation:
One way to handle it might be to level with voters, telling them that inflation spiked in 2021 mainly because the pandemic snarled supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it. The vice president instead opted for a less forthright route: Blaming big business.
That is, pardon the expression, rich. It’s exactly what Biden has told the voters all along, to what one must admit have been less than rave reviews. Why “level” with the voters when the voters reward you for it by telling the pollsters that they trust Trump more on the economy and are at best torpidly unenthusiastic about voting for you?
And that is apart from the fact that Harris has a strong point: Much of corporate America — from the food industry to the drug industry, from wholesalers to retailers — took advantage of the pandemic to make a killing. A little pushback — which Trump has wasted no time in idiotically dubbing “Kamunism” — might just be in order.
And it might interest the Post to know that a May YouGov survey found broad bipartisan support (91 percent among Democrats, 85 percent among Republicans) for a proposal “banning excessive price increases during emergencies,” along with one to impose “stricter penalties on companies that use monopolistic practices” (74 percent and 56 percent respectively).
So taking on the corporate price-gougers is Harris’s “gimmick” (singular). What I found most interesting is that, from that point forward, the Post editorial turns neutral to positive. It concedes that her housing plan is “built on a slightly firmer foundation” and praises her “clever tax incentives” to boost construction, while worrying that the first-time home buyer subsidy may exacerbate matters by boosting demand — not exactly a stinging critique.
And from there the Post fills in its scorecard by praising Harris for proposing an increase in the child tax credit, as well as the “earned income tax credit for childless low-income ‘front-line workers,’” and an extension of Affordable Care Act tax breaks, which the board cites as “part of the reason more than 92 percent of Americans have health insurance now.”
So how does a mixed review like that wind up under a headline featuring the descriptives “gimmicks” (plural), “misguided,” and “outlandish?” How does a B+ paper wind up with a big red “F”?
In certain cases we know to take headlines with a grain of salt — they can be ginned up in a hurry by a subaltern who may have read the assigned piece with less than full attention or comprehension. It happens. But I would wager that it is highly unlikely to happen when the piece is written by the Editorial Board.
Those folks know what’s going out under their name. Which is why I see the gross disjunction between this editorial’s mild content and its wickedly pejorative banner as a significant tell — perhaps the opening salvo as the media, jealous of its power, returns the fire of a candidate who has dared to defy its demands.
Which leads naturally to the question: Are those demands truly in the public interest? Is the media, in sticking up for its perceived prerogatives, also sticking up for the public it purportedly serves — or are its concerns more parochial and self-serving?
The country didn’t seem to give too much of a rat’s ass for democracy when Biden was out there campaigning on preserving it in light of the threat Trump poses. So perhaps the voters don’t, and are not going to, care about “doing the right thing for democracy” when it comes to how Harris is running her campaign?
One commentator, with whom I’m generally in sync, advanced the argument that Harris’s snub of the press is bad for democracy, which, since I care deeply about democracy, certainly got my attention.
But you have to wonder: The country didn’t seem to give too much of a rat’s ass for democracy when Biden was out there campaigning on preserving it in light of the threat Trump poses. So perhaps the voters don’t, and are not going to, care about “doing the right thing for democracy” when it comes to how Harris is running her campaign?
I mean, ultimately the voters will decide whether or not to penalize Harris if she persists in not giving the media its normal, expected role in sorting everything out. A role, can we agree, in which it has not exactly covered itself in glory since, well, maybe since the 1970s when Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post? (Sidebar: It has not escaped my notice that Jeff Bezos — chief stakeholder in mega-retailer Amazon as well as Whole Foods, both potentially in Harris’s anti-price-gouging crosshairs — owns the Washington Post, though, unlike Murdoch, he has received generally favorable marks for keeping his distance from the news and opinion operations.)
Given what that same media did to Bernie Sanders, did to Hillary Clinton, certainly tried to do to Biden — and given its unrepentant double standard when it comes to covering Trump — is it any wonder that, if Team Harris can see a media-lite path to victory, she wouldn’t be in any great hurry to show her carotid arteries to the teeth of that beast? And is it any wonder that the media would perceive her refusal as a shot across its bows?
You can make all sorts of good points about how democracy usually does or should work (one of which is that it should not include the thumbs of billionaire fascists Elon Musk or Timothy Mellon on the scales), but in this case the voters, having seen Harris present herself in the manner of her choosing, will have the final say, democratically.
If they don’t like being less than fully informed by the legacy gotcha press, they always have the option of voting for Trump — master of the press conference that he is.
