Kamala Harris should shake the Etch-A-Sketch

The case for a new (shorter and more moderate) policy agenda

As Mitt Romney was heading toward victory in the 2012 GOP primaries, he faced questions about whether he’d pivoted so far right to win — branding himself as “severely conservative” contrary to his moderate reputation as governor of Massachusetts — as to become unelectable against Barack Obama. His senior advisor Eric Fehrnstrom went on CNN and said out loud the kind of thing that is probably better kept behind closed doors: “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch-A-Sketch — you can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.”

This was a dumb thing to say on national television midway through an ongoing primary campaign.

But the idea of pivoting to the center for the general election is a good idea, and I’ve always loved the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor in particular. To reset an Etch-A-Sketch, you need to shake it really hard and decisively and start all over again, not do a series of painstaking revisions. Romney, however, did not actually take Fehrnstrom’s advice. Of course, to some extent he tried to highlight his more moderate side and downplay some of his more right-wing commitments down the fall stretch. But at key campaign moments — like the VP selection — Romney ran like a Democrat, obsessed with consolidating his base and making sure that he articulated a sufficiently specific policy agenda that he could claim a mandate after he won. The problem, of course, was that he lost.

Kamala Harris now finds herself in some ways in an enviable situation compared to Romney.

She didn’t need to run in a competitive primary to secure the nomination. She locked down near-universal elite support with a ruthless 36-hour operation that does not seem to have involved making an embarrassing promises to anyone. And people view her more kindly than Joe Biden across a broad range of issues, not blaming her as much for inflation or other problems. But she also has more baggage than Romney. Romney’s record was as a moderate governor of a blue state; Harris’ record is as a progressive senator from a blue state. And while Harris didn’t run left in the 2024 primary because no such primary happened, she did run left in the 2020 primary. There’s a lot you can potentially hang on her in terms of old Senate votes and old campaign proposals, over and above the fact that the right will naturally link her to anything people don’t like about Biden and his administration. She also, as vice president, has a kind of ambiguous relationship to the elements of Build Back Better that were left on the cutting room floor and to things that were proposed in White House budget submissions.

And I think the situation calls for is a vigorous shake of the Etch-A-Sketch.

Rather than getting dragged into an endless series of micro-conversations about every position she or Biden ever took on any issue, she needs to wipe the slate clean and articulate a brief set of policy agenda items to run on. She should say that everything else is in the past, ideas formulated in a different time and under different circumstances, and now she’s running on the new “Project 2025 But It’s Good.”

Argue the future, not the past

So far, the Harris launch has been mostly good vibes directed at the Democratic Party base. She has taken the 44 percent or so of Americans who were dead-set on voting for Joe Biden a week ago but felt depressed as hell about the state of the campaign, and made them feel happy and optimistic about the future. There are pro-Harris TikTok memes circulating, whereas previously there were none for Biden. Fundraising is going great. She’s getting some positive earned media.

That’s all good, and it lays the foundation for a winning campaign.

But in terms of addressing persuadable voters, the only real argument playing out over the past week has been Republicans slagging her as Joe Biden’s “Border Czar” and the Harris camp pushing back with the argument that it’s just a title her enemies made up and her actual immigration-related assignment was much narrower. I think that even if you grant Harris the point, the fact is she’s Vice President of the United States, so the opportunity necessarily exists to take anything people didn’t like about the Biden years and put it on her.

The good news, though, is that unauthorized border crossings have plummeted in recent months, in part thanks to the administration’s asylum actions, though my sense is that at least half of the credit goes to actions taken by Mexico.

What Harris wants to do, though, is have an argument about the future of immigration policy. Right now the public strongly favors Trump on this topic, because there’s been a huge surge in the number of people who say they want the volume of immigration decreased, and people assess that Trump agrees with them about this.

I’m a very boring person, so I think the solution to this problem is pretty obvious. That poll came out in June, midway through an actual decline in immigration volumes after the large increases in 2021-23. Harris should say that the volume of immigration is decreasing this year, that it is good that it is decreasing, and that a Harris administration will decrease it further by pushing for the bipartisan border security bill that Donald Trump killed. Joe Biden, through diplomacy and executive actions, has reduced border crossings, but to reduce them further requires additional material resources and only Congress can deliver that — which didn’t happen thanks to Trump’s sabotage. That’s the immigration plank.

Talk less … smile more

Any Democrat would tout the 2024 reduction in crossings, and any Democrat would tout the bipartisan border security bill. But I think that if Harris released a seven-point plan for America with an immigration plank that was just, “I want to do the bipartisan border security bill,” immigration groups would lose their shit. Not because they hate the border security bill, but because the way Democrats normally draw up their policy plans is that once they start talking about a topic, they fill in all the blanks and list everything they might ever theoretically want to do.

On immigration, that is, obviously, a path to citizenship for people who have been present and working illegally in this country for a long time and have not otherwise committed crimes. I like this idea on the merits, and if Harris reiterates her support for it, I will gladly defend it and defend her.

But I think the merit of skipping a primary is that you don’t need to make huge public promises to your base groups. You need to write down a brief, realistic agenda of items the public wants to hear about. She should send a quiet emissary to the immigration advocacy community to tell them not to be idiots, that if a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill passes Congress, she’s obviously not going to veto it. But the campaign’s position should be that the top priority on immigration is to maintain Biden’s progress in bringing the numbers down by enacting a bipartisan border security measure that will provide additional resources and make what they are already doing more effective. Was she “the border czar?” Who cares! Does she still support X, Y, or Z liberal immigration policy idea? There are lots of good ideas about how to improve the broken immigration system that we’d love to work through with Congress, but the first step is to pass the bipartisan border security bill and blah blah blah.

I think a generally strong line of argument for Harris to take in defense of shaking the Etch-a-Sketch would be to say that one thing she’s learned working alongside President Biden is that in the real world, the White House doesn’t dictate legislative outcomes. If you look at successes like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS bill, federal protection for marriage equality, and other popular bipartisan accomplishments that Donald Trump tried to torpedo, these things all happened by letting members of Congress do their jobs with some helpful encouragement from the administration, not by the president sending over a checklist of demands.

Starting back in the 2008 cycle, Democrats got in the habit of insisting their presidential candidates should run on detailed policy programs. People sometimes blame me for this, though my recollection is that it’s Ezra Klein’s fault. Either way, it’s kind of dumb. Meaning not just dumb politically but actually out of touch with how legislating works.

A seven-item list

If I were to make a genuine effort at writing a realistic Harris agenda, one that I think reflects general election voter concerns, but also what the candidate actually thinks and what she’s excited about saying, I think the first item would obviously be about reproductive rights. And I think you end up with something like this:

1. A law restoring Roe v Wade as the law of the land

2. Reduce the deficit by rescinding Trump’s tax cuts for high-income individuals and corporations, while retaining current rates on the middle and working class

3. Finishing the job of securing the border with the bipartisan border security bill

4. Defend Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security

5. Maximize the output of clean energy with permitting reform, vigorous implementation of the new bipartisan nuclear energy reform, and with a science-based approach to LNG exports

6. Vigorously monitor price-gouging and anti-competitive behavior to promote consumer welfare and low prices

7. Invest in paid leave and an affordable child care system that supports all parents and all kinds of families

The sticky wicket here is item number seven, the leftover “care economy” agenda from BBB, which by all accounts Harris personally identifies with and wants to champion. I put it on there to try to make this a real exercise. If I actually got to play puppet master, I would have a housing agenda on there instead. But what I hear is that Harris doesn’t want to walk away from these concepts. I do think that she should try to walk away from the specifics of that legislation and retreat to the much vaguer formula that I put here. The BBB child care proposal had significant design flaws and the entire framework was drawn up during a period of high unemployment and low interest rates that no longer exists.

Democrats also stapled together separate programs that had inconsistent conceptual underpinnings. Why did the refundable Child Tax Credit have no work requirement, but the paid parental leave program did? If anything, it would make more sense to do the opposite, attach a work requirement to the CTC but then de facto shelter mothers of the youngest kids from it with a parental leave program. People can disagree about work requirements, but nobody thinks it makes sense to be more demanding of labor force participation of the parents of infants than the parents of 12 year-olds.

I think ideally she should just say that she supports a significant investment in this whole area, is happy to be broadly flexible on the details, but does want to ensure that any childcare program is fair to stay-at-home moms and people who prefer informal care arrangements.

But what about…?

My main point here, however, isn’t even about exactly what Harris should say she’s running on — she just needs to come up with a single, relatively brief, unequivocal list.

The merit of such a list is that on the one hand, it gives you something to talk about. But more importantly, it gives you an answer to every question about every past initiative. You don’t need to give a detailed account of whatever happened to the LIFT Act or the Green New Deal when your single answer to every question is, “We live in a world transformed by a pandemic, a global supply chain crunch, and the historical legislative actions of the Biden-Harris administration, and this seven-point agenda is the right answer for today’s problems.”

Voters are very forgiving of flip-flopping — Donald Trump has held every position under the sun because he’s a dangerous mountebank, and J.D. Vance used to think Trump was a dangerous mountebank. But they do like a clear message. And the groups, meanwhile, do need to stand up for themselves if you betray them. If you go one by one down the line, re-litigation every position ever taken, you are guaranteeing multiple negative news cycles, regardless of what you choose to stand behind and what you choose to flop away from. It’s much better to give the Etch-A-Sketch a single extremely vigorous shake and then write a new playbook. Or to rip the Band-Aid off in one fell swoop, if you like that metaphor better. People on the left won’t like it, but you can always tell them, accurately, that it is doesn’t actually accomplish anything to make unrealistic detailed legislative promises.

That’s the stuff you do to win primaries. But the primary is over, and the goal is to beat Trump, not give tons of long-winded answers about hypothetical legislation.