(New York) Kamala Harris and Donald Trump seem to still be in the Olympic spirit. These days, they are competing for the gold medal in “flip-flopping,” the discipline of political weathervaning. The top step of the podium will go to the one who can pass off their about-faces as genuine change.
The label of “flip-flopper,” it should be remembered, can be damaging to a presidential candidate. In 2004, for example, Republican President George W. Bush and his allies used it devastatingly against their Democratic rival, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Kerry cemented his reputation as a weather vane by declaring, regarding a supplemental budget for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, “I actually voted for the $87 billion and then voted against it.” He never quite recovered.
Twenty years later, it is the turn of Donald Trump and his allies to use the same label to undermine the Democratic opponent. It must be said that there is no shortage of material.
Eager to place herself at the center of the political spectrum, Kamala Harris has abandoned several of the progressive, even radical, positions that she defended in 2019 during her first presidential campaign.
For example, the Democratic presidential candidate no longer supports decriminalizing illegal border crossings between the United States and Mexico. She no longer opposes fracking, a key issue in the key state of Pennsylvania. She no longer supports eliminating private health insurance. This list is not exhaustive.
Which is why CNN reporter Dana Bash asked the question in Harris’ first interview since launching her current presidential campaign: “Generally speaking, how should voters view some of the changes you’ve made? Is it because you’re more experienced now, and you’ve learned more? Is it because you ran for president in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you’re saying now is going to be your policy going forward?”
“I think the most important and significant aspect of my perspective and my policy decisions is that my values have not changed,” the vice president initially responded. Later, regarding fracking, she added: “We can grow and develop a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
Donald Trump and his Republican allies concluded from this interview that Kamala Harris was still a “radical.” Didn’t she repeat three times rather than once that her values had not changed?
The delicate question of abortion
The history of political recantations teaches us that voters can tolerate or even understand them depending on the circumstances. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama was accused of flip-flopping on several issues, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, campaign financing and wiretapping, among others. He denied these accusations. At the time, one newspaper summed up the situation in an article with the following headline: “On the campaign trail, one man’s pragmatism is another man’s about-face.”
The Democratic senator from Illinois had obviously survived the label that had weighed down John Kerry’s campaign. In the end, his opposition to the Iraq war and his personification of change had prevailed in the minds of voters.
But will Donald Trump also be able to make people forget his rapid and spectacular about-faces on abortion? Reminder: last Thursday, the Republican presidential candidate denounced Florida’s law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. “That’s too short. There has to be more time,” he told an NBC News reporter.
PHOTO JASON ANDREW, THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
Donald Trump, last Friday, at an event in Washington
Does this mean that he intended to vote “yes” in November in the Florida referendum that aims to overturn this law and to enshrine in the state constitution the right to abortion until the viability of the fetus or to protect the health of the mother?
“I will vote for the need for more than six weeks,” he replied.
The statement dismayed Donald Trump’s allies in the anti-abortion movement.
“So President Trump clearly doesn’t want to be pro-life anymore,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life America, said on X. “We need to demand that Trump reconsider his position.”
The next day, after other similar denunciations, Donald Trump made an about-face, promising to vote “no” in the Florida referendum. Which did not prevent him from renewing his criticisms concerning the ban on abortion after six weeks.
Clearly, the former president is torn between his desire to appease anti-abortion activists and his desire to protect himself from the political fallout of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the ruling. Roe v. Wade on abortion.
“My administration will be very supportive of women and their reproductive rights,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on August 23, as if he had not helped reduce or eliminate those rights in several states through the appointment of three conservative justices to the Supreme Court.
Democrats argue that voters will not be fooled. Republicans say the same about Kamala Harris’s about-faces. It remains to be seen which of the two presidential candidates will reach the top step of the podium in the political discipline of “flip-flop.”