Republican endorsements, running to the right on foreign policy, an unambitious agenda of incremental change less important than how bad the other guy is. Where have we seen this before?
Okay, Democrats would say, but what about some of Harris’s policy announcements? Like her housing platform, for instance, which pledges to build three million homes and to give first-time homebuyers a grant of up to $25,000? Or what about her recent announcement that she would expand Medicare to cover home care services, vision, and hearing? Doesn’t that point to a different, more progressive policy–based direction than Clinton’s 2016 run, even if she barely talks about it?
The answer to which is, not really, because this platform is actually a major step backward from the Biden years. It’s true the sitting president often seemed reluctant to run forcefully on the populist agenda he had taken up as a way to make nice with Bernie Sanders voters, but that agenda was fairly ambitious: among other things, it featured universal pre-K, free community college (for two years), childcare subsidies, paid leave, Medicare expansion, and a more generous child tax credit. Everything but the last two are now out in Harris’s day one agenda.
Even her Medicare expansion is something of a step back from previous Democratic standard-bearers’ ambitions: Biden had promised to expand Medicare to dental, too, and lower its eligibility age to sixty, while even Clinton had offered to let people over fifty buy into the program (something her husband, nearly twenty years earlier, proposed).
But…