On October 25, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Norah O’Donnell of CBS’ 60 Minutes.
During the interview, O’Donnell lobbed numerous softball questions. (Shocking, I know.) However, she did broach one topic with a few hard-hitting inquires. That topic was socialism, as it relates to a potential Biden administration.
“The president made the case at the Republican Convention that your administration would be a Trojan horse for liberals. That AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren would actually be controlling policy, that this would become the most liberal administration in U.S. history,” O’Donnell said.
Biden responded, “He’d love to run against them, wouldn’t he? Mr. President, you’re running against Joe Biden. Joe Biden has a deep, steep, and successful record over a long, long time.”
What Biden neglected to state is that he is in lock-step, policy-wise, with many of the progressives and socialists O’Donnell mentioned.
For instance, the former vice president has promoted the radical Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force recommendations on his website.
The 110-page document, which includes “free college,” a $15 federal minimum wage, and several other liberal/socialist policies was designed by a Biden-Sanders team of policy “experts” to serve as the platform for Democrats and a Biden presidential administration in 2021. Despite Biden’s insistence that he is not a left-wing radical, the platform was drafted by many self-avowed socialists and radicals, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who is the co-chair of the “Combating the Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environmental Justice” section. That should, at the very least, cause some concern for those Americans who still think Biden is a “moderate.”
But that wasn’t the most important part of the interview. In their conversation, O’Donnell addressed Harris’s rather radical record.
“You’re very different in the policies that you’ve supported in the past,” O’Donnell said. “You’re considered the most liberal United States senator.”
Harris responded with a typical non-answer: “I … somebody said that and it actually was Mike Pence on the debate stage.” She proceeded to burst out laughing, for some reason.
To her credit, O’Donnell set the record straight, likely to Harris’s dismay. “Yeah. Well, actually, the nonpartisan GovTrack has rated you as the most liberal senator. You supported the Green New Deal, you supported Medicare for All. You’ve supported legalizing marijuana. Joe Biden doesn’t support those things. So are you going to bring the policies, those progressive policies that you supported as senator, into a Biden administration?”
Harris delivered another non-sequitur: “What I will do, and I promise you this, and this is what Joe wants me to do, this was part of our deal, I will always share with him my lived experience as it relates to any issue that we confront. And I promised Joe that I will give him that perspective and always be honest with him.”
Again, Harris failed to address O’Donnell’s straight-forward question, as she laughed nervously.
However, O’Donnell did not give up. She asked Harris an even more simple question: “And is that a socialist or progressive perspective?”
Harris, again laughing like a school girl, muttered, “No. No. It is the perspective of a woman who grew up a black child in America, who was also a prosecutor, who also has a mother who arrived here at the age of 19 from India. Who also, you know, l like hip hop. Like, what do you wanna know?”
The back-and-forth went on a little while longer, with Harris continually laughing and avoiding the questions asked by O’Donnell.
O’Donnell, like many Americans, is wondering what a Biden administration would actually do. To date, Biden has punted on whether or not he would pack the Supreme Court, among many other important issues, so it’s more than reasonable for her to ask basic questions about the ideology of two people who could become the next president and vice president of the world’s most powerful nation.
Americans, with less than a week before a monumental election, are seeking clarity on what a Biden administration would do in terms of policy. But, like they’ve been doing for months, Biden and his running mate continue to refuse to give clear answers.
Even more portentously, when confronted with a few simple questions about socialistic policies that she has unabashedly supported in the past, Harris nervously laughed repeatedly instead of answering whether she would promote them as vice president.
People laugh in serious situations for many reasons, be it anxiety, nervousness, or general discomfort. However, someone running for vice president of the United States, with a reasonable chance of becoming president, should not laugh at questions about policies that could have a huge impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Biden and Harris, for one reason or another, refuse to answer fundamental policy questions that every American has a right to know before he or she votes in an election that could have major repercussions.
Some things just aren’t funny. Socialism in America is certainly one of them.
PHOTO: U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris. By Gage Skidmore. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Chris Talgo ([email protected]) is the editorial director and a research fellow at The Heartland Institute, as well as a researcher and contributing editor at StoppingSocialism.com.
