Wednesday Edition: The Real Kamala

There’s growing scrutiny over some inconsistencies in Kamala Harris’ positions. (Axios)

The latest: Harris, once opposed to the southern border wall, now supports spending hundreds of millions on it if elected president.

• At the DNC last week, the vice president said she’d sign a bipartisan bill that continues border wall funding using $650 million in unspent funds.

• One of the key architects of the bill, GOP Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, told Axios Harris’ support surprised him, considering she was nowhere to be found while negotiations were taking place earlier this year.

What she said: In 2020, Harris called Trump’s border wall “a complete waste of taxpayer money.”

• In 2019: "On the subject of transnational gangs, let's be perfectly clear. The president's medieval vanity project is not going to stop them.”

• In 2017: “Trump’s border wall is just a stupid use of money.”

Big picture: There’s a pattern here.

• Fracking: Harris initially supported a ban on fracking but now opposes it.

• Medicare for All: Harris once supported "Medicare for All," but her current campaign indicates she won’t push for it anymore.

• Gun buybacks: Harris endorsed a mandatory buyback of assault rifles in 2019 but has since backed away from this position.

• Bail reform: Harris has gone from saying cash bail needs to be more expensive to saying the system needs to be ended to her current ambiguous stance (“On the issue of cash bail, she believes that we need a system where public safety, not wealth, determines who should stay behind bars following an arrest. Anyone who is a danger to society should be detained regardless of how wealthy they are,” her campaign told Fox News this month).

• Marijuana: Harris opposed the legalization of recreational marijuana early in her career but later supported ending the federal ban on medical marijuana and admitted to using it herself during her 2020 presidential bid.

• EVs: While Harris’ stance on electric vehicle mandates has been described as more aggressive than President Biden’s, her campaign said yesterday she no longer supports such mandates.

National Review editor Rich Lowry’s take:

Bubba’s Two Cents

Politicians flip-flop (it’s not like Donald Trump or J.D. Vance’s positions haven’t “evolved”). But I think Lowry’s right that the risk you take with someone like Harris is you can’t take her current shift to the center at face value. Was Kamala faking it when she pandered to progressives during her first presidential bid? Or is she faking it now with her efforts to assure moderates that she’s not a far leftist? Who is the real Kamala?

On certain issues—cough, cough—abortion—Trump’s clearly just telling a constituency what it wants to hear. But, for better or worse, you know there are a package of policies that he seems to actually care about, like immigration, trade, or lower taxes and interest rates.

There's a lot of talk about the GOP's "economic populist" turn under Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, but Republican voters aren't fully embracing big government just yet. (Pew Research Center)

A new Pew Research Center survey: Trump supporters are more than three times as likely as Harris supporters to favor smaller government.

• Only 21% of Trump voters say government should do more to solve problems, compared to 76% of Harris voters.

• More than 7 in 10 Trump supporters say government aid to the poor does more harm than good.

Zoom out: Some have seen Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate as a sign the GOP is embracing big government and moving away from Reaganite, small-government principles.

• They view Trump and Vance as advocates for strong government intervention in the form of protectionism, infrastructure spending and aggressive antitrust enforcement.

Bubba’s Two Cents

Can you reconcile supporting Trump with being a small-government conservative? I think for the most part, yes. There’s no denying Trump’s more open to government intervention than other Republicans, but I think his supposed deviation from free market principles is a bit overblown.

In an interview with Bloomberg last month, the former president described “Trumponomics” as “low interest rates and taxes” along with deregulation, crackdowns on Big Tech, unleashing the crypto industry and curbing immigration. That’s quite the hodgepodge — some of it aligns with traditional GOP views on limited government and some of it doesn’t.

But I think Trump’s philosophy on the role of government is best understood as reform-minded rather than interventionist. For instance, when he talks about refusing to cut Social Security, he sounds an awful lot like a “limited government conservative”: “There’s so many things we can do. There’s so much cutting and so much waste in so many other areas, but I’ll never do anything to hurt Social Security.”

All policies and personalities aside, I believe the divide in America can best be boiled down to people who think the world is better off government directed, and those who believe things are better market driven.

Political dysfunction might be behind those pesky flight delays at U.S. airports. (Reason)

A new analysis by Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation: The New York/New Jersey metro area's airspace congestion causes up to 75% of all U.S. airline delays, and understaffing is a major problem.

• N90, the N.Y./N.J. air traffic control facility, operates with just 54% of the required certified controllers, leading to low productivity and high costs.

So why not just hire more people? A plan to reduce air traffic at N90 by shifting responsibilities to Philadelphia was stalled by political opposition, particularly from Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, and other New York lawmakers.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board last year:

Baltimore’s struggling public school system gives us a glimpse into broader challenges in American education. (National Review)

The data: Only 70.6% of Baltimore City Public Schools students graduated in spring 2023, a slight increase of 1.9 percentage points from 2022, but well below the statewide rate of 85.8%.

• 2023 state testing data showed that at 40% of Baltimore City High Schools, zero students achieved proficient scores in math.

• Baltimore, like many U.S. school systems, is struggling with chronic absenteeism in the aftermath of the pandemic.

• Nationwide, the share of chronically absent public school students increased from 13% in 2019-20 to 26% in 2022-23.

The catch-22: One response from educators in Baltimore and elsewhere have been programs like credit recovery, which allow failing students to retake coursework or complete extra work to stay on track toward graduation.

• But critics have claimed credit recovery is little more than a scheme designed to inflate graduation rates by giving students laughably easy busy work.

• A 2022 study found that while online credit recovery led to a rise in high-school graduation rates, it did not improve student learning, ultimately resulting in a wage gap over time between credit-recovery students and those who graduated through traditional means.

American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio: