Leave it to the astute minds at the Media Research Center to ferret out the leftist media spin in no time flat. A comment by ABC and former Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos caught the eye of Brent Baker over at MRC, who was able to call him out. With simple observation, Baker merely used the ABC program host’s own words to convict him: “Kamala Harris comes from the middle of the road, moderate wing of the Democratic Party.”
Alert the Fourth Estate
That anyone would claim Ms. Harris as a card-carrying moderate Democrat is reminiscent of the inimitable words of Mark Twain. “If you don’t read the newspapers,” Twain once quipped, “you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed.”
So, let us take a moment and dial back the rhetoric of the political class disguised as the unbiased Fourth Estate and look at the facts. What does an examination of Kamala Harris’ legislative record reveal?
GovTrack.us – an independent, non-partisan organization – studies all these things in detail. Here are a few pearls from its research on Joe Biden’s “moderate” running mate.
- Harris is ranked as one of the “most liberal U.S. Senators.”
- Harris joined bipartisan bills the least often compared to other Senate Democrats.
- Harris held the fewest committee positions compared to other Senate sophomores.
- Harris is ranked the third most absent in votes compared to all senators.
In her tenure as the junior senator from California, Ms. Harris introduced one bill that became law, which was co-sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). S.129: Saint Francis Dam Disaster National Memorial Act “provide[d] for the establishment of a national memorial and national monument to commemorate those killed by the collapse of the Saint Francis Dam on March 12, 1928, and for other purposes,” according to GovTrack. As you can deduce, the bill called for the design and construction of a memorial to commemorate the Saint Francis Dam Disaster of 1928.
We won’t bore you with details of this monumental tragedy and will assume those riveted by such a disaster can surf on over to Wikipedia for their own edification. Either way, this bill has not exactly been a political hot potato and doesn’t prove Ms. Harris is a rabid leftist. For that, we shall hop on over to her “ideology score.”
GovTrack uses a complicated matrix that is surprisingly “blind to actual information like what the legislation is about or what party each Member of Congress is affiliated with.” Instead, it uses a legislator’s record of co-sponsorship to “capture their left-right ideology.” If you drill it down to the basics, their complex system of horizontal and vertical vectors reveals the wisdom of what everyone’s mother always told them: “Who your friends are, tells a lot about you.” Harris’ ideology score is staggeringly left leaning.
From Both Sides Now
Ironically, some on the left don’t find Harris an ideologue. In an article for Mother Jones, author Kara Voght wrote, “In Harris, Biden finds an ideological equal—which is to say, someone who isn’t much concerned with ideology at all. Both Biden and Harris prefer the pragmatic to the principled, the politically feasible over the soaring ideal.” Meanwhile, Miranda Devine of the New York Post pegs Harris as a “gifted shapeshifter,” promoting the concept that Harris “will be whatever you want her to be.” “Like Biden, her moderate label is a phony play for swing states, but in this age, overloaded with hypocrisy as it is, it might work,” Devine opined.
But perhaps Harris is best summed up by the man we quoted near the beginning of this article – the gifted and astute Samuel Clemens, who wielded his ink pen much like the expert French swordsman Joseph Bologne. Clemens may have captured the essence of Kamala Harris when he wrote the following: “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
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Read more from Leesa K. Donner.
