The fall election will turn on three major issues: inflation, immigration and Israel. Rebuilding our military, confronting Communist China and seeking accountability for the disastrous learning loss brought about by the terrible closure of schools during COVID-19 should matter to most voters but will not. (The soaring antisemitism in our country and especially on campus is part of the broader "Israel" issue.)
Former President Donald Trump has a record as president on all three of the big issues. Vice President Kamala Harris has a record only on the border and illegal immigration but Friday she helpfully identified herself as unprepared to handle inflation while she has already outed herself as anything but a friend to Israel.
A dozen eggs cost $1.51 in 2020, the last year of the first term of Donald Trump. A barrel of oil averaged below $40.
With a very few exceptions, the price of eggs runs $4 to $7 and oil is double what it was four years ago. The two prices are, of course, connected. Everything to do with the price of eggs, from the care and feeding of chickens through to the packaging of the eggs and their shipment to stores and the operations of outlets from roadside stands to small markets to Costco costs much more because of the inflation in oil prices and all energy.
The Biden-Harris dive into "the Green New Deal" not only flooded the country with money while production and supply lines struggled to repair the damage done to the supply chain to the world by the COVID-19 virus, it also did so as it signaled a war on fossil fuels. Oil markets, which always look forward, priced in the anti-oil policies of the Green Democrats, and the oil markets have never recovered.
Thus, the classic "too much money chasing too few goods" took over and caused inflation that was exacerbated by the spike in fossil fuel costs driven by a market wary of Biden-Harris hostility to domestic production.
Kamala Harris told us candidly in 2019, when she ran a spectacularly unsuccessful campaign for president, that she would absolutely ban all fracking just as she told us she would "absolutely, on day one" close all detention centers for illegal immigrants.
A print statement from her campaign assures us that’s all in the past now, but without one interview in the month since Biden withdrew from the race, why would anyone believe her campaign staff on these enormous flip-flops and not her record compiled during two decades as a San Francisco left-wing Democrat?
The past month has in fact seen a steady flow of printed statements by the Harris campaign purporting to repudiate her 2019 campaign and her voting record in the Senate. But how did she open her 2024 campaign? With a call for price controls, a notoriously bad idea and one that has been tried and failed before in post-war America, under President Richard Nixon from 1971 to 1974. Harris reverted to her core orientation: not merely a big government liberal, but an enormous-sized government radical.
The Harris campaign isn’t serious. The consequences of a Harris presidency would be.
It took Harris 25 days to come up with her campaign’s first big policy proposals, the major one of which turned out to be proven failures from 50 years ago while the second was simply gas for the inflation fires.
When Nixon tried wage-and-price controls in 1971 and again in 1973, they were a disaster, the low point of domestic policy of his presidency. There’s a reason why the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda California does not have an exhibit of wage-and-price controls. Though Nixon tasked very smart people with trying to make them work — Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George Schultz, John Connally, Arthur Burns and more — they failed miserably.
Because price controls cannot work and never have, not even in police states. They produce only shortages, black markets and thousands of bureaucrats charged with enforcing the price controls.
PBS did a look back at that doomed policy from the early 1970s. "Government officials were now in the business of setting prices and wages," the report noted about the second plunge into government price-setting in 1973 after the first round of controls in 1971. "This time, however, it was apparent that the control system was not working."
The PBS assessment continued: "Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets. Nixon took some comfort from a side benefit that George Shultz, at the time head of the Office of Management and Budget, identified. ‘At least,’ Shultz told the president, 'we have now convinced everyone else of the rightness of our original position that wage-price controls are not the answer.' Most of the system was finally abolished in April 1974."
Wage-and-price controls failed in the 1970s because bureaucrats cannot outthink free markets. It’s not a credible position to advocate for price controls under any guise anymore. But Harris pitched price controls as her very first explicit volley of policy.
The second was a proposal to gift $25,000 to anyone who wanted to buy a first home. This is an astonishing proposal — and astonishingly stupid — as the last thing the American economy needs is a repeat of subsidized entry into the housing market of the sort that the sub-prime mortgages of the pre-2008 world featured.
Of course, California has had a "housing crisis" for three decades and nowhere more severe than San Francisco where Harris made her political career, so it is not surprising that Harris would march out into public for the first time with a doomed-to-fail proposal to spend vast sums on targeted voters, one doomed to fail at great cost.
The federal government cannot successfully build "housing units." Only the private sector can follow market trends, efficiently and successfully bring large numbers of new homes and apartments to planning departments, and only local governments can approve housing starts. (The tiny exceptions to this rule — public housing projects, shelters for homeless or subsidized group homes for the disabled — have minimal impact on the national housing market.) If even one serious home builder was involved in the development of Harris’ second major policy proposal, they should identify themselves. Don’t hold your breath.
Harris’ first two policy proposals will exacerbate inflation, and she does not appear to know it. The Financial Times succinctly summarized the shocked reactions of economists in the free world: "Democrats on defensive after Kamala Harris’ economic plans poorly received" ran the headline. "Cool response to price-gouging pledge complicates vice-president’s bid to win trust on inflation," was the subhead.
Harris, already on tape after tape defending Bidenomics, had one shot at distancing herself from the ruinous economic policy of the Biden-Harris years. She face-planted.
On immigration, Harris has a record from which she cannot run but on which she does not want to run. Too bad. It’s her record.
In March 2021, the AP reported that "President Joe Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem."
"When she speaks, she speaks for me," Biden said at the time, citing Harris’ past work as California’s attorney general as making "her specially equipped to lead the administration’s response," according to AP.
"Harris is tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders, administration officials said," the AP’s report continued. "She’s also tasked with developing and implementing a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries."
"A senior administration official said Harris' role would focus on ‘two tracks’" NBC News added at the time. "[B]oth curbing the current flow of migrants and implementing a long-term strategy that addresses the root causes of migration. Cabinet members, including the secretary of state, are expected to work closely with Harris on these issues." (Emphasis added.)
Harris failed in spectacular fashion as "border czar" and has sought to make the fact that Biden did not use the formal title "border czar" the primary issue in campaign coverage of the border in an attempt to divert attention from her primary responsibility for the consequences of her hapless tenure as point person on border enforcement. As president, she would be far worse than Biden on the border, for progressive activists have long been vocal on the need to abandon border enforcement as a priority.
The national security issues for the fall should focus on the Chinese Communist Party and its global ambitions and on rebuilding our military after four years of neglect. On Israel, Harris’ decision to boycott Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress and then to use the language of "the resistance" among pro-Hamas activists after her private meeting with the leader of the Jewish State confirms what is in fact already certain: Harris will be America’s first explicitly anti-Israel president.
Former President Barack Obama designed a catastrophic appeasement of the Iranian regime which still torments the Middle East and that failed completely. Biden sometimes exercises his muscle memory of when the Democratic Party could be counted on to support Israel quickly and comprehensively, but just as often — and more recently — forgets that traditional support for Israel and indulges the Obamian impulse to blame Israel for defending itself against the rogue regime in Tehran.
No American who supports Israel can deceive themselves on this point: Harris and her team are even more radical than Biden’s and Obama’s, and she and they would isolate Israel and make it more vulnerable to Iran and its many proxies.
On the "big three issues," facts are stubborn things. I’ve called this the "Eggs Election" on air because it’s the easiest price point aside from the price at the pump that large numbers of voters can relate to. Revisit the top of this column: A dozen eggs averaged $1.50 in 2020. Today it is very rare to find any locale where the same dozen will cost less than $4 a carton, and often much more. Young families especially run through eggs as a staple.
The Green New Deal pumped trillions into an overheated economy and the cost of everything, but especially food soared. That’s because it requires energy to produce and transport food. That’s it. "Supply chain disruptions" have long ceased to persuade any consumer on the topic of prices. A barrel of oil averaged less than $40 in 2020 because Trump had unleashed domestic production, stood solidly behind fracking, wanted the Key Stone Pipeline. Oil is often more than double that today and rarely barely less than $75 a barrel.
There’s the explanation for food prices: Massive spending to juice demand with a heavy hand halting robust energy production. That was the perfect storm for prices, and the Federal Reserve fought back with the only tool it had: hiking interest rates, which crushed the hopes of would-be new home buyers.
Harris will double or triple down on her anti-oil, anti-coal, anti-fracking and anti-natural gas radicalism. It is in her DNA to be anti-oil and natural gas. This is a recipe for more price hikes which price controls will not stem but rather exacerbate as shortages become obvious and the classic "too few goods along with too much money" takes over again.
Americans couldn’t afford the first Green New Deal and could not weather a second. The electorate does not want price controls or expanding government. It favors the production of domestic energy. And it stands broadly and vociferously behind Israel and is dismayed by the on-again-off-again sham that Biden-Harris has orchestrated when it comes to support for Israel over the months since 10/7.
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A starker choice is hard to imagine between going left and farther left still under Harris or back to the Trump economy combined with the full-throated words and deeds backing Israel that marked Trump’s tenure.
Harris has closed the polling gap created by Biden’s manifest decline, but focus on her agenda has just begun. She is the most radical major party candidate in modern America. Anyone who has followed her career, her roots in San Francisco politics, her voting record in the Senate and her presidential campaign in 2019 knows this.
She and her team are now engaged in a great effort at misdirection, but it cannot help but display its leader’s real self, as she already has done on Israel, price controls and massive federal spending in pursuit of electoral power.
Her election would be catastrophic for the country and that doesn’t even contemplate her scores of judicial appointments or reduction in defense spending. Donald Trump has a record. Its strengths were on deregulation, stable prices, energy independence and energy exports and support for Israel. The evasions by Harris, her attempted repudiation of everything she campaigned on in 2019, and her manifest insecurity — leading to her refusal to speak to the press — tell all.
Harris would never have won the nomination had President Biden not stepped aside in the fashion he did and at the time forced upon him by his disastrous debate and obvious physical decline. Harris’ radical politics are just as obvious as was Biden’s infirmity, and legacy media is covering up her radicalism just as it covered Biden’s slide into incoherence.
What is obvious: She ought never to be president. The country and its allies simply cannot afford that.
Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
