In her first campaign rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris took aim at her Republican rival and a widely derided Trump-linked platform that provides a blueprint for the next GOP administration.
“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” she said in remarks from Milwaukee on Tuesday, just two days after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed his vice president.
Harris, who secured enough delegate pledges to clinch the Democratic Party’s nomination within a little over 24 hours after announcing her candidacy, linked Trump to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-backed plan for his administration, and one that his campaign is now furiously trying to distance itself from.
“He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. We know we got to take that seriously,” Harris said. ”Can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages.”
The plan proposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, tax breaks to corporations that will force “working families to foot the bill” and abolishes the Affordable Care Act, which “will take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions,” Harris said.
I would just like to point out that this is an example of the tried-and-true rhetorical technique of shrugging off issues with a dismissive “that’s not new.” We see politicians and spokespersons do it all the time, because, maddeningly, it works.
But, it doesn’t actually matter whether it’s new, does it? Couple things: The Heritage Foundation has put out a similar document every election cycle for decades, but the contents have changed; this iteration could be (is!) much, much worse. Even if Heritage had been putting out the same plan all along, and we didn’t object then, well, we can still object now. We don’t have to keep making the same mistakes in the future just because we made them in the past.