No, Kamala Harris cannot ‘flip the script’ on the border

NO, KAMALA HARRIS CANNOT ‘FLIP THE SCRIPT’ ON THE BORDER. You may have seen reports that Vice President Kamala Harris, currently running for president without an agenda, plans to “flip the script” on the border. “Harris tries to flip the script on Trump on the border during raucous Georgia speech,” NPR reported after the vice president’s first rally, in Atlanta, on July 30. “She tried to flip the script on one of her most vulnerable issues in this election, immigration,” reported CNN. “Harris has tried to flip the script on the Republican attacks on her immigration record,” the wrote Washington Post.

You get the idea. The Harris strategy, if it can be called that, is to find a way to avoid blame for the Biden-Harris administration’s welcoming, encouraging, and accommodating more than 10 million illegal and unvetted border crossers who have entered the United States since Harris took office . The migrants have spread into cities and towns across the country, burdening municipalities struggling to house and feed them. Some have committed horrendous crimes. Culturally, on top of the nation’s existing immigration process, it is a bad idea to let in so many unassimilated migrants so quickly, since it overwhelms the country’s ability to turn them into Americans. And most fundamentally, the border rush represents an offense against the nation’s sovereignty and the rule of law.

Large majorities of voters disapprove of the work Harris has done to make the border the disaster it has become since 2021. Approval ratings for the Biden-Harris handling of the border are routinely in the 30s and sometimes dip into the high 20s. An approval rating that low usually means a policy appeals to the core supporters of one political party and to no one else.

Harris’s open border policy — remember, she has played a key role in border affairs in the last 3 1/2 years — represents an enormous change from the policies of the last Democratic president, Barack Obama. In 2005, Obama said, “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and legally to become immigrants to this country. In 2021, as the Harris border stampede was accelerating, Obama said, “We’re a nation-state. We have borders. The idea that we can just have open borders is something that… as a practical matter, is unsustainable.”

To be brief: The Biden-Harris border is a disaster entirely of the president’s and vice president’s making. That won’t change. One cannot “flip the script” on a disaster.

Nevertheless, there are some in the nation’s press who appear eager to help Harris pull it off. After Harris’s rally in Arizona, Politico published a news account headlined, “Harris promises to go tough on border security.” The straight-faced opening paragraph of the story reported that Harris “promised to fight for ‘strong border security’” and attacked former President Donald Trump “for killing immigration legislation that would have curtailed asylum.” Harris’s words, Politico said, were “part of an aggressive effort by the Harris campaign to flip the issue of immigration and border security, long a political liability for Democrats and the vice president in particular.”

Now, why has the issue of immigration and border security long been a political liability for Harris in particular? The article did not say. But here is the answer: because she opened the nation’s southern border and allowed more than 10 million migrants to cross illegally and further allowed millions of them to stay.

Harris based her Arizona remarks on a jaw-dropping new ad she released the same day. Here is the entire text:

Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border. As vice president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades. And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.

The extent to which Harris, as attorney general of California, “took on” international drug cartels and gangs is unclear. But notice that the next item mentioned in the ad is Harris’s support for the failed border bill in 2024. Harris waited through 2021, 2022, and 2023, until the beginning of 2024, which just happened to be an election year — Harris waited, while millions crossed the border illegally, to decide that she would become tough on the border. And now she promises to hire “thousands more border agents,” most of whom, it is safe to say, will be used to accommodate, rather than stop, the flow of migrants. And then: “Fixing the border is tough.” Yes, it is — and it is particularly tough if you, personally, played a huge role in screwing it up.

The Harris border episode shows the futility of the whole notion of “flipping the script.” To use a hypothetical example: Could Trump “flip the script” on abortion? In an appeal to undecided voters, could he make an ad for some swing states claiming that he has been a steady protector of abortion? That he would, in fact, be a far more effective protector than Harris, who he said did not “walk the walk” on the issue? Wouldn’t some Democrat think: “Hmmm, Trump did more than any other person to reverse Roe v. Wade — and with a record like that, he can’t just ‘flip the script’ on abortion. It doesn’t work that way.” A candidate with an indelible record on an issue can’t just say the word and purport to be the opposite, even if some biased or credulous reporters go along. When it comes to Harris and the border, the script can’t be flipped.