Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was asked during the first vice presidential debate Wednesday what she and Joe Biden would do differently with regard to the coronavirus pandemic if elected this November. Harris didn’t have an answer.
Instead, she criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, calling it the “greatest failure” in recent history. But still, she could not name a single policy that she and Biden would introduce that President Trump had not already introduced.
Harris pointed to business closures, unemployment filings, and financial losses and suggested that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are to blame. But it was Trump who encouraged states to begin reopening as early as possible. It was Trump who signed two coronavirus aid packages to provide much-needed aid to the public. Trump stood by the national lockdown in March because, at the time, he had no other choice. We were facing an unprecedented crisis that we knew very little about, and a temporary quarantine was the best solution.
Harris and Biden would extend that shutdown if given the opportunity. Biden has already made that clear. He has said several times that if the health experts pushed him to shut the country down again to curb the spread of the coronavirus, he would do just that.
Another shutdown would cost thousands of more jobs, increase unemployment rates, and devastate certain industries. The economic consequences Harris named on stage would come back twofold if Biden were to go that route. But Harris doesn’t want to admit that because she and Biden have no real plan when it comes to the coronavirus. Everything they have proposed regarding this crisis has been a reaction to something Trump has said or done.
Which is why she couldn’t answer the question. She couldn’t say what she and Biden would have done or would do differently because she doesn’t know. And the truth is that there’s not much a Biden administration could do beyond what Trump’s administration has already done. The federal government is necessarily limited in scope, and the states have done much of the heavy lifting. So not only was Harris’s answer dodgy, but it was also dishonest. And she knows it.
