The Biden camp has, to a degree, put up a good block against Donald Trump’s “law and order” themes by picked a vice presidential pick who was known as a highly aggressive prosecutor in California. The Tulsi Gabbard confrontation just highlights how law and order Harris was.
It won’t really do for the President to attack Harris on her campaign rhetoric when her actual record is what it is as an Attorney General.
But there is a perfect way to pivot. Make it about fairness and justice.
Embrace criminal justice reform that President Trump himself signed into law. I give you this from the New York Times.
Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.
Consider her record as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Ms. Harris was criticized in 2010 for withholding information about a police laboratory technician who had been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” her work and stealing drugs from the lab. After a memo surfaced showing that Ms. Harris’s deputies knew about the technician’s wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harris’s indifference to the systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.
Read that bold portion again.
Or consider this from the New York Times:
Assistant prosecutors were quoted saying that Ms. Harris had pressured them to take weak cases to trial in an attempt to look tough on crime as she prepared to run beyond the liberal city.
How many people went to prison to advance Kamala Harris’s career?
The ads write themselves. Donald Trump believes in justice. Kamala Harris fought for injustice. Donald Trump believes justice must be fair. Harris propped up an unfair system stacked against the poor just to advance her career.
Donald Trump wants bad people in jail. Kamala Harris wants poor people in jail.
A quick pivot on this highlighting Donald Trump signed legislation to let out of jail the very sorts of people Harris was throwing in jail to build her career could make this law and order campaign about justice vs. injustice and take a lot of wind out of the Democrats’ sails.
After all, a whole lot of the very people who want the public to ignore Kamala Harris’s record from just a decade ago also want to tear down Thomas Jefferson’s statute. Make the Biden campaign own her record as candidate willing to throw poor black men in jail to make herself look tough and then forced them to stay in jail past their sentences to provide cheap labor for California.
The record is there.
Will the Trump campaign dare do this?
Some would counter that it takes the attacks away from Biden. But the majority of the public doesn’t believe Biden is going to stick around anyway. So make it about Harris and then ask why Biden would pick someone so committed to the injustice of wrongfully keeping people in jail.
Good suggestion Erick. But Trump should also focus on Harris support of the Minneapolis Freedom Fund, which bailed out a suspect who shot at police, a woman accused of killing a friend, and a twice-convicted sex offender. It is not that Harris is strong/weak on criminal prosecution, but rather that she strongly prosecuted people with minor crimes who didn't deserve it, and she now supports not prosecuting violent rioters who do deserve being prosecuted. As with Biden, she is completely wrong on the meaning of law and order.
Erick, you see to be attempting to politically advise Trump. Why?