'More of this!' Harris lauded for focus on 'smart' policy vs. Trump’s 'full blown catastrophe'

16 August 2024

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris sought to draw a sharp contrast between her own vision for the next four years and former President Donald Trump's ideas. And according to various experts on social media, the vice president's first major policy speech of the 2024 cycle is already making waves.

During her speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, Harris rolled out several specific proposals centered around a theme of lowering costs of basic necessities like food, housing and healthcare. Harris noted that the Tar Heel State is officially a battleground state in 2024, and frequently compared her ideas side-by-side with those of the former president, who also spoke in North Carolina earlier this week.

One key plank of her 2024 platform is making it illegal for grocery stores to artificially jack up the prices of food items. She reminded the audience about her time as California's attorney general, in which she spoke of cracking down on price gouging and saving consumers roughly $1 billion in the process.

"We all know that prices went up during the pandemic when the supply chains shut down and failed. But our supply chains have now improved. And prices are still too high," Harris said of grocery costs. "Many of the big food companies are seeing their highest profits in two decades."

Author and Texas A&M professor Jennifer Mercieca praised Harris for that statement, tweeting: "The prices are too damn high. Blame the Robber Barons." And Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) complimented Harris for her willingness to talk about housing costs for both renters and homeowners, calling it "the biggest chunk of most people’s budget every month."

"More of this!" Smith tweeted.

Harris spent part of the speech sharing her personal story about working as a McDonalds employee while she was in college to make extra spending money, while her mother "saved for well over a decade to buy a home" after being a renter for years. New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent tweeted that Harris was essentially giving voters "her version of Bill Clinton's story about coming from 'a place called Hope,'" while reminding them of where they were four years ago.

"It will be central in depicting her as a child of the middle class at the convention," Sargent wrote. He added that the vice president was also "correctly pointing out that Trump's last year in office actually happened and it was a full-blown catastrophe."

"We see that contrast clearly in many ways, including when it comes to how we think about the economy," she said. "So our country has come a long way since President Biden and I took office. At that time, we sadly remember the millions of Americans that were out of work. We were facing one of the worst economic crises in modern history. And today, by virtually every measure, our economy is the strongest in the world."

Dan Pfeiffer — a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama — expressed a similar sentiment, saying Harris sharing her story of self was "smart" in that she was "using her bio to build trust for her policies." He went on to say that while Harris "understands what American families are going through" and that "her family dealt with similar challenges," her speech underscored how she "will fight for people like you, while Trump fights for rich people like him."

Democratic consultant Kenneth Baer, who is another alumnus of the Obama White House, said Harris' speech was "some of the best delivery I've ever seen her give." He added that the vice president was "making a careful distinction" between small mom-and-pop businesses that "play by the rules" and massive multinational corporations that take advantage of working families.

"Keep up this theme; do it with immigration, crime, etc," he tweeted.

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