Kamala Harris Is No Communist, Socialist, or Nixon
She wants to protect consumers from price-gouging. That’s not a Soviet plot.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS wants to punish companies for price gouging—but only food suppliers and grocery stores, and only if federal or state authorities investigate and determine that they have violated what her campaign calls “clear rules of the road.”
Reaction across the spectrum has run a mild to overheated gamut of negativity, with the proposal being called everything from counterproductive and “not sensible” to “Venezuelan-style” Nixonomics and “a heavy-handed socialist policy” that will fuel former President Donald Trump’s attacks on her as “Comrade Kamala” going “full Communist” by imposing “socialist price controls” that would cause rationing and hunger.
Give me a break, man, as President Joe Biden might say. Communist? Socialist? Nixonesque? Not even close.
“In our country both wholesale and retail prices are established by the government,” Soviet Finance Minister Vasily Garbuzov said in 1960. All of them. By fiat. And quite similar to what President Richard Nixon did eleven years later. “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States,” he said on August 15, 1971.
None of this is remotely akin to the modest scope and due process of what Harris has in mind, per her campaign: writing national rules “to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries,” and authorizing the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to investigate and penalize companies that break those rules.
Many states—those vaunted laboratories of democracy—already have laws that ban price-gouging. At its core, it’s simply consumer protection. And while we don’t yet know the details of the Harris plan, let alone how it would evolve when enacted or what impact it would have, as a political calculation it’s never a mistake to empathize with consumers during inflationary times.
Nixon lifted his price and wage controls right after he was re-elected in 1972. Harris announced her plan last week—less than a month after her sudden rise to the top spot on the Democratic ticket in a contest against Trump, who is manifestly unfit to serve and a proven danger to democracy.
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi helped engineer that candidate switchout, Harris slotted in for a flagging 81-year-old Biden, and it’s the Pelosi campaign mantra that comes to mind these days: Just win, baby. Plus, what’s wrong with politicians signaling in a visceral way that they feel people’s pain at the grocery store? Nothing.
Bill Clinton, the epitome of a feel-your-pain president, signaled both political moderation and emotional connection in two State of the Union speeches—1996 when he was running for re-election and 1997 after he had won a second term—by backing uniform requirements in public schools that wanted them. He argued they could help “break the hold of gangs and violence” and promote “discipline and order and learning” in classrooms.
By scale and historic import, Clinton’s school uniforms push didn’t rank among his administration’s most noteworthy achievements, yet it allowed him to relate to people on a personal, daily-life level, and that’s what Harris needs. The latest evidence came Sunday in a Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll, which found that while Harris leads Trump by a few points overall she trails him on the economy and inflation—the two top concerns cited by voters:
Joe Biden has not gotten the credit he deserves for his economic record. The U.S. economy on his watch has made a stellar recovery from the pandemic. Wages are up, unemployment is way down, the stock market is up, retail sales are up, inflation is down, and as of last week, small business applications were at a record high of 19 million since Biden and Harris took office.
Maybe the public hasn’t given Biden credit for all this because inflation has only just shown signs of subsiding. Or maybe it’s because of his age and general unhappiness about a Biden–Trump rematch. But part of it may be, as I have written, that Biden has been playing the long game—setting us up to fight climate change, compete with China, and bring manufacturing home to protect America against future global supply-chain disruptions.
And the investments have been targeted well: renewable energy, high-speed broadband, electric-vehicle battery plants and charging networks, a wave of future-forward manufacturing that studies show has gone largely to red and purple states and congressional districts. Biden will leave the whole country, not just the parts he likes or wins, more self-sufficient and better equipped to take care of the planet.
The concrete results in some cases won’t be apparent for years after Biden leaves office, but progress is happening now—high-speed internet proposals submitted and approved, new jobs coming online, semiconductor manufacturing projects advancing with federal and private-sector financing, and America on its way to producing 30 percent of the world’s semiconductor chips by 2032—up from zero.
Key parts of Biden’s Build Back Better plan largely fell by the wayside in 2022—most notably a care component that included free preschool, paid family and medical leave, child care subsidies, higher pay for home health care workers, an expanded child tax credit, and remedies for what even then was a crisis-level housing shortage. But Biden has not lost sight of any of this, and in fact he revived the family-relief provisions this past spring before exiting the 2024 race.
Harris, whose interest in such policies is longstanding, is now adapting and expanding on the care agenda in ways that mesh with today’s populist economics. She’s doing the same on housing and inflation, informed by her background as a prosecutor and attorney general who protected consumers and their interests, from privacy to home foreclosures.
This is the moment we’re in and Harris is seizing it. That’s the right thing to do in 2024, just as the right thing to do in 2020 was to defend democracy and fight for the soul of the nation. That’s how Biden defeated Trump four years ago and he’s been clear about his objective this year. Asked Friday what message he’ll give Democrats in his speech Monday, the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Biden answered with one word: “Win.”
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