You’d think, if this were a rational country, that Kamala Harris would be a shoo-in for the presidency, if only because her opponent is, according to ex-Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, “a fascist to the core.” But alas no. The rap against Harris is that she’s not talking enough about policy, that she doesn’t have a vision, and that she’s not sufficiently separating herself from Joe Biden.
But last week she did something historically bold that checked all three boxes…and guess what: Barely anyone paid attention.
You gotta wonder why. But read on, because I know why.
Harris pitched a plan to vastly expand Medicare, to make long-term home health care for seniors a standard benefit. Currently, more than 14 million families are financially and emotionally stressed by the need to pay for and care for aging loved ones who live at home. (That number is expected to hit 24 million within the next six years.) Harris pointed out, the burden is especially heavy for “sandwich generation” adults “who are right in the middle,” paying out of pocket to help aging parents while dealing in their own households with children. Harris wants to lift their burden with federal help. And it just so happens that her idea has landslide support in the polls – 68 percent, according to an AP-NORC survey in 2022.
But if you haven’t heard about her common-sense proposal, perhaps it’s because it was so lightly covered in the mainstream media. I counted one now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t story in The Washington Post, one in The New York Times (which did quote a public policy professor who rightly said that Harris’ proposal “is what we need in national leadership to address a need among the population that has been disregarded for much too long”), and zero coverage on the NBC, ABC, or CBS nightly news shows.
Why? Three intertwining reasons:
* The press says it wants more policy, but it thinks policy is boring. It’s much easier to cover the horserace polls. And for the broadcast media in particular, policy is a drag because it’s often tough to present it in visuals.
* The press wants Harris to be bold, but as soon as she proposes something bold, it says the bold plan will never get enacted because Congress won’t like it, so why cover it?
* The press wants to know “How will you pay for it?” – the standard question that Democrats get whenever they want to expand a domestic program, the kind of question you rarely hear when the Pentagon’s spending spikes or when Trump promises to deport 20 million people. Harris says she’d pay for her caregiving reform in part by slapping taxes on companies that shift jobs overseas and by negotiating more prescription drug discounts under Medicare (thus freeing up sizable Medicare bucks for her reform plan), but The Washington Post said that sounded “hazy,” so, end of story.
But the details can wait. Harris was getting heat for not talking policy, for not being visionary…fine, she just pitched the most sweeping plan for family caregiving that any candidate has ever offered. She basically told sandwiched adults, “I’m on your side.” She’s trying to address a domestic crisis that will only get worse in the years ahead if not addressed. She’s trying to spark a policy conversation about something substantive. Isn’t this the kind of stuff we want our presidential candidates to talk about? Or are we too numb to care?