Attacks Redux
Much of the Republican case against Harris is the same as the case against Obama 16 years ago. The differences are instructive too.
Do you ever watch right-wing attacks on the current Democratic Presidential candidate and feel like you’ve seen it all before?
Well, a lot of it you have—in 2008, among other cycles. Even with a very different Republican candidate, and a substantially different conservative ecosystem, a lot of the arguments against Kamala Harris sound awfully similar to the ones made against Barack Obama. But not entirely.
In 2008, three rising stars in the conservative punditry jointly issued a “final argument” late in the McCain-Obama campaign. Explicitly intended to persuade undecided, non-extreme voters, the document was extremely popular within the right-wing blogosphere of the time, passed around widely with exhortations to share with independent-minded relatives and friends.
I was particularly interested in it at the time, because I was quite familiar with the work of all three writers—Guy Benson, Mary Catherine Ham, and Ed Morrissey—and considered them all smart, if perhaps hopelessly self-deluded, windows into the state of right-wing movement thinking. Their final argument was, I thought, a revealing articulation of what inside-the-bubble Republicans believed would resonate with people outside that bubble.
I’ve continued watching that right-wing echo chamber ever since, as it has changed and remained the same to various degrees. The three co-authors of that 2008 document remain active in the conservative marketplace. Ham is a Fox News contributor with syndicated columns and podcasts; Benson has a syndicated talk radio show and is an editor at Townhall.com; Morrissey blogs at Hot Air and hosts a podcast.
So, let’s go back to that October, 2008 argument—entirely a case against Obama, without even an attempt to say anything positive about McCain—and see how it matches up with today’s right-wing case against Kamala Harris.
The 2008 document covered the following key topics: Abortion; Taxes; Radical Associations; Foreign Policy Judgment; Disdain For The Heartland; The Race Card; and Lack Of Accomplishments. Much looks very familiar, but some does not.
What’s the same
With both Obama in 2008 and Harris in 2024, Republicans faced a Democrat promising to cut taxes on the middle class. In both cases, Republicans believed that those promises hid a radical egalitarianism that would hurt everybody. The 2008 closing argument cites Obama’s much-hyped exchange with “Joe the Plumber,” in which he supposedly revealed his socialist intentions by explaining the need to “spread the wealth around.” Trump’s frequent reference to “Comrade Kamala” is somewhat less subtle. Fascinatingly, the 2008 case also warns of Obama’s plan to raise capital gains taxes, which has recently emerged as a big criticism from the right about Harris’s economic policy.
Of course, the main criticism of Harris on economic policy centers on inflation and other failures, real or imagined, of the Biden-Harris administration. Appearing on Benson’s radio program after the September 10 debate, Ham’s main argument was that Trump should have criticized Harris more for her inability to say whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago.
Writing in mid-October, 2008, Ham, Benson, and Morrissey had a tougher case to make for Obama’s culpability in the unfolding economic crisis. But they made it anyway, via his supposed connections with community organizing entity ACORN. ACORN, they argued, in what was a common conservative belief at the time, “forced banks into issuing unwise mortgage loans to low-income individuals, setting the stage for the recent mortgage crisis that sent the economy into a tailspin.”
“Putting Obama in charge of cleaning up the mortgage mess would be akin to hiring an arsonist to put out a fire,” the three conservatives wrote. It took more of a stretch in that case, but ultimately it’s not much different from the current argument against putting Harris in charge of, as they see it, fixing what she and Biden broke.
Elsewhere in the 2008 document, details have changed but most of the basic arguments are similar. Under Foreign Policy Judgment, Obama is criticized for opposing the Iraq “surge” and saying he would meet with Iran “without preconditions”; for Harris substitute the Afghanistan departure and being insufficiently pro-Israel. The 2008 Disdain For The Heartland section begins by noting that “Obama was rated the most liberal United States Senator in 2007 by the non-partisan National Journal—farther left than… self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders.” Replace the year with 2019 and you have almost word-for-word the first major attack on Harris when she emerged as the nominee. Today’s Race Card section would surely be even longer than the couple of paragraphs in the 2008 version. As for Lack Of Accomplishments, I would argue that the right makes more of Harris’s inexperience than they did with Obama, despite her objectively much more impressive resume.
Missing migrants
What really jumps out about the 2008 document is what’s missing. There is no mention of immigration and border security, which is the top topic that the Trump campaign and right-wing influencers believe helps win them votes in 2024. That includes Benson, Ham, and Morrissey, who all regularly criticize the Biden-Harris administration for lax borders and warn of worse ahead if Harris wins.
It’s not that the topic wasn’t salient for conservatives 16 years ago—it had played a large role in the 2006 midterm elections, and most of the Republican primary candidates (Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani) hammered the issue hard in their efforts to gain support from the base. But unlike 2024, immigration “was almost nonexistent in the general election contest,” as the Migration Policy Institute wrote after the 2008 election.
A large part of that was the narrow ideological gap between McCain and Obama on the issue; both supported comprehensive immigration reform. Also, with a Republican President in office (George W. Bush, also a reform proponent), there was less of a clear path to scaremonger against Democrats as there is today. Still, it’s a bit surprising that it was so completely neglected.
Hushed on abortion
The trio talk much more these days about immigration than they do about abortion, which had been their lead topic in 2006. What’s changed, of course, is that Dobbs replaced Roe as the presiding law of the land. The reaction has made clear, even to most conservatives, that the issue now only hurts Republicans among swing voters.
Nevertheless, the 2006 document’s discussion of the issue sounds a lot like the case Trump and other Republicans make when they have to. Obama, according to that essay, was an extremist on the issue, supporting a bill that “would abolish bans on partial-birth abortion and parental notification laws nationwide while implementing taxpayer funded abortions.” He also, as Illinois Senator, voted against the “Born Alive Protection Act,” they wrote.
“Americans of good faith are divided on this issue” of abortion law, the three wrote, but “Obama’s extreme record” should concern even pro-choice voters. That’s the talking point on Harris (and pretty much every Democrat) today. The difference is the lack of eagerness to talk about it at all.
What about those associations
Many of us today joke about Sarah Palin’s “pallin’ around with terrorists” line, but at the time many on the right genuinely believed that this was a winning argument—and that McCain was making a big mistake by banning it from the campaign.
This is reflected in the closing argument, which devotes its longest and, I think, most impassioned section to Obama’s relationships with Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and (as noted above) the ACORN organization.
I’m a bit surprised that no similar case is being made about Harris. Even criticism of her 2020 support for raising bail money for arrested Black Lives Matters supporters, which I see fairly often in right-wing circles, doesn’t really lean into her being dangerously close to any incendiary BLM leaders. The usual attacks on controversial figures of the left, such as Rashida Tlaib or Alex (son of George) Soros are posed as generic Democratic Party problems, not as revelatory about Harris in particular.
Has this tactic gone out of favor? Or has nobody on the right been enterprising enough to find (or invent) connections between Harris and someone who can be portrayed as scandalous?
Maybe it’s yet to come. As we’ve seen with the recent round of anti-Haitian rhetoric, the Scariest Thing About Harris can easily change at a moment’s notice. Stay tuned.