FO Podcasts Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, has a biracial background and grew up partly in Canada. She had a successful legal career in California, where she became attorney general and later a U.S. senator. Harris is known for being tough on crime and for her progressive policies, including support for Medicare for All and a nationwide ban on fracking. However, her presidential campaign struggled to gain momentum and her staff turnover rate has been high. She is now running alongside Joe Biden in the 2020 election. you Welcome to EPO Podcast. With me is Christopher Roper-Shell again. As you know, he is a Republican from Texas. He served on Capitol Hill for 11 years. So he will offer us a completely fair, extremely impartial, pre-balanced view of Kamala Harris. And we are here to discuss Kamala Harris. Welcome, Christopher. Thank you for that very fair and balanced assessment of my background. I do promise to be my fairest, but yeah, let's dive into it. So we are now going to talk about the dark lady, Kamala Harris. As dark as me, perhaps. You know, I'm Indian too. I mean, she's half Indian. So she is what we would call a person of color, right? People of color. I think I qualify too. Maybe that's a jolly good thing. Anyway, maybe it's not. Let's discuss jokes apart. Kamala Harris is spectacular. When it comes to fundraising and even in the polls, she's now the presidential nominee. We've had an eventful few days. Financial Times is in front of us. No, this is not an advertisement for the Financial Times. They have not paid us a cent. They should. Anyway, but we have it in front of us and it tells us that Harris raises $200 million in first week of record shattering election campaign. And $81 million of that was in the first 24 hours. That's a heavy haul. All right. So much so for all the money she's bringing in, reeling in, and now she's rolling in cash. But apart from all the riches in her campaign, give us an idea. Paint us a picture of Kamala Harris. Who is she? Well, some history is instructive. She has a biracial background. Her Indian born mother was a breast cancer researcher and her Jamaican father was a Stanford economist. She was born in Oakland, spent some years in Illinois, then back to California. Her parents divorced when she was seven. And then her teen years from 12 years old on were spent in Canada with her mother. She did her first year at university in Canada and then she transferred to Howard, which is a historically black university. In Washington, D.C. no less. Washington, D.C. That's right. So do you have mutual friends? No, Harris and I do not have. Well, no, the ones I would know would be a bit younger. But I see because you're a hill rat. You've lived in Washington forever and you do have some Democrat friends. You don't know why. All right. All right. You've just just barred yourself from the Republican primary. Friends are friends. Oh, jolly good. So she you've told us that she is biracial and she grew up partly in Canada and she went to Harvard University. What does she do after that? Well, she begins a legal career in Washington. No, no. In California. She. Where does she go to law school? I don't know off the top of my head where she went to law school, but she graduated and she began a career in law. She held a variety of positions, probably her career in law in San Francisco, Los Angeles, in the Bay Area. We're going to get to the Bay Area stuff shortly. You know, something that it's kind of everybody knows, but few people say she had a boyfriend around age 30 and her boyfriend was Willie Brown, who was speaker of the California Assembly. And he kind of plucked her from obscurity. She had several jobs. I'm not saying she wasn't qualified. I have no idea. But what was important is he introduced her to a lot of people who could help her fundraise. She said he was the speaker of the California State Assembly. Correct. Where was he from? I have no idea where he was from. He's quite a character. Do you know? No, I was looking at you to educate us. I mean, maybe I should be speaking to Glenn. You would have all the juicy details. Oh, dear. No, no. But he did terrible. The younger boss doesn't measure up to the older boss. I don't know that Glenn would know where that guy was from, but he is quite a character. You want to bet? Well, he would be in the intelligence business. But at 90 years old, he's really is endorsing Kamala. And so at any rate, he's still alive. He is still alive. So yeah, he's black, white, Mexican. I just I saw a picture of me. I would guess black. So at any rate, she lost her political career in 2003 as a little known prosecutor. And she was the same year as the Iraq war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. And so she I mean, I wouldn't compare the two. So it was a great year. Two great things happened. Kamala Harris joined her political career and George Bush Jr. invaded Iraq. I'll leave you to draw the parallels. Exactly. But she defeated a popular incumbent who was San Francisco district attorney and a liberal icon. And Harris ran a campaign stating pretty flatly that. That the sitting district attorney had a pretty low success rate in his prosecutions. So basically, she took the same slogan, tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, something like that. She did. And to be fair, given his low conviction rate and said he was soft on crime, she would be tougher once she won. She did substantially improve the conviction numbers, I want to say, by something like 25 or 30 percent. It was it was notable. She moved on from there. Well, just as you said, she was notable. A storm has broken out. Indeed. In Georgetown, which is older than the oldest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. predates Washington, D.C., it's named after George, King George. I don't know whether the first or the second or the third. I've forgotten. I'm losing my memory. Speaking of the madness of King George. Exactly. So it was named after King George, not George Washington. And the heavens have opened up as Mr. Christopher Rupert Shell. That's his lyrical about Kamala Harris. Well, at any rate, she had a bit of a rocky start with her relationship with the police. She had a case. I thought for a moment you were going to say a relationship with Willie Brown. No, that that I guess eventually that hit the skids. But Willie's still supporting her. At any rate, she she's trying to find her, as you said. She's backing her up. Attorney General, she became attorney general from 2011 to 2017. At that time, you have to remember that was post-crisis and she was engaged in what a lot of people were doing, sue and settle. And she was suing the banks and then settling and getting big settlements. She launched an investigation into ExxonMobil over its carbon emissions. In 2019, she endorsed a nationwide ban on oil and gas fracking. And it's worth noting that she's on the record saying she would ban all offshore drilling as well. She instituted an implicit bias program when that was sort of the brand new thing. So that's her California career. Pretty effective prosecutor. Yes, she she did. She was affected, certainly. And she she seemed to be reasonably middle of the road in terms of certain things. Some more progressive factions wanted her to take various measures. At times she was resistant to them. But she definitely upped the conviction rate when she first began in 2004. So, you know, that's what she did in California. Then she became a U.S. senator for California. Now, I think it's important to note that Kamala came up through the legislature, came up through a sort of legal career as opposed to the legislature. So once she got into politics, her instincts were effectively base pleasing and not very nuanced. At the same time, I don't blame her. I mean, she's a California Democrat senator. But this, in some ways, has come back to haunt her. Her Senate career principally garnered publicity when she aggressively questioned some of Trump's appointees, rarely voting for them, in particular. That might help her with the elections. I agree. I'm going to get into why she's taken some pretty decisive views that may hurt her. But she went after now sitting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was appointed. She ran on a platform of Medicare for all, guaranteed income, tax credits for renters who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, a bill that would pay tuition for state schools if you made less than $125,000, a lot of big government programs. So a big spending Keynesian sort of economic policymaker. I would say Keynesian, I should take that back because Keynes said spend in times of trouble and save in times of plenty. So I take that back. Yes, she's not a counter cyclical. That's not fair to Keynes, but basically a big spending policymaker. So she then ran for president. It did not go well. She had one exchange with Biden during a debate where she really went after him. She seemed to be the thing of the moment. She had a good fundraising first day, but then she quickly faded. And why? Well, she faded because she tethered herself. At that time, there were the sort of moderates and progressives who were running for president. She kind of decided she would be a more progressive candidate. But you've got to remember, that field was crowded with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, household names. And you're not going to out Bernie Bernie and out Warren Warren. So her campaign really struggled to find a message. And she also was horribly disorganized, ran a campaign that led to any number of staffs doing very public mic drops as they left. And that is, by the way, a bit of a calling card. Her staffs have generally been disasters. Her vice presidential staff of the 47 staffers who have been with her in the first three years, all but four left. She has a 92% attrition, quit, whatever you want to call it rate. So let me get this right, 47 to full? Yes, that's right. Yeah. Only several have stuck around. So she doesn't stop contrast to Joe Biden because people stick around Joe Biden forever. And Joe never fires. I don't know how much Kamala fires, but but people generally leave. It's a well-known office you don't want to be in. Why? Well, for one, she doesn't read her briefs and she commonly berates staff when things don't go well. I see. She throws files in their faces. Have no idea. I have no idea. So hurl them to the ground and kick them in the ribs. I just know she's, you know, whereas Hillary was known to read her briefs and was really steeped in the facts. Harris does not do her homework at times, it is said, and routinely gets angry at staff when things don't go well. But how public is this knowledge of Kamala Harris not reading her briefs? Very. Yeah. I see. She had a little bit of an embarrassing situation in Singapore when the Singaporean prime minister, who is a pretty bright chap, or the former Singaporean prime minister, who had done mathematics at Cambridge, stepped in to rescue her from the press. Was that a case of not reading her briefs or was that something unexpected that came up? I don't know the specific instance, but if he's stepping in, what, to save her and answering a question? Yes. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you can't know everything about every country, but it could very well be a function of her not doing it. I'll tell you this. I don't envision a scenario where Hillary Clinton would have needed that assist. But, you know, Hillary Clinton's been around a long time. And to be fair, Kamala has not been around nearly as long. But it is a very well-known thing in D.C. that she's not particularly wonkish. But she is a lawyer, so you would assume she would know details. Jake Sullivan is famous for getting lost in detail. Yes, yes. And so he's a lawyer, too. I'm just telling you, Kamala Harris is no Jake Sullivan. I think a lot of people would go, well, they wouldn't go on the record, but they would concede that point. I see. By the way, listeners who are outside America, Jake Sullivan is the National Security Advisor, tall, good-looking chap. I think he ain't no Henry Kissinger, but that's for another podcast. Yes, yes, yes. So at any rate, she bows out of the race. Biden had vowed to pick a woman, strongly intimated that would be a woman of color. He picked Kamala, and that was his running mate. You know, he kind of hemmed himself in, but at the end, he went with someone who he thought, A, offset his age, B, had enough of a history, although she had only been a senator for about three years at that point. I think she was ultimately a senator for four by the time she and Biden won. So a bit like Joe Kennedy, but Barack Obama. You know, the Chinese are apparently calling her a female Obama. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. She's had a meteoric rise. She has indeed. No doubt about that. There are two schools very clearly in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. When I speak to people in California, it acts lyrical about Kamala's rise as an example of the dynamism of American democracy. Here is a woman of color rising to the second office of the land, and will break the glass ceiling and become the first female president of the country. Who will? Will. And not just the first female, but also the first African-Indian-American female president. So they view her through prisons that are very rosy. And when I talk to friends from Mississippi, and yes, I do have friends in Mississippi, um, or for that matter, any of the states in the South, Kentucky, Tennessee. You like the South. The Southern blondes do it. Well, another podcast for another time. But the important thing is that they are not so happy. And in fact, even many Muslim Americans I've spoken to have said that they see Kamala as someone who came from an educated family. A Muslim American family said, quote unquote, they wouldn't be voting for anyone. And the reason is they don't like Donald Trump because he has said certain nasty things. And they don't like Kamala Harris because they think she's a DEI candidate, a diversity, equity and inclusion candidate. And they think that she passes herself off as African-American, but actually comes from an educated background. Yes, a single mother. Certainly true. Yes, has had to struggle. But they think that at the end of the day, her father was at Stanford and her mother was a Tamil Brahmin. And she had many advantages. And she can't be compared to a kid in the Bronx. So it's interesting to me that she divides opinion so strongly because this set of people believe that she is unelectable, while the others believe that she will stop the Trump train. Where do you lie on this debate? Where do you lie in this extremely contentious debate? Well, I think if you pull the two sides, what? You know, 30, 40 percent are going to take one side or the other. It's a highly polarized environment. Do I think, you know, will she win? Can she not win? I think she could win. I don't know. We can get into it later what her odds are. But she certainly does have a lot of momentum right now. But you could pull a ham sandwich and, you know, the odds are it will be on one side or the other. All right. Given the fact that she is polarizing opinion, tell us what does she stand for? Well, that's where it gets interesting. She has taken some very absolute views when she was running for president along a sort of progressive ticket. And she's gone on the record for any number of controversial things. She has suggested there be voting rights for violent offenders, i.e. people who are incarcerated for pretty, I mean, massively bad stuff. She is in favor of breaking the filibuster. At the time when she proposed that, it was to pass the Green New Deal, a massive expansion or rather massively expensive project to decarbonize all electricity in America by 2030. She is for a mandatory buyback program that I think would be unconstitutional with regard to guns. She at points has been on the defund. Like the police, don't you? Well, yes, indeed. And she's not going to get them. But she has been in favor of defunding the police. She has traditionally, well, she's been against major trade deals. For a prosecutor, it seems odd that she would be in favor of defunding the police. Well, she has gotten crosswise with the police before. We didn't get into that. But it's a popular. Remember, she was a California senator. California, you know, involved in Bay Area law. So these are pretty knee jerk normal things for them. But she's open to packing the Supreme Court. There's even an ad out there being run in Pennsylvania. And Trump has run a version of it where she talks about changing the food pyramid to reduce meat consumption. So there's really not much. I can see why you love her so much. You can see where that was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A Texan who loves his beef with blood dripping on the plate is going to obviously get upset by any notion of vegetarianism. You're not taking my cow away from me unless I go to I go to Gujarat where I learned or India, for that matter, at large. And then the cow becomes holy. That's right. That's right. So she has. But in Texas, she ain't. And you want to keep it that way. I definitely want to keep it that way. I think I mentioned she's in favor of banning all fracking everywhere and offshore drilling. She wants oil, too, as a good Texan. You want to be able to rig. Drill, baby, drill. That's me personally. I understand. I just her positions are pretty absolute. Now, she has flip flops on a lot of that term for it. When you go out into the wild and you drill for oil. Wildcatter. Wildcatter, too. Why don't you embark on a wildcatter career, mate? I would find it that, you know, the old wildcatters are really interesting people. The original ones. Yeah. So at any rate, you know, I watched There Will Be Blood with great interest many times. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's a story about wildcatting. A great movie. Fantastic. Isn't that Daniel Day-Lewis? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic movie. Two of the fourth. It tells you a lot. Yes. About wildcatting. And then, of course, Giant, an older film, also gives you glimpses into that culture to very different vignettes. Yes. Yeah. You had the old, even in more recent times, you had the old guys like T. Boone Pickens, now sadly deceased, and they'd make a fortune, lose a fortune, make it again, and might lose it again. I mean, these were people who really played a game of pitch and toss. So at any rate, she is on the record with very strong positions. She is currently flip-flopping and running away from a lot of them. She's for single-payer universal health care, including for those who come here illegally. She is for decriminalizing people who come to America illegally. She's for providing them health care. These are sort of touchy issues, but she's flip-flopped on single-payer. She's flip-flopped on defund the police. I think it was yesterday she flip-flopped on fracking, though there are a million ways to prevent people from actually drilling. The Biden administration has been quite adept at that. And I suspect she's going to at least back off some of her stronger positions on the expiring tax cuts from 2017. I think she'll ultimately adopt the Biden administration view of not raising taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. All jolly good. We have some idea of what she stands for. Oh, and can I just point this out? Yeah. In 2019, GovTrack listed her as the most liberal senator, as well as the least likely among Democrats to join bipartisan bills. These are seemingly her instincts politically. So she's kind of trying to soften the edges in terms of appealing to voters. Good. So we have some idea of what she stands for. Now, tell us, what is her path to victory? Well, she has one. Her polls are way, way, way up. And everyone's talking about this honeymoon phase. And that could very well be the case. It's difficult to predict. She's a new candidate. She has that renewed enthusiasm from Democrats, obviously. We just talked about the fundraising numbers. Or even what people in California are telling me. And elsewhere, too. There are people, and many young people, very enthused by her candidacy. Sure. Sure. I mean, I've seen the rallies, and people are exuberant that she is the candidate for Democrats. But to be honest, and I don't want to shoot the dead, how could you not be when you saw what you were heading for had Joe Biden been your candidate? I mean, it's a reprieve from the gallows as far as they're concerned. All right. All jolly good. What's her path to victory? Well, she's going to have to moderate some of those views. And she's in the midst of doing it. She's going to have to run very, very far away from the Biden economy. And she's going to have to separate herself from this title of border czar. The press is doing some of that covering down. And they're saying, no, no, no, she was never the border czar, in some cases, after using the phrase themselves. She was sent there to look at root. She was sent to figure out, quote unquote, root causes of the immigration to the United States. And surely it's climate change. It is indeed. In fact, I'll give you a quote. And you didn't even know I had this quote. The quote is, quote, lack of climate adaptation and climate resilience was in her mind, at least a part of it. So, you know, at the end of the day, I'm sorry, that's the word. Well, but, you know, she's given that's another thing. And she's given to what are called word salad. Oh, word salad. My apology. Yeah. Yeah. And I imagine at this point they really want to keep her away from any sort of word salad gas. But the good news is, when you're running for president, you're reading off the teleprompter a lot of the time. You're not playing it quite so off the cuff. But, you know, she is going to have to moderate these positions. Some of them are tough to back out of. Certainly her place in immigration is difficult. She can say, no, no, no, I only worked on root causes. But still, she's got to explain why border encounters have positively exploded. Personally, I think the point is to keep voters' eyes away from her record, right? No one's happy about inflation. No one's happy about flat wages. No one's happy about given inflation, zero stock market gains. That also affects people with pensions. No one's happy about gasoline prices, energy prices. No one is certainly happy about immigration and the like. So they really don't want to talk about. Well, Gallup puts it as the top concern of American voters repeatedly in their monthly surveys. I have never seen immigration as the top issue. And it has for months been the top issue. And unfortunately, she was the point woman on the Biden administration's immigration policy. So I think they really don't want to talk about policy. They certainly don't want to talk about Biden's current plan to tweak the Supreme Court and the federal courts themselves. I don't feel like that helps her much. So this is how we get into. So all that is very good. I said, what is her path to victory? Which of the swing states does she have to win? We know that California will vote for her. Sure. We know New York will vote for her. We know blue states are going to vote for her. We know red states are going to vote for Donald Trump. So which state does she need to capture? Everyone knows Pennsylvania is probably the most important one. In fact. Can she win Pennsylvania? Well, maybe. Josh Shapiro there, who is a very popular governor, he is one of probably the top three or four picks for Veep. You also have Mark Kelly, the former astronaut who is a great. He's from Arizona, isn't he? From Arizona, another swing state. She is currently. Can she win Arizona? Can she win? Yes. It is way too early to tell where, you know, how this is going to shake out. She is currently. You just told me she could win Pennsylvania and she could win Arizona. She could win any of the swing states. Any of them. Well, no one really. Let's go through the swing states then. Pennsylvania. Yeah. And by the way, on Pennsylvania, there's kind of an outlier I'd never heard of. I think they're called Susquehanna polling. They have her up by four in Pennsylvania. I'm not sure I buy that, but that's the poll that came out yesterday or today. So Pennsylvania. We've got Arizona. Arizona. Georgia. She's in Georgia today. Michigan. Michigan. Yeah. Wisconsin. Am I missing any? Ohio. Well, no, probably not Ohio. Let's see. You got Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. That's where we missed Nevada. Nevada. So we have six here. Yeah, I think I'm leaving out at least. I think I'm leaving out one. But at any rate, these swing states will be crucial. It's generally. The swinging six. At least at least six. We've got six swingers. No wonder you're so interested in this subject. Which of the six swingers can she swing? The polls coming out are changing day by day. And it hasn't really settled. I mean, everyone's looking at polling data immediately after she's been chosen. There's a honeymoon phase. I would say we'll know more in, you know, post-convention two weeks after. I mean, it is way too early to know how this is going to shake out. Yeah. And the Trump campaign is already attacking her by posting videos of her saying various things. Oh, she's got a lot of them. Yeah. And having captions underneath and pointing out that she is a liberal who will destroy the American way of life, eat the firstborn, and bring bubonic plague. Yeah. And they have a big ad buy that's about to come out in those swing states with anything between $2.7 and $1.3 million being spent per state, I believe, on immigration. They're going to try to nail her to that cross. There's no way she gets out. Now, she has responded. She has an ad out right now on immigration saying, hey, the Democrats proposed this bill and Trump shot it down. That is not entirely unfair. I would say that is a fair point with the caveat that during the Biden administration, they have done nothing to staunch the number of people coming across the border. Meanwhile, she's offering health care to anyone who comes across and wants to decriminalize those who come across. So you don't get out of this scot-free. You're creating the incentives. So you want root causes? Offering free health care and a free pass. A free pass. Understood. So her chances are high or moderately high or her chances are even? What adjective would you use because I will not push you to put a number because things are so fluid. Yeah, I think as of now, Trump has a little bit of a margin on her. But that could vanish. Nobody thought even the Trump officials were caught off guard, as were, frankly, when I talked to my friends who are Democrats. They never expected that she would sew this thing up so quickly. Oh, and meanwhile, she has liabilities. She's got to explain theoretically how she kept saying to the bitter end that Biden was sharp as a tack. You know, she's got some explaining to do. We know he was. He just slipped in the bathroom the day before the debate. Had a bad night. He had a cold. He was on an international flight, which he returned from 12 days prior. I mean, you know, that's an unusual. But she stuck with him all the way. I think right now there are all these distractions and Democrats. And if you watch, you know, the mainstream media and all that, we're getting to like Fox News, you mean? Actually, I'll be honest. I don't watch much Fox News. I watch, you know, CNN, MSNBC. I like News Nation. They're pretty impartial. I catch Fox. Are you sleeping with the enemy? I want to know what they're thinking. You know, I read the New York Times. Do you sleep with? I read the New Republic. I'm understood. I know that. I didn't write. I feel right. You can have Democrats. I will say there are probably copies in New York Times on my bed. God knows there are any number of more progressive journals that frequently occupy my bedchamber. But, you know, they're getting caught up in all of these minor issues. We're being told that this is the recent one that's come up. J.D. Vance is just weird. Have you noticed this? This is the Democrats across the board are joining in, calling, well, he's just weird. You know, they never qualify it. They're thinking that's going to stick, and it has. And so they're just calling J.D. Vance weird, which personally I think is kind of weird because I thought the Democrats were against deficits and didn't like when Trump did it. They're saying that the Vance background is contrived. I see no evidence of that. We're talking about J.D. Vance. His views might be contrived, though. Fair's fair. When I talked about Kamala flip-flopping, Vance has certainly changed his views on Trump. He's like a shopping trolley in a supermarket, careering from one end to another. Some things. I mean, I think some of his views. Donald Trump was the heroine of the Republican Party. And I don't mean heroine as in a keen eye in the classics. I mean heroine as in the drug. Heroine as in what J.D. Vance called Trump, an opioid or heroine or something. But that was a while back. But nonetheless, I grant you that. I grant you that. Get it. But, you know, power is seductive, as we know. Absolutely. All right. All right. So much so. I think one other thing, you know, these other weeds we're getting into, you know, various Exactly. I was just going to say, let's not get into the weeds, but please finish it. Well, let me finish the weeds. Let's go traipsing through this. You know, they're taking Trump quotes out of context. And they've drawn this bead on Heritage 2025, which the administration. Project 2025. Project. Project 2025. And they have the Trump administration. A glorious project, isn't it? Well, you know what? From your point of view. Well, no, from my point of view, they do this for every election. That's lost in the weeds. It's as though, you know, Heritage just decided this one time to do it. But, you know, they've drawn a bead on that. And Trump has backed away from that almost from the get go. But you and I know there's no other plan post-election. So Project 2025 is the default Trump will eventually slip to. Maybe. I mean, one, if you think Trump's read 900 pages of the document. Oh, he hasn't. He hasn't. The people he appoints will read nine pages of it. And then call the people who wrote 900 pages to implement them. I'm not so sure that's true. Because Trump, I mean, to a degree, you're probably right. But also Trump has a well-established track record of just doing what he's gonna do. I don't know that it's that clear a blueprint. I mean, the blueprint is clear. But I don't know that he's going to follow it lockstep by any means. Right. So any more weeds we need to go through? Or I can ask my final question. Say it's January 2025. OK. Say Project 2025 has failed. Donald Trump has lost the election. J.D. Vance has become weird. He's sobbing. He's got his beard. Not his beard. OK. Beard. And his beard. And his Indian wife is consoling him. And Kamala Harris takes over as president. What can we expect of Kamala Harris as president of the United States of America? Right. So I think Biden got elected as sort of Uncle Joe during a weird time when everybody was also a majority, at least. Voters were sick of wanting to see Trump go. 3 a.m. tweets. Yes. Yes. And so he was elected as a moderate. Personally, I don't think his administration has been moderate. I think with Kamala, we will see a more nakedly progressive agenda. I think in the first term, she wants to be reelected again. So she'll have to nuance some of that. She can do it by ending fracking in a way without ending it. She certainly will environmentally be very aggressive. I think she will be less a friend to Israel. She has pushed for more emphasis within the administration on the Palestinian concerns, plight, however you want to put it. But I think she will be more obviously progressive. She will push environmental issues. I think if the Democrats retain the Senate, that's another issue you didn't raise, but or an issue you didn't raise. I think she'd love to see the filibuster broken. She's been for it before. I don't know what it means for immigration, foreign policy. She's kind of a blank slate. There's not a lot of experience there. So I think she generally will be against trade deals. That's where she's been. She was against NAFTA, Trans-Pacific Partnership, sort of the remnants. I think she probably will do her best to push for something that looks like single-payer health care. I think she will be strongly in favor of raising taxes. I think she will, with the expiration of the 2017 tax cuts, the Trump tax cuts, but really they were Paul Ryan's, then Speaker. I think she will be strongly in favor of dramatically increasing taxes for certain segments of the population. All right. So she'll be a friend to Israel. Oh, I think she'll be less of a friend. What about Ukraine? Well, you know, here's the problem. I think voters in general in the U.S. have kind of this donor exhaustion. You know, like I said, her foreign policy is a bit of a blank slate. You may recall in the Ukrainian funding, Biden himself was kind of absent in those negotiations. He never really came out and said, you know, he would say Putin can't win, but he never said Ukraine must triumph. He never really pushed publicly for that funding, nor did Ms. Harris. So I don't, Vice President Harris, I don't know what to tell you on that front. I do think it is getting less popular to provide cents a billion in aid and weapons. As a side note, you saw we're going to get F-16s. Yeah, yeah, but it all helps American industry. F-16s are made in America. I get it. But you're also, you know, digging a hole to fill it back up. I mean, you know, you can spend money like that all day. But it generates jobs in America. It does. And it's your form of Keynesian politics. I'll put it to you this way. Where the money is distributed around the country because one bolt will be made in some place in Wisconsin, another will be made in California, and a third will be made in Alabama, and it'll be all put together somewhere else. So you are, in a way, following your own version of redistributive Keynesian policy through the military-industrial complex. I agree. But let me put it to you this way. I think a Harris presidency would not like to spend that on weapons systems, the defense industrial, military-industrial complex. That won't go well with her voters. She would rather take that same money and plow it into a Green New Deal or, you know, various— You're going to have solar-powered tanks. Well, yeah. We need a lot of panels for that. But no, since it's not a world of— And we technically— Glorious. Let's just say we—let's hope we don't have to fight a war with those in some shady part of the world. I think she would rather spend that money— You can conquer Brazil with that technology. Brazil, yeah. Equatorial areas, as long as they don't have jungles. But I think they'd just rather spend that pot of money on something else. And in general, Democrats don't like funding defense. Hell, they— And you, as a Republican, with your big muscles and terrific cojones, are all for 800 bases around the world. I'm all for a strong U.S. defense. But there's— We actually have spending, more spending, more spending. No, I didn't say that. But there is evidence, because the Biden administration has offered up budgets and achieved real cuts to the Pentagon's budget every year he's been in office. And you could fire off the Pentagon, and that's what helps. Well, I worked there for a year, and I can tell you, there are a number of contractors. I was like, what is it you do here? Kind of like the old movie Office Space. But yeah, I just— To answer your question, they'd rather spend that money elsewhere. All right. Good. Jolly good. Thank you for your time, Christopher Ruppershell. We'll be back with more. And if you've liked this podcast, and if you think you'd like to listen to more, follow us wherever you're listening to us, whether it is Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else. Leave us a review. Make sure you go to our website, www.fairobserver, which is F-A-I-R-O-B-S-E-R-V-E-R.com. Sign up for our newsletter. You can follow us on social media, if you are on social media. And if you're feeling particularly generous, you believe independent non-profit journalism without owners and advertisers deserves a chance, then sign up for a donation of as little as $10 a year. Now, without further ado— Without further ado, I bid you adieu. And as they say in Texas, y'all be good now. Thank you, Christopher. Indeed.