Letter from Washington: The unbearable lightness of policy

On the campaign trail, the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris seems almost allergic to policy specifics. She has only sat for one network interview since President Joe Biden left the race in July, given no press conferences, and delivered a series of speeches that are heavy on mood and light on policy. Harris is running a “vibes” campaign, asking voters to vote for a feeling – for optimism, for enthusiasm, for joy – rather than for her tax plan or her Middle East strategy.

The Washington cognoscenti find this lack of precision problematic and, at times, even immoral. But of course, the cognoscenti need ever more policy grist for their criticism mills. It is less clear that voters care about policy, even if they do express a lack of knowledge of who Harris is and what she might do as president. The Trump campaign wants to fill that void and define Harris in the minds of the voters.

But the Harris campaign resists. It seems to intuit that, in US presidential politics, lack of policy specifics is a feature not a bug. Giving the voters what they claim to want does not always make them happy. A candidate that is unknown can be anything to anyone, a blank canvas on to which all sorts of voters can project their hopes and their dreams. Barack Obama, a first-term senator in 2008 when he ran for president, parlayed this lack of definition into veritable messiah status. He metaphorically embodied the idea of hope and change, without ever really saying what he hoped to change. In America, any precise definition of a presidential hopeful’s intentions is bound to disappoint many voters.

The problem for any candidate in this election is that voters desperately want change – they seem to hate the “system”, as well as almost all the institutions of civic life and, most of all, incumbent leaders. But majorities of voters also dislike nearly all specific changes. They don’t like immigration flows or immigration controls, tax hikes or deficit spending, intervention abroad or inactivity in the face of human rights abuses abroad. In this environment, vague vibes convey a sense of joy and optimism. Policy specifics seriously harsh that buzz. Precision just gives the opposition targets to attack.

Project 2025

To see the electoral perils of concrete policy, one need only look at the wretched fate of Project 2025 – the huge intellectual effort of a coalition of right-wing think-tanks led by the Heritage Foundation to provide the policy ideas for the next Republican administration. Project 2025 produced an over 900-page policy book entitled “Mandate for the Leadership” in the summer of 2022.

“Mandate for Leadership” is a policy wonk’s playground, filled to the brim with specific policy proposals. Itwas never intended as a campaign document. It is more of an extended group job application designed to convince the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, that the various authors have the loyalty and acumen to refine and implement his vision for America. The authors are an amalgam of former Trump officials looking for promotion in the next term and new lights seeking to demonstrate their emerging brilliance. The various chapters, each with their own set of authors, often contradict each other, reflecting the divides with the Republican party on what Trump’s vision is or should be.

The project never claimed to represent the Trump campaign or Trump himself. But the presence of over 140 former Trump officials on the project implied a de factoofficial status. In a political environment in which telling people what you intend to do is self-harm, the “Mandate for Leadership” constituted a 900-page act of political suicide. The media and the Democrats wasted little time in asserting that it was the Trump playbook and in mining its deep seams of objectionable policy ideas, ranging from abortion bans to slashing veterans’ benefits. The Trump campaigned repudiated the document and Trump himself even devoted a few Truth Social posts to claims that he had never read it or even heard of it (which, to be fair, does seem believable).

These denials have made no difference. Speaker after speaker at the Democratic National Convention in August referenced the document to prove that Trump and the Republicans intended to roll back environmental protections, increase prescription drug prices, and end gay marriage.

The joke

This process reached a sort of policy wonk apotheosis when Saturday Night Live comic, Kenan Thompson, used Project 2025 as the basis for a skit on the convention stage. Thumping an outsized version of the document on the lectern, he asked “you ever see a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Here it is.”

The joke killed in the arena, but the peals of laughter also sealed the fate of any future effort to make US presidential elections about policy. Project 2025 arguably achieved more public impact than any think-tank project in history. But it is now seen as a political disaster. The Heritage Foundation fired Paul Dans, the director of the project, apparently for the sin of producing a policy document that people actually read. Various chapter authors have practically gone into hiding in a desperate effort not to draw any more attention before the election. A couple of them have told me that they worry that their association with the project will hurt their effort to get a job in a putative Trump administration, which of course was the main point of participating in the first place.

The lesson for future campaigns is clear. There will be no more major efforts to define a policy agenda for future nominees of either party. Any such work by public policy professionals even vaguely affiliated with the parties will simply present too much political risk. The prospective authors will worry that their policy precision will only give ammunition to political opponents or limit voters ability to project their own wants onto the candidate. Even non-public efforts will generate worries of leaks. Any Washington thinker with an ambition to serve in a future administration (which is almost all of them) will spend future campaigns administering frontal lobotomies to themselves so they can sound as vague as a politician. Real efforts to define policy will have to wait for the brief period of the transition of power.

As bad as many of the ideas in Project 2025 are, this final death blow to policy debate in presidential politics is something we should all lament. Vibes are important, but elections are supposed to be about policy.