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CHOOSING THE PEOPLE OVER THE BILLIONAIRES  
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Max Moran
August 2, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Kamala Harris has made some gestures in the direction of rejecting
big-money entreaties. That’s the right move, but there’s more to
be done. _

"Would billionaires spend millions to influence your vote if it had
no value?", by DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)

 

Democrats are focused on one thing for the next four months:
preventing the rise of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, the Republican Party,
and everything the MAGA movement stands for. The New Popular Front
[[link removed]] spirit
of anti-fascist unity across the left and center has made its way to
the United States, and not a moment too soon.

In that context, beginning to think about what a Harris administration
would actually do is arguably premature. But that being said … yeah,
what would a Harris administration actually do?

No matter how motivated a given voter may be to oppose Donald Trump,
it’s still reasonable for them to wonder what they’ll actually get
if they vote for Kamala Harris. The plutocrat class—who
are certainly no hard-liners against Trump
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been asking this question too. In a rather stunning show of attempted
bribery, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who has donated
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million to a Harris-aligned superPAC, went on television to demand
Harris replace Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan once elected.
Media mogul and Expedia chairman Barry Diller later seconded
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did Barry Sternlicht
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head of real estate company Starwood Capital. All three of these
corporate titans run or are on the boards of companies being actively
investigated by the FTC.

Unnamed “outside advisers to the campaign” (probably some
lobbyists gossiping to a gullible reporter) claim
[[link removed]] Harris
is considering a “reset” of regulation of the
cryptocurrency racket
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“industry.” And Wall Street ghouls
[[link removed]] like austerity
fetishist
[[link removed]] Peter
Orszag
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[[link removed]] mogul
[[link removed].] Jonathan
Gray (whose Trumpian
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once compared
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hikes on the rich to Hitler’s invasion of Poland), and BigLaw fixer
Brad Karp
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opening their pocketbooks and working the phones of their press
contacts. Karp in particular reportedly led
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high-dollar Zoom fundraiser for Harris focused on “how Wall Street
could best support a Harris ticket.”

_MORE FROM MAX MORAN_ [[link removed]]

At least rhetorically, Harris doesn’t seem to be biting on economic
retrenchment. In her first major speech
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the economy, Harris explicitly recommitted to passing the pro-labor
PRO Act
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a later speech
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she declared she’d “cap unfair rent increases” and attack junk
fees on day one, as part of a plan to “take on price gouging and
bring down costs.” Most of the tools for doing so run through Khan
at the FTC, and Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, another regulator much reviled by big money donors. As the 
[[link removed]]_Prospect_
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David Dayen has noted
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Khan, Chopra, and other progressive appointees have provided the
Biden-Harris administration with most of its brag points on the
campaign trail this year. (Chopra actually brought Khan into the FTC
when he was a commissioner there.)

This is all Biden’s economic policy agenda, and Harris is running as
Biden’s successor. But of course, campaign rhetoric only means so
much, especially when it’s this vague. Harris’ welcome declaration
that she’d sign the PRO Act is one of the few hard commitments
she’s made so far. Huge swaths of economic policy remain
unaddressed: financial regulation, merger approval, spending and
taxes, and more.

Economics reporters
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Harris aides and associates about her views over the last few weeks.
The most consistent theme from their comments is that she is less
concerned with macroeconomic frameworks than the human impact of
policy: “Do these policies give people more freedom, choices, and
ultimately autonomy over their own lives?” in the words of
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Harris aide Rohini Kosoglu.

With deep respect to Harris and her staff, this sounds like the kind
of thing an aide politely says about their boss who honestly just
isn’t that interested in economic policy. And if so, that’s fine!
Everyone finds some issues more exciting than others, and Harris has
deep, demonstrated commitments on many of the most important domains
in American life today, especially abortion
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power of the courts
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and pro-democracy structural reforms
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If she doesn’t thrill to the latest quarterly GDP data, that makes
her like 99 percent of the public.

It also makes her like her current boss. Though his Senate career was
marked by carrying water for his home-state credit card industry, it
turned out Joe Biden didn’t have many strong personal priors on
economic policy, so he generally just planted his flag in the exact
median of Democratic Party opinion. That median has shifted
substantially leftward in recent years, so he could be persuaded on
some topics through well-deployed leverage and well-tailored
arguments.

Harris boasts a substantial $200 million war chest and over 170,000
volunteers. Her campaign has little fiscal need for high-dollar
fundraisers at this point.

But if the president is not ideological on economics, then their
economic advisers and appointees are that much more important. If you
don’t have a strongly-held mental model of the economy, then the
mental models of whoever surrounds you—no matter how accurate, and
no matter what values they reflect—effectively become yours. In the
words of Joan Robinson
[[link removed]], “The
purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made
answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being
deceived by economists.”

Historically, high-dollar fundraisers like Karp’s are where
politicians get taken in by those deceptions. They’re where a
wealthy and generous host can introduce a candidate to the
intelligent, well-spoken, numerically literate young person from Big
Tech, BigLaw, or Wall Street who just so happens to be interested in a
policy job.

Like Biden, Harris doesn’t appear to have personal qualms with
making friendly with ultra-rich donors. But the public definitely
wants
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who aren’t bought and paid for: 80 percent of Democratic-leaning
voters say large donors have too much influence in politics, and 76
percent say there should be hard limits on political spending.
Republican-leaning voters poll about the same. Opposition to big money
is perhaps the last bipartisan issue in U.S. politics.

In this context, big donors going on TV and explicitly asking the
candidate they showered with money for personnel decisions seems like
a misstep. Hoffman’s pathetic excuse
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he was just talking about Khan as an expert and not a donor was
treated with the skepticism it deserved, and just dug the hole deeper.

The public is showing Harris another path. In just over a week, she
has shattered
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fundraising records. She boasts a substantial $200 million war chest
and over 170,000 volunteers. Moreover, 66 percent of her contributors
were first-time donors. Her campaign has little fiscal need for
high-dollar fundraisers at this point.

More generally, Harris clearly cares about crushing Trumpism, and
ushering American democracy into a new, more inclusive and robust era.
Refusing big money is a natural extension of that vision. Bringing the
Supreme Court to heel without addressing any of the other ways
billionaires have bought Washington would treat one particularly bad
symptom, but not the disease.

Harris should certainly want to be at least as good as her predecessor
on money in politics. Khan’s anti-monopoly agenda
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Chopra’s crusade against junk fees
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National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer
Abruzzo’s support for unions
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and others also poll extraordinarily well, especially among young
people. Throwing these effective, progressive regulators to the curb
in favor of Wall Streeters and corporate hacks would be worse than
“more of the same,” it would actively pull the Democratic Party
further from the public’s preferences. All that Harris would get in
exchange is some more short-term money for an already well-resourced
campaign.

As she prepares to lay out an actual agenda in the coming weeks,
Harris should recognize these risks. And progressives shouldn’t be
afraid to remind her of hard lines against tossing out the most
accomplished and brag-worthy appointees in the current administration.
Over the past four years, the left has proven that a Democratic
administration cannot safely ignore it. Harris has successfully jolted
Democrats across the political spectrum into action. She shouldn’t
risk demobilizing the young, diverse, working-class base just to
grovel to billionaires.

_Max Moran is a senior fellow at the Revolving Door Project._

_Published in partnership with the Revolving Door Project. __The
Revolving Door Project, a _Prospect_ partner, scrutinizes the
executive branch and presidential power. Follow them
at therevolvingdoorproject.org
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