As J.D. Vance noted in his closing argument at this week's VP debate, "Day one was 1400 days ago" for Kamala Harris. Even more strongly than Donald Trump did in their debate last month, Vance spent Tuesday night hammering home the point that Harris represents the status quo of the past three and a half years. If Harris could accomplish what she promises, Vance asked, why hasn't she done that already?

Good question. In fact, it was such a good question that an interviewer took it up yesterday, and ... Harris still can't answer it. Instead, she unleashes a word salad about Donald Trump as someone who wants to create distractions (via Twitchy):

Notice she does not answer the question. 😂 pic.twitter.com/nF4o3MdhK9

— 🎃The🐰FOO🎃 (@PolitiBunny) October 4, 2024

Q: Former President Trump says that you've had four years as Vice President to do all the things you've promised in the campaign, but haven't done it. Is he right, or did President Biden not give you, or limited in some way, your role as Vice President?

That's a direct question, to which Harris responds with ... misdirection. Afterward, Harris then essentially begs the question by once again listing all of the policies she promises to implement without explaining why she and Joe Biden haven't already accomplished it -- which was the question in the first place:

HARRIS: So, let's start with this. I think that the former president is, is really becoming quite desperate, and is really, is really offering a lot of misstatements and misinformation, and perhaps it's because he wants to distract from the fact that he has offered no plan for the American people. You Google -- I've talked about this before, I invite you to go to his rallies, and what you'll hear about full time is him talking about himself and his personal grievances. What you won't hear him talking about is you and the needs that you have as a working person, as a family person. My plan is about building an opportunity economy, where I'm going to give first-time homebuyers $25,000 down payment assistance so they can get their foot in the door to be able to be a homeowner. My plan is about $6000 tax deduction for middle-class families for the first year of their child's life to help them buy a crib or a car seat. My plan is about getting a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up businesses, to our small businesses, knowing that they are part of the backbone of America's economy. Those are my plans, and I think that unfortunately what we've got on the other side is someone who just wants to distract from the fact that his plan is about giving billionaires and big corporations a tax break like he did the last time and doing that again.  

"Those are my plans," Harris tells her interviewer, but those have actually been the plans of the Biden-Harris administration for months. Biden laid out the same exact down-payment subsidy and housing agenda on March 7 of this year right before his State of the Union address. Four days later, the White House flogged those same proposals along with various child-related tax credit proposals. Two years ago, the administration touted subsidies for start-ups in the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden began flogging "opportunity economy" as a slogan this spring, borrowing the term from the Bush 41-Jack Kemp era. 

In other words, this is all a rehash of Bidenomics, and mainly failed-to-pass Bidenomics at that. That still leaves the question of why Harris has failed to implement the agenda during her existing term in office, and why anyone should trust Harris to follow through in the next four years. 

That's what the interviewer asked, and Harris doesn't answer it because she can't answer it. It's not even clear that she recognizes that she's lifted Biden's plan in the first place; her "Issues" page got copied from the old Biden campaign website so clumsily that they copied the code along with it that identified its original source. Harris strings clichés together in this response as a talisman to avoid the real answer to the question.

J.D. Vance has her number, though, and so would any reporter not already in the bag for Democrats. Here's his closing argument again, and its devastating bullseye on Harris as the status quo rather than change:

I believe that whether you're rich or poor, you ought to be able to afford a nice meal for your family. That's gotten harder because of Kamala Harris's policies. I believe that whether you're rich or poor you ought to be able to afford to buy a house. You ought to be able to live in safe neighborhoods. You ought to not have your communities flooded with fentanyl. And that, too, has gotten harder with Kamala, because of Kamala Harris's policies. Now, I've been in politics long enough to do what Kamala Harris does when she stands before the American people and says that on day one she's gonna work on all these challenges I just listed. She's been the Vice President for three and a half years. Day one was 1400 days ago. And her policies have made these problems worse.

The bottom line: Harris is an incumbent running as a challenger, griping about the status quo she created. Period.