It’s hard to run as an outsider when you’re the incumbent, but that isn’t stopping Kamala Harris from trying

Change is a powerful rallying cry.

Bill Clinton reversed 12 years of GOP control of the White House in 1992 with the message that he was the voice of a new generation, a break with the past, and the one who would never stop thinking about tomorrow. Barack Obama also represented change to a nation deeply ready for it after eight years of Republicans. Against endless foreign wars and a domestic economic crash, Obama offered HOPE in capital letters.

Kamala Harris wants to tell voters that she, too, stands for change. Something new. Joy, even. Time and again, she has called for voters to look to “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” But she has a big problem: unlike Clinton and Obama, Harris is not running against the party in power. Worse still, she’s actually the incumbent vice president, the second-most important member (theoretically) of the Biden administration.

It calls to mind a scene from the film O Brother, Where Art Thou, in which incumbent Mississippi Gov. Pappy O’Daniel (played by Charles Durning) laments his unpopularity compared to that of a seemingly reform-minded challenger. His slow-witted son suggests that since people like reform, they should run on that, too. An exasperated O’Daniel exclaims, “How are we gonna run reform when we’re the damn incumbent?!”

It’s a fair question.

» READ MORE: Should Josh Shapiro even want to be vice president? | Kyle Sammin

Harris has not provided a good answer to it, partly because she has declined to give an answer to nearly any question from journalists, assiduously avoiding prolonged contact with the press since her nomination to replace Biden until finally agreeing to an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday.

In an otherwise nonconfrontational sit-down, Bash raised this important contradiction. Harris told her that she believes “the American people deserve a new way forward and turn the page on the last decade.” Bash noted, correctly, that the last decade includes Harris’s entire term as vice president. If the Biden administration has done so much good — Harris claimed in that same interview that they had achieved “extraordinary successes” — why would we “turn the page” on it? If Biden’s economic policies were a great success that enabled us to “recover as an economy,” why would we want to change them?

Even more to the point, after hearing all of the grand plans Harris has for changing America, Bash asked, “You have been vice president for three and a half years. The steps that you’re talking about now — why haven’t you done them already?”

Harris followed up with a lot of focus group-tested banalities, but no good answer to the question of how she can be running on a record of success — and a need for change — at the same time.

That’s because there is no good answer. She can’t run reform while being the incumbent. No one can.

But as much as the Harris-Walz team would love to find a better answer to that impossible question, they also believe that they don’t need to.

Instead, Harris’ friends in the media have fervently repeated that this election will not be decided on issues, but on “vibes.” As the Democratic convention closed, NBC News’ Jonathan Allen said what many in the press were saying: that Harris’ campaign “is running on vibes, and many Democrats hope she can ride them to victory on Election Day.” He further explained that “Harris has offered a ton of talk about joy, vision, and values, but very little in the way of detailed plans.”

Their strategy, it appears, is to point out that Donald Trump is weird and mean, while Harris is cool and nice, and expect the voters to just not think about it very hard. In short, they think you’re dumb and ruled by emotion.

Gallup’s most recent survey tells us that the top four problems Americans see with the country are “poor leadership” (26%), immigration (19%), inflation (13%), and “the economy in general” (13%). None of these favor the incumbent party, and Harris has no good answers on any of them. To be fair, “poor leadership” is not something she could fix with a policy paper, but the others are. Yet as I write this, her campaign has only issued vague statements about how she would fix things — without explaining why she and Biden haven’t done so already.

» READ MORE: Forget about November, Biden should resign today | Kyle Sammin

Harris’ campaign website doesn’t even have a policy section, just biographies of the candidates and a way to send them money. Even Trump — no one’s idea of a policy wonk — has had a prominent link to his policy platform for months now. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. Maybe you believe it, maybe you think it’s a pack of lies. But at least the man tells you what he stands for.

Candidates owe the public that much.

It’s not just a matter of honesty or common decency: the whole theory of liberal democracy hinges on the idea that the people are able to govern themselves. That we can decide through our elections which set of policies we want enacted.

For Harris to act as though policy doesn’t matter — that vibes and emotions are how we choose our elected leaders — is to say that the people aren’t capable of high-level thinking. It is to say that democracy is dead, and she wants merely to preside over its ruins.