Only thing New York Times likes about Kamala Harris is she isn’t Trump

Talk about damning with faint praise. The New York Times editorial board endorsed Kamala Harris for president on Monday — but the real headline should have been “anybody but Donald Trump.”

The Times editors spent 16 paragraphs talking about Trump, twice as many as discussed the candidate they were actually backing.

Consider what Harris has gotten done in her career, according to the Times: the endorsement doesn’t refer to a single accomplishment.

We’re told only the jobs she has held and that she “has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom.”

Nothing she’s actually done is mentioned. Even the discussion of her foreign policy just says what the Times hopes Harris will do, then turns to bashing Trump.

Contrast this to the paper’s 2020 endorsement of Biden, which never mentioned Trump’s name. That editorial listed laws Biden had authored, positions he had taken, and tasks he had handled as vice president. It praised his “unusually rich grasp of and experience in foreign policy.”

Given how that worked out, what does it say that the Times can’t even put Harris on the same level with a straight face?

In fact, this editorial lists more accomplishments for Trump than for Harris, including securing the border during the pandemic, breaking the stale Washington consensus on China, and a “focus on Covid vaccine development” that “paid off” — never mind that the Times claimed four years ago that we needed Biden to “return a respect for science and expertise to the government.”

The best the Times can say of Harris is that she has shown “care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution.”

Competence at what? We’re not told.

Also, since when has Harris ever stood up for the Constitution? The Supreme Court smacked her down for violating the First Amendment rights of charities and public advocacy groups. She spent her first presidential campaign “running for queen,” as Times columnist David French said at the time, given her penchant for just declaring that presidents could do whatever they wanted by executive order — a pattern this administration has continued.

In 2019, she literally laughed in Joe Biden’s face when he warned that her gun-grabbing plans were unconstitutional. She’s still touting a law-breaking plan to pack the Supreme Court by forcing three conservative justices off the bench.

Harris “may not be the perfect candidate for every voter” who wants to see change, the Times admits. She “would continue” Joe Biden’s budget-busting climate policies, and the Times can’t think of an example of how her policies would be different from old Joe’s.

She “at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders,” but how?

She was the “border czar” for the past four years, when the lack of border security was because the administration wouldn’t enforce the laws we have. We’re told that she aims to bring down prices, but not how.

The longest section of the discussion of Harris is the Times’s admission that she’s doing “a disservice to the American people” by not giving more details about her plans or having “unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies.”

The editors note that this creates “a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been.”

Ya think?!

It “could backfire by undermining her core argument” that she is “capable.” Perhaps voters might want a capable candidate.

In the past, Democratic presidential candidates trudged dutifully to Manhattan to court the Times editors, even if that meant being upbraided to their faces, such as when an editor accused Pete Buttigieg in 2020 of helping fix bread prices. Harris hasn’t granted the Times an audience, but she’s not Trump, so who cares?

The Times has to settle for putting words in Harris’s mouth because it is so busy foaming at its own about Trump.

It describes his first term “a warning” of worse to come — admitting without saying so that it wasn’t actually the worst thing ever, as Times readers were told daily at the time.

Maybe instead of playing the boy who cried wolf, the Times editors should have higher standards for their own candidate.

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review. Twitter: @BaseballCrank