In mid-October, as Kamala Harris began to do interviews with friendly audiences, she visited the Breakfast Studio of radio host Charlamagne tha God, where she took questions from callers. The first to come through was one of those questions that is often top of mind for voters, but dismissed in Washington as a naive misunderstanding of how the world truly works.
Why, asked the caller, do we send so much money overseas but seem to have nothing to meet the needs of people here at home?
“That’s one of the reasons the America First rhetoric resonates,” Charlamagne added, putting the question to Harris. “We can do it all—and we do,” Harris responded.
It was a callback to the debate in Washington the last time a Democratic president had pushed through a sweeping new social spending agenda, LBJ’s Great Society, but coupled it with ramped up spending on the Vietnam War. At a press conference in the summer of 1965, one reporter told President Lyndon Johnson, the day after the bombing of North Vietnam.
“Mr. President, from what you have outlined as your program for now, it would seem that you feel that we can have guns and butter for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right now, though, that down the road a piece the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter?”
LBJ said that the American people would be willing to bear the burden. “I have not the slightest doubt but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face,” he responded.
He was wrong, of course, and the runaway inflation produced by the war spending broke the back of the New Deal coalition, shattering organized labor and ushering in the Reagan Revolution.
But, according to Harris, not only could the American people have both guns and butter, they already had it, and it was good.