Time was when a Democrat president lost Walter Cronkite, he lost Middle America.

That’s what Democrat President Lyndon Johnson reportedly muttered on February 27, 1968, upon watching the CBS News anchor’s grim assessment of our ongoing involvement in Vietnam. A month later, in a nationally televised address, Johnson called it quits, telling the nation that he’d decided against seeking reelection.

Of course, relatively few Americans watch the network news these days, but the Democrat Party certainly watches the headlines of its foremost cheerleader. That would be The Washington Post, an organ that, like Cronkite in 1968, has been less than charitable toward the party’s new standard-bearer, Kamala Harris.

A week ago, for example, the Post’s editorial board lamented the vice president’s refusal to sit for an interview — a refusal that has now reached Day 29. “Questions we’d love to ask Kamala Harris,” went the headline.

More recently, the editorial board was at it again, pouring cold water on Harris’s plans for curbing inflation and fixing the American economy, which she’d previewed during the week and announced Friday at a sparsely attended event at Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As the Post’s headline put it: “The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks.” Ouch. “‘Price gouging’ is not causing inflation,” went the subhead. “So why is the vice president promising to stamp it out?”

“When I am elected president,” Harris said on Friday, somewhat presumptuously, “I will make it a top priority to bring down costs and increase economic security for all Americans. As president, I will take on the high costs that matter most to most Americans, like the cost of food. We all know that prices went up during the pandemic when the supply chains shut down and failed. But our supply chains have now improved. And prices are still too high.”

She’s right that prices are too high. But she’s wrong about their root causes. Recall that in 2021, Vice President Harris cast the deciding vote in a 50-50 Senate to allow the passage of Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American [sic] Rescue [sic] Plan [sic], a massive money-printing operation that even Democrat economists conceded would increase inflation. That, more than some phony supply-chain failure, is why prices are so persistently high. Thanks to Team Biden-Harris, we have more dollars chasing fewer goods and services. And that’s the very definition of inflation. As the Post’s editors wrote:

Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech Friday was an opportunity to get specific with voters about how a Harris presidency would manage an economy that many feel is not working well for them. Unfortunately, instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.

Americans are clearly still anxious and angry about the high cost of groceries, housing and even $5.29 Big Macs. While the inflation rate has cooled substantially since the 2022 peak, an ostensible Biden-Harris administration accomplishment, prices remain elevated relative to the Trump years.

Recall, too, that Harris said in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, recently, “When I am president, it will be a Day One priority to fight to bring down prices.”

Kamala keeps talking about “Day One” priorities. But she’s already been in office for three and a half years. What she really means is, It’ll be a Day 1,461 priority. Because that’s how long she’ll have been in office by January 20, 2025.

The Post’s editors, though, weren’t the only ones who panned the Harris plan. As former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman told the Financial Times, “I think the biggest hope is it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and not reality. There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”

Asked on CNN about the impact of so-called corporate price gouging on the inflation that all Americans are feeling, Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff was even less enthusiastic than Furman. “I don’t think corporate price-gouging has all that much to do with it. … I hope she walks this one back. She had some good ideas. She had some mixed ideas. This was a horrible idea.”

Price controls are always a bad idea, and this sentiment is shared widely across the political spectrum. So when Harris proposes price controls on healthcare, housing, and food, she’s proposing ideas that have been disavowed by all but the Soviet-style central planners currently running Venezuela into the ground. Consider American grocery stores, for example. According to the Food Industry Association, their net profit was a paltry 1.6% last year. Talk about your incompetent price-gougers.

Perhaps the most damning assessment of all, however, was meant as a compliment to Harris. Asked yesterday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” whether the candidate’s plan to ban price gouging “was anything more than a gimmick,” Michigan Governor and 2028 Democrat presidential hopeful Gretchen Whitmer replied, “I think it speaks to Kamala Harris’s values.”

In other words, Kamala Harris values gimmickry over substance.

As even The Washington Post concedes: “Harris’s full plan would add $1.7 trillion to federal deficits over a decade. … To be sure, every campaign makes expensive promises that will never come to pass, especially with a divided Congress. … Even adjusted for the pandering standards of campaign economics, however, Ms. Harris’s speech Friday ranks as a disappointment.”

The economy remains the number one issue among the American electorate, and there isn’t a close second. Furthermore, the polls consistently show that voters trust Donald Trump more than Kamala Harris on this issue.

Harris didn’t need to hit an economic home run this weekend; a slap single would’ve been enough for The Washington Post and for much of Middle America.

Instead, she swung and missed.