It's a mystery, all right. The only certainty the Atlantic's David Graham has is that Republicans are pouncing.

Left completely unsaid: The curious incuriosity of the American media over Kamala Harris' policies, as well as their shrug at her complete lack of engagement with them. Graham offers a scolding look at Republicans for pointing it out, not for the candidate without a policy page nor the media without a shred of self-respect:

The Trump campaign says that Kamala Harris is a radical leftist. The far left fears that she’s a neoliberal cop. They can’t both be right.

But pinning down exactly where the vice president and Democratic nominee for president sits on the political spectrum is not so easy. She has gone from her first state-level election to the top of the presidential ticket in 14 years, far faster than Joe Biden, and she spent much of that time in positions that don’t provide an extensive record on a wide range of policy issues. During her 2020 presidential bid, she took some positions to the left of her prior record—several of which she’s now walked back in her current bid for president.

Robert L. Borosage, a progressive strategist and writer, told me that Harris’s career offers a good sense of her views on some discrete issues, but less of her overall vision.

“What she hasn’t had to do, and what she failed to do in 2020, was define a coherent, compelling message about where she wanted to take the country and how that was authentic to her,” he said. “That’s a big deal. And that remains to be seen.” This ambiguity is something that Donald Trump’s supporters have seized upon, pointing to the absence of a detailed platform on her campaign site (though Trump’s own platform is not exactly heavy on policy details either).

First, let's assess Graham's weak-tea attempt at a false equivalency in his parenthetical: "though Trump’s own platform is not exactly heavy on policy details either". Trump actually has a platform page on his campaign website, unlike Harris, and a 16-page "white paper" explaining the details of his 20-point agenda. Maybe Graham's too bored or too shattered by all of the GOP "seizing" to click onto the Trump website and check his facts. And, of course, we have four years of Trump's presidency to assess his policies and positions.

What does Harris have? She's been vice president for almost four years. Her party anointed her as the nominee three weeks ago. Kamala Harris ran on a progressive platform in California for the Senate and in 2019 for the presidential nomination, so she's had years to develop her positions on all of the issues in play. Is she such an empty suit that she couldn't put together a platform within the first couple of days of the campaign? If so, why did Democrats rush to anoint her?

Why aren't reporters asking these questions, rather than just observing the "seizing"? Because the answer to why Harris is hard to pin down isn't Republicans who pounce -- it's reporters and media outlets who refuse to do their jobs. 

That's why mainstream media never tires of reporting the "seizing" and the "pouncing" when it comes to Republican criticism of Democrats. Republicans are doing the job the media refuses to do, and the media is embarrassed by it. There isn't a single word in Graham's essay that pins the issue of "ambiguity" on the media that has cooperated in her strategy of silence. We know, for instance, that the pool reporters on her campaign have agreed to off-the-record bull sessions with Harris in order for them to report on the campaign messaging without fingerprints, thanks to a Politico newsletter item last week. 

Want to know why no one knows Kamala's politics of the moment? Maybe it's because the people whose job it is to report it aren't asking. The American establishment media have allowed Harris to run as the anointed presidential nominee of a major party for three weeks now without a platform, without a press conference, and without even an interview in which she could be pressed to answer this question.

And the biggest criticism Graham can muster for this sorry state of affairs is ... to smirk at Republicans for pointing it out and slough it off as "seizing," the hoariest cliché in political reporting. Talk about Protection Racket Media!

This is a complete failure by the journalistic institutions who exist to inform the electorate, especially about public officials and the exercise of power. Why bother with newspapers and other news organizations at all if they won't bother to ask Kamala what her positions are? If her pool reporters refused to do any more off-the-record chats and demanded a full presser or on-the-record interviews and still didn't get them, that would be one thing. But they're rolling over and playing along, partners in a conspiracy of silence that will keep a major-party nominee a complete cipher to the American electorate for as long as possible.

Graham may or may not be right that Kamala's politics are "hard to pin down." That's not true of the politics of the American media establishment, which acts as an arm of the DNC now at all times.