Quick Take: The Emerging Cult of Kamala
It's Bratgirl Summer in America!
Just the other day, Vice President Kamala Harris was a figure of fun. Our first female veep was universally regarded as a DEI fail: lazy, incompetent, a bad and unpleasant girlboss. She was mocked for her speaking style: either addressing her audience in the manner of a kindergarten teacher or falling into some rhetorical black hole. Though she was reintroduced to the American people again and again, the same old dismal, off-putting Kamala always emerged.
But if Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris on the assumption that there was no one in America who’d shiv him to make her president—he was wrong. Biden’s accelerating mental and physical dissolution, leading to the collapse of his presidency, left the Democrats with no choice. Pay no attention to the praise being heaped upon him now—Biden did not bow out gracefully. Like a contestant on The Gong Show, he was jerked rudely off the stage in a coup organized by party grandees who foresaw the coming train wreck and moved decisively to avert it.
Tactically, the defenestration of Joe Biden was a masterpiece. But strategically, it embodied a serious flaw: the only possible alternative to Biden was his subpar vice president. As a diversity hire, she couldn’t be bypassed without sending progressives into a rage. And in any case, the Dems left it so late that there was no time to conduct a mini primary. Harris it had to be. And so now, the Democratic Party—needless to say with the eager assistance of the legacy media—is working overtime to transform this dud into a diva.
Harris does have a couple of things going for her. First, she takes the age issue off the table, and some on the Left are arguing that she actually turns the tables on that score. But after the Dems’ long and deceitful defense of their octogenarian president against a charge of senile decay, pinning the same charge on Donald Trump seems unlikely to fly. Also, Harris can be counted on to shore up her party’s position with black voters, who were none too enthusiastic about Biden.
On the debit side of the ledger, the Vice President’s problem can be summed up in two words: Biden Administration. As the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party and a member of that administration, she inherits all its political liabilities: the state of the economy, the border crisis, crime, a feckless and ineffective foreign policy. Nor does it help that Harris is a progressive of the worst kind, a California progressive. No pivot to the political center can erase her record as a supporter of Medicare for All, of slavery reparations, of the Green New Deal, of a deeply hostile attitude toward Israel that skirts the edge of antisemitism. It can be taken for granted that the Trump campaign will hit her hard on those issues.
And of course, Kamala Harris is complicit in the attempted coverup of President Biden’s parlous mental and physical condition, which was well on display during his eleven-minute televised address to the nation last night. She’s got some explaining to do about that.
Indeed, that coverup is still ongoing. In his address, Biden didn’t really explain his decision to quit the race. That would have been awkward, since he remains the president. Instead Biden wheezed out some prefab rhetoric about passing the torch and defending democracy. History, he told us, is in our hands. Good to know!
But it may well be asked whether a man to infirm to run for the presidency is fit to serve as president. Shouldn’t Harris have replaced him? Well, maybe Biden resisted any such suggestion. And maybe that suited Harris just fine. After all, if she became president immediately the mechanics of the transition and matters of state would interfere with her campaign schedule. Therefore, let Joe be propped up in the front window of the White House until January 20, 2025—and let the fact that he can no longer carry out the duties of the office be memory holed.
We can only hope that nothing dire happens in the next six months, for the truth is that America no longer has a functional presidency. At this point, Joe Biden’s nothing more than a stuffed dummy.
But we do have Kamala Harris, who’s now receiving a makeover as the Wonder Woman of American politics and the country’s leading bratgirl. And though in many ways Harris is a flawed candidate, she’s not to be underestimated. Her opponent, Donald Trump, is also full of flaws and none too popular. In fact, he and Harris have similar approve/disapprove ratings. But the Vice President has the advantage of being served by a large sector of the media that will do all it can to assure her victory in November.
Kamala Harris can win. Never doubt it.
Trump and Harris have similar approval ratings? Would those be from the same sources that confidently gave Hillary an 80% majority in 2016?
I have read it is easy to fake a poll - and how often do we even know where those numbers came from?
Which is not to deny that Harris will have some real appeal, especially if she confines herself to presenting pre-packaged messages from her handlers.