by Victor Davis Hanson
In theory, it should be hard for Kamala Harris to win the presidency of the United States.
Under pressure, Harris just completed her first “live interview” — a disastrous performance that was mysteriously taped, edited, and emotionally supported by her co-interviewed running mate. During the interview, she claimed that her values remain the same even though her manifestations of them have admittedly changed. Translated, that means for the next 63 days, she will advocate for popular policies antithetical to her own values, which will inevitably resurface after the election once the current façade fades away.
She is a Berkelyite who, as attorney general of California, had a proud far-left tenure. The lifelong large corpus of Harris’s left-wing enthusiasm and causes are only now being unearthed. But they are singular in that her riffs of embracing wokism, being a radical, erasing ICE, doing away with private health insurance, or being the last person in the room when Joe Biden made his disastrous decisions were all given to sympathetic media or pandered to crowds.
As a result, she often doubled down. Her emphatic statements were intended to stun audiences. Unlike other leftists, she really was a proud woke, radical and wanted everyone else to be one as well — broadcasting her leftism as openly as she is now cloaking it.
In one respected survey, Harris’s voting record was rated as the most left-leaning in the United States Senate. If she voted to the left of the admitted hardcore socialist Bernie Sanders, what exactly does that make her?
Otherwise, Harris was undistinguished, and often overtly so, as she was exposed as inane in Senate hearings. Her envisioned 2019-2020 primary bid proved an utter disaster. When liberal Democrat voters nationwide were first made aware of her radical record, her left-wing agendas, and her weird wash/rinse/spin word-salad chats, they ran.
Harris’s well-funded 2019 campaign quickly blew up early. Indeed, she never entered much less won a single primary–and captured no delegates through voting.
In the frenzy following George Floyd’s death, and the mayhem and nationwide rioting and violence of late spring and summer, panicked 2020 nominee Joe Biden announced in advance he would select a diversity candidate as a running mate. And in no time, and under increasing pressure to trump his braggadocious promise, he boxed himself in by assuring his handlers that his running mate would be preselected as a black woman.
Given there were then no black female governors and only two black women in the Senate, Kamala Harris was a choice of last resort — even though, as a candidate and competitor of Joe Biden, she had condemned him before a nationwide audience as a veritable racist who had habitually cozied up to segregationists. When she labels her own running mate a racist it becomes hard to take her charges of racism against Trump seriously.
As vice president, Harris predictably proved inept. In a variety of tasks as “border czar” and point woman on space exploration, she proved not merely clueless but embarrassingly so — sappy, cackling, and variously labeled by ex-staff and Democratic insiders as “out of her league” and “way over her head.” Her chief role was to break a sometimes 50/50 deadlocked Senate and therefore, in every one of those votes, owns the passage of hard-left legislation that often turned disastrous.
As Biden’s cognitive decline accelerated at a geometric rate, a widely derided Harris was seen by the Bidens as Joe’s Spiro Agnew insurance policy: a vice president so bumbling and unimaginable as a future president that if Biden only breathed, he would be still judged preferable to the travesty of a Harris succession.
Biden utterly imploded on June 13 during a stress-test national debate. His collapse ended the 42-month-long charade that he was “fit as a fiddle.” In 24 hours, Biden was transmogrified by his handlers from an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like health nut to physically and mentally unable to continue as the Democratic nominee.
Left unsaid was that his diving polls, not his debility, doomed Biden. Otherwise, he would have survived his latest public humiliation had his approval ratings been respectable. Harris’s race, gender, and status as vice president made it impossible not to anoint her as the new Democratic candidate.
Her machinations to preempt any challengers were achieved almost instantaneously in the same anti-democratic fashion as the removal of Biden himself from the ticket. In the way of the current Democrats, whatever the billionaire donor class and the DEI apparat decide is reified almost instantly by fiat.
We now suffer a zombie presidency for the next five months. Biden’s own party insists that he is too enfeebled to campaign as a nominee but not too demented to serve as president. Weirder still, a presidential candidate, who has never in her life won a primary and just days ago was written off by her own party as linguistically challenged, is being reinvented in 63 days as the second coming of Barack Obama.
Harris 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…
So, the Democratic political establishment of Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer, the Obama consortia, and the Hollywood, Wall Street, and tech billionaire insiders quickly devised strategies to get Harris elected. And that too was not easy.
Given what they had to work with, their efforts centered around avoiding all press conferences, interviews, and unscripted talks. She is to stay wide of anything that might expose her inanity to the public or remind the nation of her dismal record as vice president and the disastrous Biden tenure that she co-owns and loudly, emphatically, and proudly so.
Winston Churchill once said of Admiral Jellicoe, who commanded the Home Fleet at the gigantic sea-battle of Jutland, that he was the only man who could lose Britain the war in an afternoon; so too Democrat elites know ten minutes of an unscripted, unedited, and televised Harris could sink the entire left-wing cause.
So here we are, witnessing the most anti-democratic effort in modern electoral history — a full-fledged, tripartite effort to:
a) keep Harris silent and out of the public eye, and outsource her persona and views to a corrupt fusion media, to billionaire-funded ad campaigns, and to political surrogates;
b) superimpose pseudo-conservative views upon her lifelong record of leftist advocacies and policies — a brief, now 63-day transformation designed to fool a voting public for which Democratic grandees harbor utter contempt;
c) reinvent the campaign from Harris versus Trump to fixations on Donald Trump as a Satanic figure that justifies any means necessary to defeat and destroy him.
Will the ruse work?
That’s an open question. There are formidable hurdles that beset and many advantages that aid Harris. In her favor, the campaign cycle has been aborted from one traditionally lasting nine to ten months to a mere three, given her last-minute coronation.
Her first co-interview was mostly a story of dissimulation, soft-ball questions, and no follow-ups to her non-answers — with plenty of stonewalling about what was edited and why. And that may well be as close as the public ever gets to fathoming the ‘Being There’ Harris candidacy.
Biden proved in 2020 that he could avoid the press for almost a year by using COVID as a pretext, all while reinventing himself in absentia as a moderate and unifier.
Moreover, Harris will be inundated with two to three billion dollars, most of it globalized wealth from left-wing billionaires in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the idle, drone elite who inherited late 20th century fortunes.
Insulting the American people
Harris enjoys two other advantages besides a run-out-the-clock campaign and big money. She can count on hundreds of millions of dollars in free media publicity as network anchors spar with Trump, Vance, and Republican senators nonstop. They no longer make any pretense about objectivity but openly distort and prevaricate, again on the reasoning that the orange prince of darkness justifies becoming Pravda.
No one seems to care that for the second time in four years, the Democrats have sought to nullify and warp their own primary process, mask the nature and true condition of their anointed but challenged candidate, and then enlist the media to get elected a phantom president.
But “reimaging” Harris in 2004 also has its challenges.
First, can Harris like Biden really hide for two more months?
In 2020, Biden sought to mask his cognitive decline by claiming he had to stay in his basement due to COVID lockdowns. Harris is just as tongue-tied, but she lacks the COVID lockdown excuse to avoid the public and media.
And whereas Biden ran in Democratic primaries and was a candidate for two years, Harris again neither entered a single primary nor won a single delegate in an election. She cannot claim any experience campaigning, given she may be the first modern president never to have entered a single primary election.
In theory, a normal candidate with such a dismal and abbreviated past would be demanding interviews.
Instead, Harris’s compulsive-obsessive fixation on avoiding the media becomes a doom loop: the more she knows a presidential candidate must at least occasionally speak off the cuff, the more she knows, given her limitations, that to do so endangers the entire progressive project. As a result, Harris haggles over proposed interviews demanding notes, the reassuring presence at her side of Tim Walz, no live transmissions, and a final edited and truncated version released to the public.
So, her paralysis may annoy and then anger the electorate. The more she calls Trump a “coward,” the more she is seen as a craven projectionist.
In 2008, the blank-slate Obama did the hopey/change schtick as an antithesis to the unpopular Iraq War, the 2008 financial meltdown, and eight years of Republican rule. In 2020, Joe Biden reinvented himself as good ol’ Joe the centrist healer as a supposed antidote to four years of the “disrupter’ Trump and the purported “armed insurrection” of January 6.
But Harris is the current vice president. She has five months left on her term. Joe Biden is either on vacation, asleep, or suspended in a zombie state.
Theoretically, she is in control and could implement right now all of the bromides of her equity campaign agendas. And when she trashes high prices, open borders, the national debt, or high interest rates, she is indicting her boss who lifted her out of obscurity and herself as the proverbial and self-acclaimed “last person in the room” who co-owned those decisions.
Note that in her first and likely last (co-)interview, Harris, like a medieval palimpsest, imprints her pseudo-MAGA agendas on top of her real leftist history and policies.
That is, she never quite disowns her prior and innate positions on banning fracking, abolishing ICE, the disastrous Afghanistan humiliation, or any of her unpopular leftist positions.
Instead, Harris simply pastes their antitheses onto them and then has aides contextualize the jumbled mess of discrepancies so as to not alienate her extremist base.
Harris is not so much a flip-flopper as a padder, who supports anything, without any worry about framing each new position by renouncing her original and opposite one.
Her politics are now like an overgrown sandwich, with too many trimmings squashed on top of each other that eventually cause the entire jumble to fall apart.
Her sudden pivot to support Israel and stop illegal immigration exists simultaneously with siding with Hamas and destroying the border. But as political reality pulls her to the right and her innate leftist pulls to the left, she is beginning to split down the middle. When one is for everything, one is for nothing.
So, it will be hard to convince the American people that Harris is not an incumbent but another Obama-like newcomer here to save us from old white guys in their seventies. And even harder will be her task to fuse socialism with MAGA if even for only 63 days.
Rawness Beats Dishonesty
Finally, Trump is running for a third time and better so than he did in 2016 or 2020. His team is more experienced and so is Trump himself. He has a record of four years that polls on the economy and foreign policy far better than Harris’s tenure with Biden.
The five civic and criminal court trials are increasingly seen as Biden-inspired vindictive abuse of the law and illegitimate. For all the Biden-Harris caustic slurs of “convicted felon” more than half the country sees Biden and Harris as more culpable for discrediting our judiciary in their efforts to do in court what they fear they cannot at the ballot box.
Experts insist the race is even or in favor of Harris. But aside from the polls’ history of underestimating Trump’s real support, the current deadlock, and the right/left politics of the race, Trump is running authentically, transparently, and bluntly, Harris disingenuously, covertly, and duplicitously.
Trump’s challenge is to expose Harris for the radical she is; Harris’s is to mask the radicalism that she once proudly asserted and will do so again immediately upon election.
Ultimately, the American people should choose in-your-face honesty and competence over smiley-face dissimulation and incompetence.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University.
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Kamala Harris.
