Let’s be honest. From the moment she came into sharp focus upon being selected by Joe Biden as vice president, Kamala Harris has been a laugh line. Why? The widespread perception that she was picked over more qualified candidates strictly because of her race and gender. Her evident lack of substance revealed through her signature word salads. Her disastrous performance as border czar. Her famously ineffective management style that forced one adviser after another to run for the exits. Her inexplicable guffaws when a gracious laugh was called for and expected.
But that’s all over now. She’s a new person, Kamala 2.0, don’t you know? She no longer represents the most target-rich environment for ridicule but rather a rock star, Hollywood on the Potomac, the female Barack Obama -- the woman whose mixed-race background and endless enthusiasm for abortion promises to offer broad appeal to left-of-center voters. With Democrats undoubtedly scrambling to change everything from ballots to lawn signs from Biden-Harris to Harris or Harris-(fill in the blank), a fawning media are doing their part by glamorizing her life story. They will be sure to leave out inconvenient truths like her career-launching relationship with a married man, famed California Democrat Willie Brown, or that her formative years were spent in Canada, or how she has presented herself alternately as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and BLM-inspired progressive.
She will try to be all things to all people but is in danger of winding up where she did in her failed run at the White House: as nothing to nobody. Despite lazy descriptions of her as African-American, she is not -- and that matters in the Democrats’ hierarchy of oppression. She has never had particular appeal to minorities or women beyond those who vote primarily on race and gender. Perhaps most damaging is that she is widely viewed as having few core beliefs.
But that was then, and this is now. Harris is a new woman, reborn as the goddess of our progressive future. And so, with the wind at her back during a mini-honeymoon, she will now have a chance to transform her image before an anxious national audience. She will try to do so as shellshocked voters desperately try to add their evaluation of Harris to their processing of the dizzying course of events in this campaign for the ages, from Trump’s conviction to Biden’s debate from hell to the Trump headshot to Biden’s stunning exit from the race.
Questions Demanding Answers
Before anyone is truly convinced of her ability to either beat Trump or serve as president, Kamala will have to answer a series of extremely difficult questions in forthright and intelligible fashion. It will require political skills she has not previously displayed.
Exactly when were you aware of President Biden’s cognitive decline?
What did you do about it? Whom did you talk to about it?
Will you continue to claim you saw no evidence of his deteriorating condition through all of your interactions with him? Congressional Democrats were reportedly startled by his condition as far back as the fall of 2021.
If President Biden is not up to running for office, something he denied for months, how exactly is he fit to continue as commander-in-chief? What is your response right now to Robert Hur’s description of your president as an elderly man with a poor memory?
As Border Czar (though you reject that title), how much responsibility are you willing to accept for the catastrophe at the southern border, for the millions of illegal immigrants who have poured over the border since the advent of your administration?
How responsible are you for a migrant-driven crime wave that has women terrified to go out alone and has driven so many out of once-great cities?
Do you agree that inflation was really 9% when you took office, as the president has repeatedly claimed, even though it was reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as 1.4%?
Exactly how much responsibility are you willing to accept for inflation that is worse than at any time in 40 years, and rising prices that are forcing Americans to change their lifestyles?
Those are certainly not all the questions facing Kamala as she races out onto the big stage. But if she can navigate those fundamental issues effectively enough to convince Americans — and Democratic leaders well aware of her deficits — that they were wrong about her all along, then her candidacy can be considered a serious threat to Trump. But if she replaces Biden’s stumbles and mumbles with her own circular logic designed to dodge scrutiny, her negative image, like that of her increasingly elite party, will only be reinforced.
How did we get to this point?
Kamala Harris: Product of a Rigged Process
One of the more prominent narratives advanced by the media over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign is that an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted alternatives to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Armed with that data-based assumption, how did the two parties respond? After all, they are the only vehicles for managing the political landscape as laid out by public and private polling. And the responses of the two parties could not have been more opposite.
Republicans, shaky about another run by Trump, created a primary framework that attracted well-known alternatives to Trump like Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie. They provided platforms, primaries, and debates. And just like in 2016, the challengers all fell like dominos before the former president as a martyr for the cause who “took a bullet for democracy,” as he proclaimed at a recent rally, and who has now unmistakably redefined and united the Republican Party.
In striking contrast, Democrats, once perceived as protectors of the downtrodden and dispossessed, are now widely viewed as the true elites. And their primary process only reinforced that reputation. They essentially warned and threatened anyone in their fold, from officeholders to operatives, who would dare consider challenging their president. Dissenters were silenced. There was only a single option. Joe Biden would be the nominee whether rank-and-file Democrats wanted him or not. The one brave soul willing to openly observe that their emperor had no clothes, Rep. Dean Phillips, was marginalized, ostracized, and reportedly threatened with a primary challenge.
The result: Trump and Republicans are more united than ever. Democrats are left with Kamala Harris, a candidate who flamed out mightily in her previous run for the presidency, receiving a grand total of zero delegates in her heavily funded presidential campaign. But now she has wrapped up the nomination in about 24 hours. Maybe it had something to do with the way their nominees were selected. Could Kamala Harris have won an open primary against successful or well-known Democrats like Govs. Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, and other rising stars? Few would say yes, and that is why, despite the party’s attempts to put a happy face on the mess they created, so many Americans are flummoxed and so many Democrats are furious.
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