Polls across the board continue to show a very tight race for president, and while these surveys have been inaccurate at times in the past, the outcome most are predicting could still be in the cards. But sometimes, one must dispense with metrics in favor of the simple eye test to determine where a race is headed. Put another way, who will you believe, professional pollsters or your lyin’ eyes? The candidacy of Kamala Harris was already tenuous when she was selected by default to stand in for Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket. But now you can see for yourself in real time that the veil she has managed to place over herself – with the vital assistance of big media – is being pierced.
If Donald Trump had suddenly attempted to present himself as a liberal this time around, the media would be spending 110% of its time ridiculing his 180-degree turn. But with Harris presenting as someone very different than she has claimed to be her entire career, spanning two decades and four different positions in the political realm, the media’s response, with few exceptions, has been crickets.
But such a dramatic pivot on top of her performance as border czar and the record of her administration was bound to unwind at some point. You may remember the lyrics from that famous silly song, "The Skeleton Dance": The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone; the leg bone’s connected to the knee bone; the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, etc. That is an apt description of how one crisis has connected to so many others under the watch of Harris and Biden. And now, these connected crises are reaching critical mass.
On the international front, Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan demonstrated a level of weakness and incompetence that led directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s audacious march into Ukraine and then to an emboldened Iranian regime monetized by Biden unleashing its surrogates to commit mass murder on innocent Israelis. To worsen matters, Washington has sent mixed messages while picking and choosing which weapons it will send our stalwart ally amid an existential crisis as Jew-hating leftists openly support savage terrorists. In turn, it has brought Israel and its enemies closer to a region-wide war than at any time in the last half-century. The sight of anti-Israeli protesters celebrating the slaughter of innocents on the first anniversary of the massacre was downright sickening and certainly won't help the cause of the Democratic presidential nominee.
Harris made the situation even more tenuous by refusing to say she supports Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during her interview Monday (Oct. 7) on CBS’ "60 Minutes." We have known since her time in the Senate that she is no friend of Israel, which is evident from her voting record and alliance with open antisemites like Ilhan Omar. But given her about-face on so many other issues, she might have at least pretended to express support for the leader of our closest ally in the quagmire of the Middle East – a direct result of her administration’s prevarication on the issue.
The domestic equivalent of Afghanistan and its spiraling aftermath is the de facto open border policy of Biden-Harris reflexively and gratuitously trashing dozens of Trump policies that kept the border under control. The millions of illegal immigrants who took advantage of the opening are now flooding hard-pressed cities across the land, which in turn has resulted in a whole new category of criminal behavior: migrant crime, including murder and rape. Urban centers have thus been forced to divert precious resources to these illegal aliens instead of their own citizens, which in turn has led to growing outrage, division, and unrest. And now, the $1.4 billion in FEMA resources diverted to the immigrant crisis have starved the agency of funds for its essential mission of disaster relief. FEMA now admits it doesn’t have enough funds to handle another hurricane – just as a monstrous storm approaches Florida.
Through it all, Biden presents as an absentee president with mind-numbing optics, spending much of his time at the beach instead of the command center in the White House while Harris continues campaigning as if everything is fine. To make matters even worse, Harris played politics with the hurricanes – which even Joe Biden refused to do – acting insulted that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the most effective governor in the nation when it comes to natural disasters, did not answer her perfunctory phone call, saying he was being "selfish." You can't make this stuff up.
Harris Campaign of Joy in a World on Fire
The strategy that had been working when Harris was the new shiny object in the race and her campaign was still declaring joy as its theme is coming undone. A major part of that plan was talking loudly but saying little – aside from discussing her “middle-class” background. But now, in crunch time, she is being forced to engage in the very thing she has managed to avoid until now – actual interviews. It started with "60 Minutes," and it did not go well, affirming her previous strategy of remaining vague and tossing out meaningless mantras. She looked shaky, unprepared, and uninformed. Thus, we can expect the rest of her sit-downs before the election to be on vacuous or unserious platforms such as "The View," Howard Stern, and the "Call Her Daddy" podcast where – unlike CBS' Bill Whitaker, who grilled her as any honest journalist should – she could count on softball questions specifically designed to cast her in the best possible light.
At the same time, it seems her running mate, Tim Walz, is only making things worse whenever he opens his mouth. After a widely panned debate performance, Walz went on "Fox News Sunday" and argued that “[Harris’] border policies are the most strongest, the fairest we've seen." We shall see if the exhausted electorate concurs. After her past statements about decriminalizing illegal entry and abolishing ICE, and three and a half years of illegal immigration that has altered the face of the country, does anyone seriously believe she is sincere in her newfound belief about closing the border?
Bit by bit, the vice president’s claims of moderation and competence are being unmasked by events on the ground about which Biden and Harris have demonstrated alarmingly little urgency and an even more disturbing incapacity to solve or even mitigate. Where are either of the nation’s top two public officials as the worst hurricane since Katrina devastated the southeast, and a new storm threatens to flatten the entire state of Florida? How could they appear to be so out of touch? To say the thousands who have suffered life-altering effects from the cataclysmic Hurricane Helene feel abandoned would be an understatement. This could produce the opposite electoral effect from 2012 when then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie heaped praise on President Barack Obama days before the election for his response to Hurricane Sandy. Obama was re-elected handily.
The vice president’s meticulously constructed house of cards based on clever, poll-tested, and endlessly repeated mantras like joy, middle class, and opportunity economy is starting to collapse upon itself. Indeed, a type of domino theory is starting to emerge in the Harris campaign. War-inducing weakness on the international stage and a self-inflicted border crisis have caused many dominoes to start tumbling down. As the walls close in around her, Harris urgently needs to find her footing in the next four weeks to avoid being the last domino to fall.
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