Kamala 2024: "What Can Be Unburdened By What Has Been"
They're trying to make Kamala happen. It's not going to happen.
Guys, Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have been “caught wrongfooted” and “are panicking over Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 race.” “This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared,” says The Atlantic: Kamala Harris and her “unifying presence.” The right-wing media has been engaged in a prolonged “meltdown” over Biden’s sudden withdrawal and the contrast between Kamala’s prosecutorial background and Trump’s felon status. White men are beside themselves. Toxic masculinity is on the run. Conservative children are crying.
The mood on the Left is jubilatory. Our Democracy™ will be saved now that Joe Biden, an “American hero”1 and a “modern George Washington” for whom the establishment shut down any real primary challenge due to his cognitive impairment, has bowed out of the race at the eleventh hour after a literal conspiracy between the White House, party leaders, and the press to cover up his infirmities was exposed during the worst debate performance of all time, dropping his approval rating to an impressive low and making it extraordinarily unlikely that he would win in November.
With Noble Joe™ making his graceful exit after a lifetime of Selfless Service™, the Democrats were able to conduct a private 36-hour blitzkrieg coronation2 with no public debate, no scrutiny of policy positions, and “virtual” ratification of their new Slay Qween Kamala™—a veritable “cultural phenomenon,” says Joy Reid.3 And the best part is that Kamala gets to run against “the oldest nominee for president of the United States in American history.” Can Donald Trump even serve another four years? I mean, he’s nearly 80 years old!
In a matter of hours, the Democratic Party and its media handmaidens, social media minstrels, and #Resistance smegma recalibrated their orbits to enthrone Harris. Never mind that she lacks any pretense to legitimacy; never mind that she owes her entire ascendancy to party elites as opposed to voters. Just shut up and let the delirious hymns of praise emanating from DNC organs wash over you.
Presented with an opportunity to turn the page on Biden, “start over,” and prevent Trump’s return to the White House, members of the left-wing commentariat have essentially spent the past two days guaranteeing a Democratic victory in November.
The problem, however, is that they’re presiding over a dreamscape of their own making. All this Kamala propaganda clashes with reality and is reminiscent of how Hillary Clinton was portrayed in 2016. In the eyes of the press, she could do no wrong. That same dynamic is currently at play. The punditocracy is acting like Kamala Harris is the second coming of Christ because she represents what sections of elite opinion believe the Democratic presidential candidate should look like; in projecting onto Harris their perfect ideal for what the electorate wants, mainstream media morons are mistaking their own preferences for the preferences of actual voters. I’m no political prognosticator, but I think there’s a version of history in which the Left looks back in disbelief at Democrats passing up any opportunity to swap Harris out for a politician untainted by the Biden administration’s record, forever wondering how they could have been so foolish.
The truth is that Kamala Harris has been objectively bad at her current job and is asking for a promotion, using a nomination that was simply handed to her. Indeed, the reason that the changing of the guard has been so torturous is because she’s actually a horrible candidate.4 I mean, less than a day ago even the leading writers of The New York Times rated Slay Qween Kamala™ as the least electable of 10 possible Democratic nominees.
During her time in the U.S. Senate, nobody was to the left of Harris…not even Bernie Sanders. She’s a dangerous authoritarian contemptuous of the essential norms that have blessed America with its longevity—not just because she’s a huge proponent of packing the Supreme Court for the purely ideological purposes of changing the Court’s decisions, which would reduce it to a banana-republic appendage for whoever happens to be in power at any particular time, but because she’s consistently demonstrated her desire to use every lever of power available to circumvent Congress and impose the full might of the federal government on anyone who stands in the way of her agenda. As Dan McLaughlin detailed during the 2020 presidential campaign, “The overall picture of Harris’s record is one that ought to alarm anyone who believes in limited constitutional government and individual liberty.”
And then there’s the fact that Harris is clearly not the brightest star in the intellectual Orion. Sure, one needn’t be an epideictic prodigy to be a successful leader, but this is someone who has dedicated herself to the endless quest of giving as many Hallmark-card-haiku speeches as possible. According to Harris’s defenders, her rhetorical skills get a “bad rap” because of the right-wing media. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson claimed that critics incorrectly believe she’s a gourmet word salad chef whose penchant for oratorical spirals and paralytic thought-helixes when forced to speak extemporaneously is already the stuff of legend. No, sometimes Kamala just gets lost in “the wilderness of syntax.”5
“It is true that she often burdens her sentences with more dependent clauses than they can bear, and verbatim transcripts of her extemporaneous remarks can sometimes be hard to follow,” Robinson writes. “But she also connects powerfully with audiences and communicates her message, even if it might be hard to diagram.”
Come on, man. The similarities between her and the fictional vice president Selina Meyer from Veep are hilarious.6
Every time Harris talks it sounds like a book report where she’s stretching to hit a word count. She does not give the impression of someone who pays close attention in her briefings and carefully reads all of her briefing materials. Indeed, former Harris staffers told the Washington Post that “one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.”
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
Harris’s time as VP has been described by CNN as “entrenched by dysfunction and a lack of focus,” and her leadership is so poor that nobody wants to work for her.7 With her transparent insincerity, self-satisfied progressivism, trademark dismissive laugh, and habit of repeating clearly untrue canned statements (“The border is secure”) and farcical platitudes, she remains impressively unbeloved among the public and ranks among the worst vice presidents in modern memory, with historically low approval ratings. In a New York Times article from February, even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.
That Harris has proven to be such an underwhelming VP shouldn’t be a surprise. Deep-blue California shielded her from serious criticism. Rarely forced to defend herself to voters or colleagues who weren’t already on her side, she never developed the persuasiveness and charisma necessary to succeed on the national stage as a politician, and she certainly didn’t hone her oratorical chops. These weaknesses were on full display when she ran for president in 2019. Unable to raise enough money despite coming from a state with one of the richest Democratic donor bases, Harris performed so poorly that she had to end her campaign8 — which was said to have been “paralyzed by infighting and an indecisive candidate” — before the first primary vote in Iowa. As one former aide bluntly told The New York Times, “you can’t run the country if you can’t run your campaign.”
And yet despite being a political lightweight and having next to no relevant policy or diplomatic expertise, Harris was springboarded up to within a heartbeat of the highest office in the land.
Why? Her identity.
Just as Biden pledged to nominate a black woman for the Supreme Court, he promised to choose a black woman for his running mate, dramatically narrowing his pool of candidates.9 In This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns detail how Biden’s advisers were willing to overlook Harris’s weaknesses in favor of Biden’s immediate political interests and saw that her chief value came from helping to win the 2020 election.10
So while her apologists continue to claim that her widespread disapproval is “gendered” or “systemic” or “inequitable” or whatever other bastardized academic term is trending, the truth is that Harris isn’t disliked because she’s a non-white woman; she was chosen as VP because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked because she has nothing to recommend her beyond immutable traits. Ironically, Harris finds herself holding a position in which she’s ill-equipped to succeed precisely because of identity politics, which motivated Biden to pick a running mate so ill-suited to the job. There’s zero reason to believe Harris will make a better President.
But now, incredibly, this wondrous mediocrity has been anointed the new Democratic nominee — with zero voter input — just a few months before the election.
Obviously Slay Qween Kamala™ shouldn’t be underestimated. But she’s a continuity candidate—another four years of the Biden administration (or worse). To say nothing of the fact that she was an abysmal failure as “border czar” and one of the key players in the conspiracy to hide the president’s cognitive decline from the public. That is damning, and should be sufficient enough reason for people to withhold support.
But if it’s not, my hope is that Americans now understand that what passes for “politics” according to the self-styled champions of Our Democracy™ is basically a game rigged by insiders to select (not elect) a candidate of their choice; and that voters will punish Democrats’ mendacity and vote against the Democratic Party’s idea of democracy: conspiring in a years-long cover-up and one of the most egregious disinformation campaigns in world history to hide the fact that your electoral candidate and sitting President is cognitively compromised and mentally unfit, rigging the primary for that candidate by blocking alternatives, and then disenfranchising your own party voters by organizing a soft coup and overthrowing government processes to remove him once the coverup is exposed and the polling is not to your liking.
Update: Check out this Dave McCormick ad. These aren’t claims being made about Kamala Harris, all of it is straight out of her mouth on camera. This is 90 seconds of electoral poison. And as much as I want to scream from the rooftops that Kamala is DEI made manifest, I think the Trump campaign should simply hammer her on her record in order to avoid alienating potential voters now that Democrats have started declaring that “DEI is the new N word.”
For years they adamantly told Americans there was nothing wrong with Biden despite knowing that he’s been non compos mentis since at least 2021. Then they threatened to destroy him if he didn’t leave the race. Now they’re calling him a “hero.”
“Succession by defenestration,” as Jonathan Turley puts it.
Joy Reid’s non-stop Kamala paeans over the past 48 hours have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she and the new Democratic nominee share the same skin color. Please do not be racist, guys.
Kamala disagrees. As she told an interviewer in 2019, “This is going to sound immodest, but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate.”
CNN did a segment today on how the Harris campaign is “embracing the Brat trend,” with “Brat” apparently meaning that “You’re just that girl who is a little messy and likes to party. And maybe says some dumb things, sometimes.”
Today’s NYT had an article on the Veep revival. Not once was it mentioned that the primary joke is Kamala Harris’s actual performance as a politician. Instead, the reporter weirdly asserted the Veep memes were “less a direct criticism of Harris” and focused the piece on Trump. Because of course.
National Review: “Data from the government watchdog group Open the Books — released Monday, as Harris consolidates her position as President Biden’s successor atop the Democratic ticket — makes clear just how extreme Harris’s personnel problem really is: 91.5 percent of the staff Harris began her vice presidential term with three years ago have since left.”
Despite being theoretically well-placed to dominate the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris dropped out of the race in December of 2019 with just 3 percent support nationally and about 7 percent support in her home state of California. Perhaps the most memorable thing about her “girlboss” campaign, as the media fawningly referred to it, was how often she flip-flopped on big issues—abolishing ICE, sanctuary cities, Medicare for All, independent probes of police shootings, and banning fracking.
And within that pool (7.7% of the population), Harris was the only black woman with national name recognition and who had been elected to statewide office.
Even so, in the run-up to Biden’s selection, some of his closest advisers vehemently opposed picking Harris and tried to discourage him from going in that direction.
With the Kamala coronation, the cabal has thrown down the gauntlet. They apparently believe the propaganda machine is now invincible, no need to hide in the shadows any more.
The scary part is that even in the face of all that’s happened, it’s guaranteed that at least 40% of American voters will cast their vote in favor of the cabal. They are not just a fringe element; we will be battling them for a long time.
What I find completely amazing is there doesn't appear to be any outrage from the left! They accepted the coup and anointment of Kamala like finding a 10 pound sack of 100 dollar bills. The MSM and talking heads didn't miss a beat. Joe who?, Oh yeah, our sitting president. What a selfless act, stepping down from the presidential race; Trump would NEVER do something like that... I wonder what, if anything, the "average" Democrat voter on the street thinks about voting for a candidate for president and having that duly elected candidate "pushed out." I won't argue about the primary process, but the process did at least TRY and involve the voting public.
And just like that, Kamala became the nominee!