I haven’t seen this many reboots since blowing into my Duck Hunt cartridge a dozen times to zap some Mallards.
Vice President Kamala (or “Cackles,” as she likes to be called) Harris is undergoing the Cinderella treatment. Again. Actually again again. Sorry: again again again. For the third time in two years, the Vice President is gussying up her image ahead of her ‘24 rerun.
Harris’s handlers can’t hide the hideous poll numbers: her lopsided negatives were the worst ever recorded in one NBC survey. Overall, the Veep’s approval rate mirrors her boss’s, which is approaching Hades depths. But Harris has it worse as heir apparent: she’s the would-be successor to a president in prime Life Alert age. Anyone else would already be primped and primed for the top job. (Career-clambering Kamala’s got some experience with being groomed—just ask Slick Willie… er… the other Slick Willie.)
Not so for poor, put-upon Kamala. Despite having her own EEOB wing, and being one weak heartbeat away from the presidency, the American public isn’t sold on a President Harris. Her own party isn’t a fan, despite VPK checking off the DEI punch list: black, Indian, woman, “trail-blazer,” “historic,” paramour. Meeting the Democrats’ inclusion rider isn’t enough—the party failed to elevate her above single digits during her brief presidential run. The very image of the left’s multicultural future dropped like a Wile E. Coyote anvil before Iowa. Even the debut Marvel movie starring a plucky hero named Kamala is bombing.
The prestige press can’t ignore the nail-on-chalkboard squawk emanating from Pennsylvania Ave. any longer. The Atlantic dubs it “The Kamala Harris Problem,” as if the second-most influential political figure in the world was a singing novitiate seeking out a family. “Few people seem to think she’s ready to be president. Why?” asks Elaina Plott Calabro, positing an obviously arguendo question. By “few people” she means a whole lot of voters. And by “Why?” she means why can’t America just make way for President Yass Queen? Why do polls consistently suggest that Harris has the age-old adolescent conundrum: nobody likes her. Were the country a cafeteria lunch table, the VP would reluctantly get an edge seat to the crowd. Or she’d be left to dine with the nerds, goths, burnouts, theater geeks, and other loser rumps.
The “why” is obvious to any non-X-eyed journo outside the Acela Corridor. Harris is an affirmative-action deputy. She didn’t get the job based on merit, unless you count winning safe seats in deep-blue California an achievement. Contrary to popular myth, Americans aren’t meritocrats. But they hate—hate, Hate, HATE!—undeserved success. Harris’s career ladder has been built of nothing but melanin and maidenhood.
If you think I’m too harsh, take one listen to the pestilential bleat she calls “laughter.” You think that ear-drubbing dissonance won her any votes?
In a long New York Times profile, Astead Herndon gives details on how the Biden campaign faced pressure from the party base and its own advisors to go full “black girl magic” for the VP slot. The summer of Floyd certainly shaded Biden’s initial pledge to pick a woman for his second-in-command—a curiously misogynistic concession womens’ lib-types overlooked. Thanks to racialist pressure from without and within, Harris got the nod in the same way she’s advanced through most of career: by dint of her immutable characteristics. MLK, eat your heart out—your dream is inverted!
What must have felt like an invitation into the commanding heights of American power became an exclusionary mark. The vice presidency has historically been a means for the president to control the inner-opposition. Team Biden effectively “Carried”-ed Harris in the savviest way possible: shining a spotlight on her.
If the grating guffaw wasn’t going to curse Kamala, her endless train of vacuous inanities would. “It’s time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.”; “I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled.”; “We’ve got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are because you have been forced to take this seriously.”
ChatGPT could come up with more eloquence than that bureau-droid speak. Then there are the strange bedtime-story patronizations: “Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus.”; “I just love circles.”; “So, Venn diagram, those three circles, right?”
A woman entranced by basic shapes and school transportation should be teaching kindergarten, not bilateraling with world leaders.
Americans are easily dazzled by prattling pols. But Kamala Harris’s plain lack of human character, her odd wetware manner, isn’t fooling anyone. H.L. Mencken underestimated democracy’s ability to unmask fakery. Sometimes voters want to be lied to, falsely comforted, indulged, demeaned, treated like kiddies begging for candy. But not by an empty vessel.
Reset a robot and you’re still left with a robot. The brightest minds in Silicon Valley won’t be able to come up with a patch by next November.
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