The media’s flip to Harris was predictable

This time last week, America’s media was excruciatingly examining Joe Biden’s current health condition and fading campaign to Donald Trump, with leaks coming from White House and campaign Zoom calls. George Clooney, after hosting a Biden fundraiser, called for Biden to withdraw in the pages of the New York Times. Reports of a mysterious Covid diagnosis followed.

But when Biden’s Twitter/X account posted his withdrawal letter on Sunday, the story instantly turned to Vice President Kamala Harris, a presumptive nominee in-waiting who has received more New York Times fluff profiles than she has primary votes (that number is zero, by the way).

The media has dug a hole in the woods for Joe Biden. A great burden of having to perform their jobs with the same amount of enthusiasm they reserve for Republicans has been lifted; now it’s time for the Meme Queen Momala. Since the Democratic Party has coalesced around Harris, the media has run stories about her sweatshirt choices, her cooking habits, her brat memes, her nonsensical ramblings about coconut trees. MSNBC anchors are creating cringe AI images and are gloating over how many views she’s getting from short montages on TikTok (the social media app controlled by the communist Chinese government).

What comes next will be a media-driven promotional campaign that will make 2008 Barack Obama look like an elementary-school puppet show. We’re already seeing it happen. One of the top voter concerns this election cycle is immigration and an all-but-stated open-border policy from the Biden-Harris administration that has tested the public limits and budgets of even blue cities, with the unlimited importation of almost 8 million people from central America and Mexico. In August 2021, as this problem was developing beyond media containment for Biden, the administration specifically put Kamala Harris in charge of stemming the flow.

Whatever she tried, if anything, beyond a couple of visits to Central and South America, failed. Just this week, several media outlets are now attempting to downplay her role that Joe Biden personally gave her. Axios, attempting to neutralize the one major task assigned to Harris over the course of the Biden administration, wrote this week, “The Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had.” The problem for Axios is they themselves labeled Harris “the border Czar” on several occasions. Like-minded articles also came from TIME magazine.

The reason for this retconning is to create a type of RBG-ification around Harris, to deflect away from her own words, actions and policy endorsements.

The problem for the media is Kamala Harris is not the blank canvas that, for the most part, Obama was, as they created the idea of a cultural phenomenon. Harris is on record backing some of the most extremely progressive policies as she catered to the farthest left of the Democratic voting base in 2020. She dropped out before the first Iowa caucus, only to be rescued from obscurity by Joe Biden as he made her his running mate. From almost the first day in office, the White House has referred to itself as the “Biden-Harris” administration, as though she were administratively equal to the president. And because of this White House’s own messaging, not all of the brat memes in the world can separate her from this unpopular administration — and no amount of retconning will contradict her own words.