Kamala shoots the moon

So how exactly does a political candidate who fell on her face in the most dramatic way possible, whose campaign became a partisan joke, who turned comparisons to Barack Obama into comparisons with Sarah Palin, suddenly, in the blink of an eye, become the national savior of the Democratic Party, a generational talent, the princess that was promised?

The answer is simple enough: members of the Democratic Party, unlike American conservatives, are totally fine with being told what to do. Belief is a transitional moment in time, unburdened by what has been. So if you have a candidate who, theoretically, endorsed the Green New Deal, a federal jobs guarantee, an 80 percent marginal tax rate, free healthcare for illegal immigrants and banning non-electric cars within the next decade, it’s just fine and dandy for her to reverse all those positions based on nothing more than the whim of the current moment. Who cares if you were opposed to fracking on Tuesday? That was Tuesday. This is Friday and it is the future, in which we exist, having dropped from the coconut tree like a newfound babe.

Kamala Harris was a terrible electoral politician. This is not a statement of opinion but a statement of fact. She managed to run well behind her fellow Democrats in multiple California races before she flamed out in 2020, still charred from the fire lit by Tulsi Gabbard on the debate stage. In 2010, her race for attorney general — thought to be a foregone victory on the coattails of the eminently popular Jerry Brown — was threatened by benign moderate Republican Steve Cooley to the point that she bested him by just 1.2 percentage points. She had the biggest launch of the 2020 presidential cycle after coasting into Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat six years later, but fell apart with such speed that she dropped out before a single primary vote was cast. Her lack of achievement was the dominant storyline when Joe Biden picked her in 2020, with everyone knowing he preferred Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar. But hey, she checked the box.

By 2023, that was no longer sufficient. Multiple columnists at the Washington Post and the New York Times floated the idea that the key to Joe Biden’s reelection was to ditch Kamala as soon as possible. Could she be tempted with a different job — a shift to academia, a swap-out with Merrick Garland, a Supreme Court appointment if Justice Sotomayor could be convinced? “How do you solve a problem like Kamala?” was the ever-present dialogue at Washington cocktail parties, which were drab and depressed affairs in the “is the president awake now” stage of the Biden presidency.

Yet through it all, Kamala endured, unburdened and even-keeled through all her meanderings about yellow school buses, Venn diagrams and space, space — it affects us all! Such beautiful musings were the focus of her vice presidency, not the dirty places she had been assigned by Uncle Joe to manage into some semblance of steadiness. Everything was a laugh line, everything was a joke, especially the suggestion that she was a leftist (by Norah O’Donnell of CBS) or the implication that she needed to visit the border (by Lester Holt of NBC) or the fact that her foreign policy expertise extended to knowing “Ukraine is a country in Europe, next to another country called Russia” which she explained to the fine hosts of The Morning Hustle radio show. Who cared if the vice president was a walking punchline? She’d never have a chance to be behind the Resolute Desk anyway.

Except now, she does. She is on a list of two people who have that opportunity, a list that no longer includes her former boss, who resisted elevating her until it was impossible to do anything else but give in to the pressure brought by the most powerful people in the Democratic elite. In an instant, with a statement on X (the artist formerly known as Twitter), Joe was out and Kamala was in, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The Democrats have come a long way since “we did it, Joe.”

This story serves as a reminder about the difference between the cohorts on America’s right and left. The Republican Party elite fought Donald Trump every step of the way to the 2016 nomination, only conceding after it became clear they would have to choose between Trump and the last Tea Party man standing, Ted Cruz. “Ick,” they said, and donned a red hat. In 2020, their ideal would have been Nikki Haley, whom they worked very hard to make happen long past the point where it was clear Nikki Haley was never going to happen. That effort was half-hearted at best, in part because the Republican elite is now more Trumpian, but also because the consequences of their own decrepitude have left them incapable of managing the party beneath them. Conservative voters do not like being told what to do — not in 1964, not in 1976, not in 1992, not in 2010 and definitely not in 2016. Their anger erupts more occasionally than the American left’s, but when it does, it runs Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity Hot Sauce hot (135,600 Scovilles). It upsets incumbents, reorders policy agendas and lights millions of donor dollars on fire.

In the Democratic coalition, this is no longer a problem. During the most recent brief instance when it seemed there might be some rebellion, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, the rebels were put down quickly and easily. Under Speaker-in-Everything-But-Name Nancy Pelosi, the Squad has turned into a neutered shadow of its former self, satisfied with messaging bills and innocuous internet memes while the actual leadership of the party satisfies voters by promising to keep baby-killing perfectly legal while they make a perfectly legal killing on that same Wall Street (Pelosi’s multimillion dollar Nvidia stock buy is up 178 percent since last year).

To California Republicans, none of this comes as a surprise. They understand Kamala Harris’s rise as indicative of the way the Democratic Party utterly abandoned its populist roots, instead becoming a party of teachers unions, big tech and corporations that play ball with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion demands of the moment. So Kamala is the perfect candidate for Randi Weingarten and Netflix, Big Pharma and BlackRock, Disney and Apple, Stephen Colbert and the Pod Save America bros — unobtrusive, vacuous, a willing vehicle for everything that corporate leftism wants and nothing it doesn’t. She will be just as pro-trans as you want her to be, neither more nor less.

Cut through this facade, though, and Harris’s problems are massive. She is particularly unpopular with the Rust Belt set — outside of Michigan, where her appeal on foreign policy is, how to say it politely, decidedly at odds with her husband’s religious affiliation (the pro-Hamas faction of the left is very ready to yass this queen). She also lacks any of the faux-centrist background that Scranton Joe used repeatedly, to great effect, as a shield against being called out for his culturally leftward veers during his presidency. How can you call him a leftist, he still goes to Mass! And then there is the odd nature of her relationship with the black voter base of the Democratic Party, which ditched her for Joe in 2020 but now is trying to drum up enthusiastic support her. Harris’s ethnicity isn’t an issue for most voters of either party, though she lacks a strong connection to the African-American experience — when she affects a southern accent before an Atlanta audience, it is an incongruous bit of code-switching that makes no sense whatsoever for those who know she didn’t grow up eating collard greens.

“She was always good at telling people what they wanted to hear in whatever room she was in,” says a California Republican who overlapped with Harris in state government. “It made her a darling of the donor class, the climber class, the people who didn’t really care about anything but raw power.” And that approach served her well, to a point. When all you care about is the next job, it means you don’t want to take the risks that might prevent you from rising while actually delivering on your promises — which means that Harris’s four-year Senate career turned into a litany of minor resolutions that didn’t do anything of note. Of the six bills she successfully sponsored in that time, the most prominent was one condemning lynching, which passed unanimously, with Robert C. Byrd unavailable to register any opposition.

What now faces the Democrats is a tightrope challenge like none other in the modern political era: can they get their unwieldy candidate over the finish line before anyone realizes just how unqualified she is? The overwhelming majority of longtime Democratic consultants, supporters and media flacks think the answer is: absolutely yes. There is desperation in their choice. Kamala is known to struggle to hold on to staffers beyond the six-month mark, so this is almost the perfect window. Just keep her going, keep her scripted, keep her hitting her marks — and the Democrats can see a path to pulling off what seemed, just a few months ago, an extremely unlikely victory.

They’ll need some help to do this — and Donald Trump seems ready and able to provide it. If the rule of the current Democratic Party is that there is no consequence for callous hypocrisy, the rule for the current Republican Party is that no plan of action can withstand contact with Donald Trump’s brain. Speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in late July, he responded to a rude welcome and a hostile series of questions by blatantly raising Harris’s racial background as an attack point with the aggression and confidence of a barstool drunk. The Trump campaign, which had gone through an unprecedented period of restraint as Joe Biden fell apart, has been pulling their hair out wishing their candidate would shut up already and let them work. Now they face a new challenge: running against someone who isn’t old, isn’t out of touch, isn’t incapable of reading a speech and who’s a lot more capable of sticking to the message of the day than their own guy.

The polling shows that Kamala effectively closed the gap headed into the Democrats’ Chicago shindig, where she will be nominated by acclamation despite the fantasies of Aaron Sorkin and a host of others who hoped there would be at least a modi- cum of competition in this party that claims to be the last hope of American democracy. The party will emerge nearly entirely united — “the only thing the Democrats disagree about at this point is Israel,” one Republican consultant told me — in their effort to beat Trump at all costs. The need for a game change may soon be back on the Republican side, given the likelihood of Mr. Diet Mountain Dew’s continued lackluster performance. Even if their ticket prevails in November, Republicans tell me J.D. Vance’s disappointing launch has him on the outs with the incoming Trump team, in an echo of what happened to loyal 2016 soldier Mike Pence. The problem isn’t that Democrats have painted him as weird, it’s that Donald Trump is starting to think so, too. Blame Tucker Carlson and Don Jr., two men noted for their political acumen.

Of course, the weirdest candidate on either ticket is Kamala Harris. She went from being a tough law and order prosecutor to being what one observer described as an “anarcho-communist” in 2020, parroting a litany of insincerity that is virtually unmatched in the history of American politics. John Kerry’s claim that he was for something before he was against it pales in comparison to the issues Kamala has shifted on over the years, without any explanation why. The answer is simple: because it’s what she needed to do. And she’ll keep on doing it, shooting the moon all the way to the Resolute Desk if Republicans can’t figure her out.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2024 World edition.