Dems Need To Be Honest That Harris Was A Terrible Candidate

So why did Kamala Harris’ campaign fail so badly on Tuesday? Well, the talking points have gone out, and whatever you do, don’t blame Kamala Harris! Naturally, the media has dry-swallowed enough diazepam by now to settle on an alternate explanation for her loss, best exemplified by this USA Today columnist:

Well, alrighty then. Maybe the more polite way to deal with assigning blame is to ask, what, if anything, could have Harris done better?

Well, maybe “flawless” seems like hyperbole, but there’s an emerging consensus:

Hmmm. Surely someone has a more reasonable take on this?

And these are the more polite rationalizations. If I wanted to start documenting the number of people that want to disingenously absolve Kamala Harris’ failure due to racism and/or misogyny, I’d have to hire a team of archivists.

But I think you get the point. Instead of humility in defeat, the Democrat industrial complex has reached North Korean levels of sycophancy, only it’s worse than North Korea where people at least praise their Dear Leader constantly only because they’re physically threatened if they don’t. And it’s incomprehensible when you consider that “sycophant” has been the preferred insult for Trump supporters for closing in on a decade.

Now I don’t believe in sucking up to politicians ever, for any reason, but if that’s your thing at least have the dignity to reserve fealty to politicians who are successful. And Trump has now won two presidential elections — very nearly three, losing in one of the craziest years in American history, where the election rules were all discarded and rewritten on the fly — emerging with an utterly decisive electoral victory and a popular mandate.

However, Kamala isn’t a failure solely because she gave it the old college try and didn’t win. In terms of political skill, she was a spectacularly awful candidate that made Michael Dukakis look like Pericles. Let’s just start with the bare minimum of what one expects: She couldn’t string a sentence together. Her optimal performance was when the algorithm was set to “refrigerator poetry,” as opposed to “forgot to prepare for the oral presentation,” and neither was acceptable. It turns out the candidate whose supposed signature move was interrupting mansplainers by announcing “I’m speaking,” couldn’t actually speak.

To the extent that anyone could make the case she ran a campaign devoid of major mistakes, and let’s be clear she absolutely did not, it’s because her handlers only trusted her to open her mouth to the friendliest of interviewers. Luckily for Democrats, this includes the top echelons of American journalism — there’s a good chance “60 Minutes” is not releasing the full transcript of her notorious interview because they let her redo her initially embarrassing answers.

But even those kinds of accommodations could not save her from herself. She went on “The View,” about as politically onanistic a venue as one can find, and basically ended her campaign. She was asked, “If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” 

Harris responded, “there is not a thing that comes to mind.” The Trump campaign immediately turned the answer into a very effective ad.

But that was not a one off. Harris was asked a version of this question a few times, and everytime she managed to come up with an entirely new and creative way of answering the question badly. Her inability to conduct a basic interview without verbally pratfalling all over the place has to on some level speak to her general intelligence.

Speaking of pratfalls, I suspect when the truth of what went on in this campaign comes out, the best they can hope for is more comedy than cringe. When Kamala Harris first assumed the vice-presidency, she was so blundering that her tenure at the Naval Observatory was often compared to the fictional comedy “Veep.” The comparison was so too-close-for-comfort that the creator of the show, who’s normally extremely irreverent, took to The New York Times to deny the comparison was apt and suggest Trump tried to manipulate people with his own assassination attempt.

Well, then what the hell would the writers’ room at “Veep” make of this anecdote from Harris’ presidential campaign? The Harris campaign arranged for an interview with a popular and well-known Muslim internet influencer, informed him in advance she would not talk about Gaza, and instead she showed up and did this:

The interview with Harris hadn’t gone as planned.

What happened was a dispute over Harris’s take. Rahma said he had been told that the vice president would be taking a stand against removing one’s shoes on airplanes. When they sat down, however, Harris had surprised him with a different take: “Bacon is a spice.” (Two senior campaign officials said this topic had been raised in advance. Rahma and his manager dispute this.)

Rahma, who doesn’t eat pork for religious reasons, was taken aback. “I don’t know,” he says, in an unpublished video recording of the interview, his voice rising to an unusually high pitch. Harris elaborates that bits of cooked bacon can be used to enhance a meal like any other seasoning. “Think about it, it’s pure flavor,” she says. …

The campaign apologized for the bacon take and proposed a reshoot. But, after publishing the Walz interview, Rahma ultimately decided not to move forward with it.

To recap, she won’t talk to Muslim Americans about a serious issue of real importance to them. But she’s eager to talk to Muslims about … bacon? It’s impossible to parody someone who cannot talk to anyone in such a manner that doesn’t insult their intelligence, when she’s not insulting them outright.

And to the extent the campaign kept her under wraps because of this liability, it’s not like people didn’t notice the contrast between the relative silence and Trump’s lengthy rallies, press conferences, and three-hour podcasts.

Anyway, I don’t honestly care if the Democrat Party wants free advice. But I must at least insist on honesty, and the truth is that Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate. (And, while we’re at it, so was Tim Walz, the thoroughly mendacious spaz who tweets about running “a mean pick 6,” which even if an idiot staffer wrote the tweet, is reasonably emblematic of a supposedly heartland football coach who mandated tampon dispensers boys’ locker rooms.)

She didn’t lose because of racism or misogyny, in fact she was explicitly and undeservedly elevated to vice president because Democrats are in an identity politics cult. It is ridiculous to say she lost in spite of a “flawless” campaign, when influencers, normally desperate to land such a major interview, are spiking interviews with her because they can’t make her not sound offensive and dumb.

She lost because she couldn’t do the one thing politicians are supposed to be able to do well: talk. She lost because she was an inauthentic lightweight that the average Hispanic roofer in Reading, Pennsylvania could tell was a nonviable leader five seconds after she opened her mouth, on the rare occasions her own campaign deigned to let her to speak.

It’s not anymore complicated than that.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator