After the dread of realizing that President Biden was not going to be re-elected president, his withdrawal and the anointment of his successor, Kamala Harris, was sure to cause a reaction. After all, going from near-certain defeat to the possibility of winning is a huge paradigm shift, one that would naturally cause certain cohorts to enthusiastically embrace the change. Viva la difference, right?
And the reaction has been enthusiastic, especially in comparison to the doldrums of a party running an octogenarian of dubious fertility. So it is similarly natural that the opposition do its best to downplay the enthusiasm, and so they did.
The vibe shift since Harris became the presumptive nominee has been whiplash-inducing, leaving some conservatives suspecting a plot. “Her sudden Taylor Swift-level stardom is as faked as intelligence-agency assessments of Hunter Biden’s laptop,” wrote Michael Brendan Dougherty of The National Review in a column titled “The Kamala Harris Psyop.”
Is the enthusiasm for Kamala legit or a “psyop,” some manufactured sham perpetrated by the left with their media comrades to create the appearance of support. Indeed? this question becomes even more important when one realizes that there was no vetting, no challenge, not a single primary vote for Harris for president. Heck, even Black Lives Matters couldn’t bring itself to support Harris without there being some opportunity to find out if she was a candidate anybody would have otherwise wanted as president.
Now, Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors are attempting to manipulate Black voters by anointing Kamala Harris and an unknown vice president as the new Democratic ticket without a primary vote by the public. This blatant disregard for democratic principles is unacceptable. While the potential outcome of a Harris presidency may be historic, the process to achieve it must align with true democratic values. We have no idea where Kamala Harris stands on the issues, now that she has assumed Joe Biden’s place, and we have no idea of the record of her potential vice president because we don’t even know who it is yet.
On the flip side, there were the zoom calls, like Karens for Kamala and White Dudes in Therapy for Kamala. The participants certainly seemed pretty darned enthusiastic. Then again, so too do the people who show for Trump rallies, wearing their MAGA caps and Trump mug-shot t-shirts.
I met Nailor in a hallway of the Georgia State Convocation Center, where around 10,000 people had gathered on Tuesday for a raucous and ebullient Harris rally. She was dressed in the pink and green of the A.K.A.s, the Black sorority that both she and Harris belong to, and was reveling in the event’s electricity. “I’ve lived in Atlanta for almost 30 years,” she said. “I’ve seen people that I haven’t seen in decades. It’s just so hopeful and so much happiness.”
The New York Times manic millennial pixie, Michelle Goldberg, attests to the legitimacy of this enthusiasm surrounding Kamala.
But having just seen Harris’s fandom up close, I can attest that it is very real.
I don’t really blame conservatives for being confused by the sudden explosion of excitement for Harris, who didn’t come close to igniting Barack Obama-level enthusiasm when she ran for president in 2019. Plenty of Democrats are surprised by it as well. Part of the outpouring of joy is the result of the weight suddenly removed from Democrats’ collective shoulders, now that they no longer need to prop up an increasingly weak candidacy. But part of Democrats’ new exuberance is rooted in who Harris is.
It would have to be “rooted in who Harris is” because we have yet to be given the opportunity to learn what Harris’ position on issues might be, abortion excepted, or what she would like to do if elected president. What we know is that she is a woman of color, Trump’s disputing this notwithstanding, and that she’s not Trump. She big-teeth-smiles a lot. She laughs incessantly, which some might call a cackle. She speaks in empty platitudes when she isn’t being incoherent, spewing plenty of words without saying much of anything.
But if, as Goldberg claims, this enthusiasm is real and organic, why does she need to write a column to tell the enthusiastic people that they’re enthusiastic. Don’t they already know whether or not they’re enthusiastic? Do they really need Goldberg to tell them who they kvell over?
Hours before Harris’s Atlanta rally began, I met Tracy Hathaway, a 41-year-old nurse from Georgia’s conservative Forsyth County, in the long line outside. Her shirt, which she’d made that morning, said, “We Are Not Going Back Like Ever,” a mash-up of a Harris applause line and a Taylor Swift lyric, and she had a handful of pro-Harris friendship bracelets to hand out. It was only Hathaway’s second time attending a political rally; the first had been two days before, when she joined hundreds at a Forsyth campaign event with Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. When Biden was in the race, she said, imitating beleaguered exhaustion, “It was like, all right, we’re going to vote blue.” Harris, she said, was a “game changer.” As an Asian woman who, like Harris, is the daughter of immigrants, she saw the vice president as a role model for her young daughters, and she couldn’t wait to volunteer. “I’m just kind of jumping on the bandwagon and try to get everyone around me excited,” she said.
A one-person anecdote doesn’t really tell much about enthusiasm beyond that person, even if she makes up her own Kamala-stan shirts, not unlike Trumkpins making up their MAGA adornments. But the reasons for her enthusiasm might be more telling. Harris is a “game changer” because of her race and gender? Does she have any clue, any clue at all, about what her “game-changer” would do with her hands on the wheel of the United States? Does she even care?
That Goldberg felt the need to write about the “Kamalanomenon” so that people would know they were enthusiastic about the replacement candidate chosen by the party since they couldn’t be trusted suggests that there is a lurking problem beneath the surface. The zeal to defeat Trump is understandable, but when NYT columnists need to stan their Kween to make people believe, we are no closer to knowing whether Harris should be president or whether she has any support beyond her sorority and the self-loathing white women who want to pay for their indulgences by voting for a black woman.
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Not that I think it’s a psyop, but for anyone inclined to conspiracy theories, this Goldberg column certainly seems as if its part of a psyop, pushing way too hard on the claim of enthusiasm without any effort to justify what it is about Harris that would make anyone vote for her other than race, gender and she’s not Trump.
My surmise is that Goldberg doesn’t mean to come off as a flack for Harris, but just lacks the depth to grasp that’s got nothing substantive to say about her. It’s all vibe and no meat.
I’m a man
Without conviction
I’m a man
who doesn’t know
How to sell
A contradiction
You come and go
You come and go
You and I think alike.
I’ve had reports that people started leaving Harris’ Atlanta rally 15 minutes into her 30 minute speech. Apparently it wasn’t so much a 10,000-person rally for Kamala Harris so much as a 10,000-person concert for Megan Thee Stallion and other performers.
I’m sure all the usual “reliable sources” will tell us the energy and enthusiasm is real, in fact they say it with eerily similar wording. But these are the same “reliable sources” that told us Joe Biden was the sharpest he’d ever been, that what we saw with our own eyes for the past few years was a conspiracy theory. They all told us we were wrong, and they all lied. They lied to support the messaging of the Democratic Party.
Now they want to tell us voters are excited, exhilarated, energized, enthusiastic, and whatever other e-adjectives came down in the talking points memo, and hope that we’ll forget that they. All. Lied.
The “Kamalanomenon” narrative and its zealots are as real as the one that claimed Biden was in it to win despite being doomed. And before that, the one that said Biden was the decent, empathetic hero standing in the breach against lies and demagoguery despite decades of being a case study. A whole lot of Biden dead enders are among those hailing Kamala the loudest, after previously sneering at the prospect of replacing him.
To borrow loosely from Nixon, with maybe some McLuhan thrown in, I’m saying when the media does it that makes it real.
Reminds me of a well advertised Kamala “showup” at a restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa, across the street from a job I was working on. I ate at the restaurant almost every day. She was sitting in a booth at the front and had maybe a half dozen supporters, if you counted the waitress serving her, and her entourage.
There were twice as many reporters and cameramen as there were supporters. Made it hard for me to get to the counter to order my lunch
I think the point of all this is so that when Harris gets just enough votes to beat Trump in November, no matter how dubious the election has to be to achieve that, the establishment can say “Look, we’ve been telling you all along how popular she is.”
This is more fruit of the “at all costs” mentality. The former candidate wasn’t polling well, so, despite the fact that he had been nominated through the regular (if somewhat stage-managed) process, he had to go. Now there is not time to do it again, and Harris is likely the only one who can readily access the Biden/Harris fundraising pot. So, they have to go all-in. Hitch up the media wagons, and proclaim without permissible dissent that the new candidate is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They have to act like they believe if they hope to get Independents to believe.
Still looming is the probable dumpster fire of anarchy and chaos at the DNC, especially if a Gaza ceasefire has remained elusive. Once the carefully crafted illusion of party unity is shattered, the new candidate’s polling numbers may revert to their former levels. Like the illusion that Joe was fine, it is another potential house of cards in the making.
May I be so bold as to suggest that you guys might be missing how mad and how energized women in the US are? We know very well where Kamala Harris is on the issues that matter the most. She has a voting record, beyond what she says. And it isn’t just Abortion. Really, are you trying to sound like JD Vance, describing us as “the self-loathing white women”? Woman of all colors care about this Country, for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, our nieces and nephews. And DJT doesn’t.
Harris has a far longer record as DA and AG, far more real than the ten minutes she spent in the Senate reinventing her image. Pretending that never happened is delusional, much like the “the self-loathing white women” who joined the Karens for Kamala call.
Women being mad (you probably mean “angry”) and caring is no doubt true. That doesn’t morph Harris into a savior any more than it did Avenatti (remember him?), when the Dems created a false god of their own. Much as I despise Trump, that doesn’t make Harris competent to be president, no less someone anyone would vote for other than to vote against Trump. If you are point is that angry women will vote for Harris for no better reason than race and gender, that is just as bad a reason as refusing to vote for someone because of their race and/or gender, and I find it disgraceful.
Sorry I don’t seem to be speaking the same language as you. Maybe I should have said many of us women are so tired of being put down as less than and not qualified. Now the favored pejorative is “self loathing?” No, we are not all Karens. Perhaps you forget that the person who inspired this epithet was reacting in a racist way. (I wonder if it is worth anyone’s time to watch the tik tok /youtube you reference.) You seem to be purposely missing my point that women have many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, that are not race and gender. Kamala Harris’ life experiences and the jobs she has filled demonstrate her competence. Why are you talking about your apparent gut reaction that she cannot be competent and not talking about Trump’s repeatedly demonstrated lack of competence to do the job of President of the United States and his lack of ability to make verbal sense? Really, someone who says he wants to do away with the Constitution of the United States and be a Dictator? Someone who says he wants to use the Department of Justice to retaliate? Avenatti as a false god? Not to me and many others – always looked like a self-aggrandizing grifter.
I didn’t say she (or any woman, per se) can’t be competent, but she has yet to demonstrate that she is and what her stance as president would be. When a candidate wants to be president, it’s her job to prove she deserves it. Not being Trump isn’t a reason. My views on Trump have been abundantly clear, but this post was about Harris. If she can’t withstand scrutiny, then the Dems shouldn’t have anointed her the chosen one without her earning the nomination.
The Dems have many rising stars who could have replaced Biden and both beaten Trump and been an exceptional choice for president. Instead, we have Harris. Maybe she will prove her worth and earn the nomination, but thus far she has not.
The alternative to being unimpressed with Harris isn’t being pro-Trump, a point that seems obvious and yet is too often missed by the unduly passionate. Wishcasting doesn’t make it so.
“Elections should be about who cares the most.”
– Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish
She wants a return to, inter alia, Roe, affirmative action, and the assault weapons ban.
Unofficial motto “We won’t go back.”
Hate to tell you, but so do the vast majority of Americans. You’re arguing the losing proposition.
I actually think that it is doubtful that most Americans support racist discrimination. In any event, shouldn’t her motto be “let’s go back”? Truth in advertising.
I think this is correct about AA. Abortion and gun control, not so much.
I should add that in spite of some misgivings about her past (as DA enabling Edwin Ramos to murder the Bologna family, as AG protecting Steve Mnuchin and his bank from prosecution, etc.) if I thought that the worst we faced from her was a return to 1995 (relatively low inflation, deficit, unemployment, etc.), I would almost certainly vote for her. The choice of slogan indicates other plans.
As I’ve made clear, I await her informing the electorate what we should expect of her. I need more than a slogan to make her positions clear.
I think the enthusiasm for Kamala is real, though it’s more that people got so deflated by Biden’s walking corpse routine and are just thankful to have a candidate who isn’t a sundowning octogenarian than any real excitement over Kamala herself. Now is some of the enthusiasm an illusion being created by media members simply regurgitating PR spin they’ve received from the campaign? Sure of course, working the media is a time honored tradition. The real question to me is how long will this all last? Is it just a short term bump before people remember who Kamala has always been, or have her and her team figured out a real recipe for success?