Every honest commentator, and even some dishonest ones, acknowledges the supreme oddity of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
As has been oft remarked, the oddity begins with the campaign’s origin. Exactly how is it that Kamala Harris even became the candidate? By what process was Joe Biden, the undisputed winner of the Democratic primary, ousted, eliminated and defenestrated from contention? The rumors and stories are plentiful, but the actual facts—to say nothing of the dramatis personae behind the facts—remain obscure.
But somehow, exactly two months ago, Joe Biden raised his sleepy head in Rehoboth Beach and announced his departure from the campaign but not, pointedly, from the presidency. (Will that happen before January 20, 2025? I wonder.)
No sooner had the public begun to get its head around that surprise than they were hit with an even bigger one: Biden’s replacement would be Vice President Kamala Harris. How did that happen? Who voted for her? Shhh! Some questions are mood breakers, and it was clear from the get-go that the Harris campaign was going to have to depend heavily, some experts say nearly exclusively, on mood.
In the weeks since July 21, when Biden made his fateful announcement, there has been a lot of Dr. Johnson’s dog about the Harris campaign. When it came to female preachers, Dr. Johnson said, we are reminded of dogs who can walk on their hind legs. They do not do it well, but we are surprised they can do it at all.
Mindful of Harris’s, er, challenges in public speaking and responding ex tempore to questions from interviewers, her handlers have been assiduous about keeping her out of such dangerous situations. The more she vocalizes (I almost said “talks”), the more damage she does to her candidacy. Her embarrassing performance on a ninety-minute livestream exchange with Oprah Winfrey in Detroit a few days ago underscored the problem.
Even Winfrey, a prominent anti-Trump Harris supporter, seemed taken aback by her guest’s incoherent flights of flaccid, cringe-making glossolalia. Harris supporters just winced and bit their tongues while critics pounced upon and ridiculed the seeping, leaking emission of empty saccharine vocables.
There are only 45 days left until Tuesday, November 5, the nominal election day. Of course, we dispensed with election day back in 2020; now we have an election season. It begins long before the designated day and continues on until Democrats conclude they have reaped all the extra votes they can muster.
Nevertheless, victory for the Democrats will depend not only, or perhaps even principally, on cheating. It will depend on the perpetuation of an illusion: the illusion that Kamala Harris is in any way a plausible candidate for the presidency of the United States. And that illusion, in turn, can only be perpetuated if she is kept far from the klieg lights of public scrutiny.
Because of the shadowy forces playing out behind the Biden-Harris administration, one often hears it compared to the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the little dog Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals that Oz, the great and terrible, was just a doddery old man.
There’s something to that, but the puppeteers pulling the strings and managing the stagecraft that conceals the vacancy of the Biden-Harris duet depend for their success on a curious magic trick. Biden was—I mean, “is”—what we might call a simulacrum president, what Gertrude Stein would have called an “Oakland president” (“There’s no there there,” she once said of that California city). The trick was to wheel him out, as the stuffed corpse of Jeremy Bentham is still wheeled out to preside, “present but not voting,” at board meetings of University College, London.
It worked, sort of, for quite a while with Joe Biden. It is not clear how it is working out with Kamala Harris. Again, the trick is to keep her image before the public while strictly rationing any actual contact between voters and the candidate. Sightings are acceptable; interviews, press conferences, town halls—all such events must be choreographed down to the last softball question and pliable interlocutor.
Can the Dems keep it up? I do not know. A canny friend compared the process to levitation. “Her campaign,” he said, “depends upon how long the media can keep it levitating in the air, disconnected from reality. We are confident reality will set in, but maybe they can keep the thing floating for longer than we think. We talk about the post-industrial society; the post-liberal society; etc.; what about the post-reality society?”
We might well be there already. I will close by noting two things. One is that when reality is denied or obfuscated, it has a way of rushing back in unpleasant ways. Whatever else it is, Kamala Harris’s joy-to-the-world socialism is a fantasy mask whose clown-like rictus conceals a multitude of dreadful realities.
My second observation is more in the way of a prediction. While it is possible that Kamala Harris will win or, even if she doesn’t win, that she will be installed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 20, 2025, it is much more likely that Donald Trump will win and will once again get the keys to the domicile at that address. In other words, I do not believe that the levitation act will be successful. Harris’s campaign will fall to earth before November 5 and—though this is not what the polls currently tell us—Trump will win in something approaching a landslide.
In 2000, Florida was, at first, called for Gore instead of Bush despite the fact that the most western Florida counties were in the Central Time Zone and had yet to close and report their vote counts. That reporting, or lack of reporting, was responsible for many people in the western states to turn their cars around to go home. They thought Bush had lost. The Harris campaign understands that they not only need to get votes from nursing homes, vacant lots and illegals but they must also suppress Republican enthusiasm to vote. That is also the objective of polls. They need to make it appear that there is no point in voting because the election is lost.
One of the things that the stolen election of 2020 has done, besides the actual theft, is to make people feel that there is no point in voting because the fix is already in. That attitude has to be eliminated. This time a voter not only has a responsibility to vote but should also make sure they get everyone else they can get to vote or sign a ballot that they can deliver themselves. In other words they have to work like they are going to lose their country and their liberty because that is exactly what this election is about.
There a lot of people (mostly women) who will not vote for Trump, but who will vote down ticket. In addition to levitation, the Dem strategy includes ads and statements that will keep them from voting for Trump. Ergo, I agree with Task’s observation about the Dem strategy including suppressing the Republican vote in two ways: 1) the polls and 2) saying things that keep those Republican voters from voting for Trump even if they vote Republican down ticket.
I truly do not know what will happen once the dust has settled and the election is declared over. Will there be enough cheating to install Harris? Will Trump’s turnout be sufficiently strong that it overcomes the inevitable shenanigans that will occur during Election Week? Will it be allowed to matter? The answers to all these questions & many others are yet to be seen and I am no longer willing to make predictions because any speculation on my part is likely to assume that a rational populace will be going to the polls in November and I’m not entirely sure that is actually the case any longer.
The only thing I am absolutely clear about is that I will spend the next 40- odd days praying that my vote still counts and that my fellow citizens still retain some sanity.
What Mr. Kimball so eloquently describes is the plausibility of Kamala Harris winning in November. Of course, by any objective, rational standard, it is utterly implausible that such a fumbling, bumbling, utterly insincere and unserious person could be elected president. So, Mr. Kimball notes, the Democrats must resort to political levitation in order to maintain the illusion that Harris is not only fit to be president, but should be the clear choice of Americans–well, at least for all those casting “ballots”.
But this calculus is only part of the drama peeking just over the horizon. The flip side of this coin is whether those in charge–the string and lever pullers behind the curtain who are levitating Harris’s magic carpet–are willing to allow Trump his much deserved second term. To me, at least, this is the $64 question that no one wants to ask, and even fewer are willing to answer.
In banana republics, autocrats typically make some pretense to “fair elections” in the leadup to election day, only to steal them with impunity and then use government control to quell the outrage and resistance to the theft. Think Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football.
Those wizards behind the curtain have a decision to make–if it has not already been made–to allow some semblance of a fair election and the possibility of a Trump victory, or, to throw caution and pretense to the wind and steal the election, and then use the Enemedia, Big Tech and very trigger happy federales to enforce compliance. And of course, if the aforementioned are not sufficient to suppress enraged citizens,
Flag Officersfellow travelers in the Pentagon will be called upon to forcefully remind the peasants of their obligation to sit down, shut up and eat their porridge in silence.Although I do think the fix is in, I will still vote for the same reason I will give excess change back to the cashier: it’s the right and responsible thing to do. Plus, my conscience demands it.