If I may start with an understatement: It has not been a good week for team Kamala Harris. First, there was the scandal of her interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes. Asked about US influence on Israel, Harris delivered one of her signature, zero-calorie word salads. We know this because the network released a preview of the interview on social media, where it was promptly pounced upon and mocked. But when the entire interview aired, the interview was edited so that Harris’s original answer was replaced by a brief answer lifted from another part of the interview.
That bit of techno-fraud was instantly pilloried and deposited a lot of unsightly egg on the corporate face of CBS. I have not seen anything resembling an apology or even an acknowledgment from the network. As of this writing, calls for an unedited transcript of the whole interview to be released have gone unanswered. As the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote, CBS’s refusal is “a huge scandal” that, among other things, “suggests that much of the entire finished product was manipulative and deceitful, and not just the one horrible example that was discovered.”
Bad though the episode is for CBS, it is also humiliating for Harris. As Macbeth noted in another context, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” The 60 Minutes débâcle was only the advance guard assaulting team Harris last week. Then there was a disastrous “town hall” meeting in which, again, multiple humiliations were assembled. First, some attentive scribe noticed that Harris was reading her replies off a teleprompter. Remember that was supposed to be an open forum in which Harris could connect with voters personally. But here she was, repeating scripted replies to pre-formulated questions.
And that was not the worst of it. A little digging revealed that the audience, too, was scripted. As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by an ‘audience-for-hire’ company and weren’t allowed to ask questions. The event was completely stage-directed and fake.”
An “audience-for-hire company”? Yep. I am not sure exactly which company team Harris employed, but it turns out that such initiatives are a booming business. Consider, for example, the company Crowds on Demand. Their website advertises “PROTESTS • RALLIES • ADVOCACY” and goes on to boast that
Whether your organization is lobbying to gain approval of a project, move forward a legislative initiative, bring additional pressure within complex litigation or trying to see swift and effective action in another way, we can set-up protests, rallies,
demonstrations, alternatives to litigation or business disputes, coordinate phone-banking initiatives and even create non-profit organizations to advance your agenda.
I suspect that Democrats have frequent recourse to such companies. The Harris campaign, at any rate, is nearly 100% synthetic. Its crowds are actors or activists for hire. Ditto the figures populating its ads. In what has been derided as the “cringiest political ad ever,” a Harris satellite, attempting to address the campaign’s masculinity deficit, just released the truly horrible “I’m-a-man-and-I’m-voting-for-
Like many people, I at first thought it was a spoof, an anti-Harris production designed to make fun of her and her running mate, Tim Walz. That certainly was the effect. But it turns out that the half dozen men in the ad were not random XY creatures who just happened to support Harris for president. No, they were B-list actors, recruited and paid to deliver their lines. (And what lines they were. One actor who pretended to know something about cars, said “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast.” I am thinking of offering a reward to anyone who can tell me what that means.)
One enterprising commentator discovered who wrote the ad—Jacob Reed, a writer for the late-night talk host Jimmy Kimmel—and the real-life biographies of the actors. Let’s just say that none is a poster child for masculinity. The comments have been brutal. “Zero testosterone was used in the making of this ad”; “A Real Man instantly realizes that there isn’t a single Real Man in this pathetic beta male cringe-fest of a propaganda video”; “From the party that can’t tell you what a woman is”; “As a man, I think I walked away from this ad with a yeast infection.”
The world was still ridiculing the ad when the news came that Tim Walz, in another effort to assuage the doubts about his masculinity, had invited journalists on a pheasant hunt. A bunch of photographs of the “hunt” are circulating. You’ll see lots of outdoorsy garb and a few dogs. What you won’t see are any shotguns. In a real hunting party, every hunter would have a couple of shotguns to hand. But in the fake, synthetic world of Harris-Walz, no guns were thought necessary. As someone quipped, perhaps they were planning to catch the pheasants by hand and strangle them. Eventually, Walz was given a gun, but it was painfully clear that he had no idea how to handle it. As one commentator noted, Walz’s “gun handling skills make Dick Cheney look like the safest shooter in the world. Perhaps that is why Cheney endorsed him.”
All this happened in a matter of days, and the days in question are barely three weeks from the election. What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious. Strange things can happen in the last days of a presidential campaign. Sudden reversals of fortune are not unknown. Candidates can suddenly turn things around and emerge victorious after weeks or months of trailing in the polls. The most difficult obstacle to victory, however, is being made to appear ridiculous. That is almost inevitably fatal. Harris and Walz have made themselves ridiculous time and again this last week or two. I do not believe they can recover.
There have been many stories of the Harris campaign bussing in crowds for her rallies. There’s another one where she kicked patrons out of a cafe to bring in her ringers for a scripted photo op. The Univision Town Hall is the icing on the cake.
But the turn to Hollywood productions as politics is nothing really new. Many may recall that the infamous January 6th Congressional Investigation was also scripted by Hollywood. There hasn’t been anything authentic about the Democrat Party for years. Die Hard Democrats know it but don’t really care. For them they see it as just another means to an end. They’ve long held an extremely low opinion of regular citizens ability to reason and the exposure of the scam doesn’t bother them in the least bit.
The polls would have us believe this race is really tight, but I’m not buying it. We should never forget, the exposure of the man behind the curtain was also a Hollywood production 85 years ago.
It really is a no-good, very bad week for a Dem campaign when even St. Barry can’t harangue black men into supporting the Bimbo and resorted to his usual smug pontificating about their only reason for it being misogyny. Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if Kamala was the straw that broke the Stockholm syndrome-like hypnosis that has given Obama-- a man every bit as inauthentic as she is but better able to hide it- such sway with black voters?
I had to look up the ad referenced in the article and it is so cringe, I feel like I need to bleach my brain; honestly, and it’s sad to say, I am probably more traditionally masculine in my hobbies, habits and attitudes than half the cast. Can you all hear the eye roll?
Reading Mr. Kimball’s article reminded me of a funny quote by Voltaire—who was, by the way, an atheist.
“I have only ever said one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.”
As a passionate student of Monsieur Arouet’s work, I will have to slightly amend your post: he wasn’t an atheist–he was on the deist side of agnostic. He knew there had to be a prime mover, an uncaused cause which he called God. His most fascinating essay on the subject was published posthumously as a volume of philosophy he wrote for a lady friend (not for publication).
But yes, between Camela Hairyass’ rent-a-mobs, her constant drunk-like giggling (even at times of national tragedy like during the last two hurricanes)–and Walz, who looks at the same time like an old man and a baby (I forget who first said it, but it’s spot on), this is one f’d up ticket.
I would laugh if there weren’t a possibility that enough idiots (plus the usual cheating) may vault them over the top next November. Here’s hoping for a resounding Trump victory.