Trying to take Kamala Harris seriously

We probably have to, because Trump can still fumble away this election.

In a centrist country, the great majority of which thinks we’re headed in the wrong direction under the current administration, Kamala Harris is the most left-wing candidate of a major Party we’ve had in at least 75 years (apologies to George McGovern, who was pre-Woke and didn’t hate the country). If she runs against the aging, narcissistic, rambling and casually crude candidate the Republicans have nominated to square off against her, she could win. Fresh face, younger generation, first woman and all that. So the thing to do is not have her run against Donald Trump; it’s to make her run against herself.

The liberal but honest writer Andrew Sullivan covers a lot of the ground:

[A]t some point, Harris is going to have to square what she has said and done in the past with what she proposes to do as president.

Yes, one would hope, but this will very likely require Trump to think and talk about something other than himself.

Her record on the national stage — from 2019 till now — is that of a super-woke leftist. In speech after speech, and in an ad she narrated just before the 2020 election, she insists on the need for “equity” as well as “equality,” and by “equity” she means that “everyone ends up in the same place.” She is a presidential candidate who endorses “equality of outcomes” over “equality of opportunity,” a position that even Communist China has now abandoned.

Just to be clear, “equity” means taking money away from people who earned it to give to people who didn’t.

One moment in her catastrophic 2020 campaign for the Dem nomination also stood out for me. There was a discussion in a debate about issuing an executive order that would ban all assault weapons. Biden made the simple point that this was not within the president’s constitutional authority: “There are some things you can do [as president]. Many things you can’t.” Harris replied, giggling: “I would just say, Hey Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say yes we can. And yes we can!” As she said this, she burst into hysterical laughter. Go watch the clip. She’s not a serious person.

That perhaps is the main reason her 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination imploded. It’s just not possible to take her seriously, anymore than it was (and is) possible to take her boss seriously as a person capable of leading the Free World (or a McDonald’s franchise for that matter (I’ll put to the side for the moment Ms. Harris’s robust and continuing lying about Biden’s fitness)).

In the only primaries outside California she campaigned in, she favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings and compared ICE to the KKK. On June 1, 2020, as BLM riots were so spreading out of control that even the NYT had an A1 story the day before — “Appeals for Calm as Sprawling Protests Threaten to Spiral Out of Control” — she tweeted out a bail fund for those arrested in the rioting, and urged people to donate.

There are probably some Democrats who understand that rooting on violence could be a problem — there was, justifiably, no shortage of them on Jan. 6 — but nominating Kamala right quick is going to save them a possibly messy convention, not to mention the verboten (to them) matter of seeing opposition to a “woman of color” who is ostensibly next in line, so…………

Also in June 2020, she said on national television, “It is outdated, and it is actually wrong and backward to think that more police officers will create more safety.”

This is not merely false but indicative that Ms. Harris is living in an alternate reality. In the roughly quarter century after 1990, the country hired thousands more police and crime rates fell by nearly half. More police was not the entire cause of this (there was also the aging out of crime by the Baby Boomers and a substantial increase in incarceration, among other reasons), but anyone who actually thinks hiring more police was not a significant contributor to the enormous reduction in crime is living in a dream world.

Harris believes illegal aliens should get work authorization and free healthcare. She favors unproven, irreversible medical experiments on gay, autistic, and trans children. She favors, and the Biden administration has enforced, systemic government discrimination against men, whites, Jews and Asians to compensate for past discrimination against African-Americans and women. Her Senate record is one long series of DEI initiatives. And yes, Biden selected her using a DEI process: no men were to be considered, and in the hysteria of 2020, white women were also seen as no-go areas for the veep role.

That is far too short a summary of a number of blockbuster issues that, if pressed with the force and frequency they warrant, can by themselves win Trump the election. Immigration and chaos at the border is, according to Gallup, the most important issue to the electorate (ahead of the economy/inflation). Racial preference in college admissions targets, not anyone who actually contributed to discrimination, but the country’s 17 year-old’s. That’s a lot of kids and twice as many parents. It’s also immoral, unconstitutional and disgusting, and if Trump hammers her on it, Harris’s climb becomes that much more difficult: Gallup found that slightly more than twice as many Americans support the Supreme Court’s decision forbidding consideration of race per se than oppose it.

But wait — it gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it). If anything is even more incendiary than racial preference in college admissions, it’s reparations. Harris’s stance on that is equal parts waffling and insufficiently disguised enthusiasm. As this Fact Check reports:

During her own run as a presidential candidate, Harris went on the record numerous times about her opinion of reparations — but her answers to questions were vague. 

Initially, she said she would support a council to look into reparations. Then, speaking in front of Rev. Al Sharpton‘s National Action Network conference, she declared that if a reparations bill came across her desk in the White House, “When I am elected president, I will sign that bill.”

However, during an interview with NPR, Harris talked about studying the issue, not about signing off on a bill. 

“I think reparations – yeah. I think that the word, the term reparations, means different things to different people. But what I mean by it is that we need to study the effects of generations of discrimination and institutional racism and determine what can be done, in terms of intervention, to correct course,” she said. 

As anyone not living in a cave knows, forming a “commission” to “study” an issue is the oldest dodge in Washington. But the language Harris used is a window on how dim she truly is: She tried to disguise her reparation-friendly views in one sentence and gave them away in the next. Nor is anyone fooled about who would get appointed to such a commission. It’s not going to be Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury or Armstrong Williams. It’s going to be Sharpton’s acolytes with a sprinkling of far Left white academics. Where’s Liz Magill now that we need her?

But I digress. Sullivan continues to take Harris apart piece by sorry piece:

Her record as vice president [is essentially either dismal or trivial]. Every single media outlet, including all the mainstream ones, said so until last week. No, she wasn’t given the formal title of “Border Czar,” because such a title doesn’t exist. But she was the administration’s “point-person” on immigration and the Southern border, as every media outlet also told us until this week. So she is strongly attached to the Democrats’ weakest issue by far: mass, illegal immigration.

Yes, it’s all true. The Democrats are about to nominate the one person in Biden’s administration most notable for her “stewardship,” to use that word more-or-less shamelessly, of its most painfully visible failure.

She deserves some pity for this. The Biden administration, unwilling to do anything to stop the illegal influx, stuck poor Harris with the task of so reforming Central America’s dysfunctional countries that no one there would ever want to leave. So of course she failed. She was, in reality, deployed to deflect the issue of mass illegal immigration away from Biden…

…because Biden was going to be the candidate.

Oooooooooops!

Sullivan makes one additional, and insightful, observation that I hadn’t seen put quite so effectively before:

She’s…incredibly insecure. That laugh is a nervous one — it’s to cover up her awkwardness and her inability to say anything that actually means something. All of those famous, inane, Jack Handy ramblings about space or the passage of time are designed to say something meaningful while not saying anything concrete:

I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.

What the f*ck does any of that mean? And what does she actually believe in? From locking up criminals as California’s AG to pushing bail for BLM rioters, from imprisoning cannabis users to favoring national weed legalization — is quite a journey. It will be interesting to watch the campaign and see if Harris is able to tell a story of her different political identities that doesn’t amount to pure expediency.

In an odd way, Harris is no more serious a candidate than Biden would have been. Biden could not be taken seriously because he was so obviously unfit for office that, post-debate, even the press could no longer hide it. Harris cannot be taken seriously in the more everyday sense — her years-long record shows that, not to put too fine a point on it, she’s a dope. She has nothing even resembling a coherent idea, except for those sent her way by whatever the Left is floating at the moment. The one thing we have to take seriously about her is that the toxins thus floating in her head could, astonishingly, prove even more dangerous to the country than the near-vacuum floating in Joe’s.