Kamala Harris came out of the gate like gangbusters, but now she’s slowed to an indifferent cantor. What’s the deal?
The deal is, largely, the same as Hubert Humphrey’s, Al Gore’s, and Hillary Clinton’s: they can’t run away from their president’s record.
Now, it’s easy to say that Joe was the victim of circumstance, though much of that circumstance was a divided party, which has in fact plagued the Democrats since the Clinton administration, even though much of the warfare has gone on under the radar, and it still continues. To recapitulate a riff I’ve used before, with some modification, Joe more or less combined Bernie Sanders/Lizzie Warren domestic policies with, well, George Bush foreign policies that unfortunately collided with the real world in costly ways. Harris’s frequent walkbacks on domestic issues like immigration, fracking, and law enforcement probably could have been carried out with more finesse than Kamala has managed so far, but a walkback is still a walkback, and doing them one after another tends to get conspicuous. And, frankly, I’m surprised the Harris-Walz ticket hasn’t suffered more from Walz’s “awkward” record in Minnesota, which was very largely an exercise in lame-ass wokeness—check out this take from the National Review’s Christian Schneider. “Unfriendly”, yes, he gets most of his facts right.
Since elections are traditionally decided on domestic issues, this is surely where Kamala is hurting the most, but Biden’s record in foreign policy is far worse. His knee-jerk, moralizing approach to foreign affairs, simply applying a Cold War mindset, and a painfully unsophisticated one at that, to an entirely non-Cold War world has tied the U.S. to two wars that, thanks to mindlessly open-ended U.S. commitment, are stumbling on a bloody road to nowhere, while Biden’s compulsive posturing on Tawain, regardless of how it embarrasses the Chinese leadership, is costing us now and could cost us much more in the future. But who cares, because we’re good and they’re bad?
Okay, if I continue I’ll just be repeating myself, arguing that we’re pushing Ukraine to fight a war they can’t win and helping Israel pursue a fantasy of absolute power over all their enemies in the Middle East forever that could literally be the end of Israel, turning world opinion entirely against Israel, to the point of pitilessness, while uniting the entire Muslim Middle East against them. But these are thoughts the Biden administration refuses to think. In the meantime, the wars continue, and Americans are getting tired and are getting ready to listen to a guy who tells us he’s going to make everything go away right away. So why worry?
Afterwords
I’m probably being too hard on Kamala for not being “perfect”, when I should be blaming people like Senator Mitch McConnell, Chief Justice John Roberts, and House Speaker Mike Johnson for betraying their oaths to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America, not to mention the 48% of Americans, more or less, who want to vote for the greatest criminal in American history. Yes, this is the “new normal”. I did not see this coming.
