The New York Times is attempting to spin Vice President Kamala Harris' history of unflattering viral moments as "celebratory artifacts" following her swift emergence as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Amanda Hess, the Times' internet culture critic, penned a piece titled "The Triumphant Comeback of the Kamala Harris Meme," highlighting the surging online content in the days after President Biden announced his endorsement for Harris and his exit from the 2024 race.
Hess called Harris a "highly memeable presidential candidate."
"The same unflattering supercuts and Photoshop jobs once used to denigrate Harris have now been flipped into celebratory artifacts of her candidacy," Hess told readers Tuesday.
The Times critic said that Harris' go-to catchphrase "what can be, unburdened by what has been," something that has long been ridiculed by conservatives, was "reclaimed by Harris supporters," writing, "The mild incoherence of her phrasing only makes it more interesting as a hook on TikTok, where fans chop up and remix a candidate’s speech like D.J.s working a goofy soundboard."
"The redemption of the ‘unburdened’ meme is also a reaction to the legitimately concerning gibberish generated by the elder statesmen in the race over the past few months," Hess wrote, referencing Biden. "Harris now presides over a post-coherence landscape, one where her occasionally meandering phrasing feels refreshingly low stakes. It’s a quirk, not an existential threat to American democracy. The ‘unburdened’ supercut shows a candidate who can memorize a line and capably deliver it on command — not something that could be said of Joe Biden, in the end."
Hess also alleged that various clips of Harris dancing and her memorable quotes like, "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?" all of which were mocked by Republicans, "have been reversed" by her fans and the "interpretation" of those moments "has changed."
"In the hands of her online fans, Harris’s word salad has been replated as hypnotic internet speak," Hess wrote. "Her confounding coconut tree quote — ‘You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,’ she went on to say — now circulates as a symbol of the giddy high produced by her dizzy rise in a destabilized campaign. Her dance moves have been set to Charli XCX songs and filtered through Charli’s lime-green ‘Brat’-era branding, bathing Harris in her chill hot-mess pop star glow. Even ‘Kamala Harris is a cop’ has been reclaimed, with an exaggerated wink, by supporters eager to fashion it into a winning general-election pitch."
She continued, "The measure of a candidate’s charisma used to be, ‘Would you have a beer with her?' Now it’s more like, 'Are you willing to spend your evening editing a fancam-style video that sets her idiosyncrasies to pop music so effectively that they produce a pleasant narcotic effect?’"
NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNISTS SAY OTHER DEMOCRATS MORE ‘ELECTABLE’, ‘EXCITING’ THAN KAMALA HARRIS
Hess later told readers, "With Harris, a meme alliance has emerged between the Democratic Party’s irony-pilled leftists and its #resistance-core centrists, and now this ragtag crew has come together to try to lift her into the White House. For very online members of the left who view Harris as insufficiently radical, the playfulness of her memes is protective. The ironic distance stands in for their own political distance from their new favorite candidate. On the internet, the project of electing an establishment Democrat like Harris can feel almost subversive. Or at the very least, mildly entertaining."
The political landscape was rocked on Sunday when Biden announced he was ending his presidential bid and endorsed Harris.
The rest of the party quickly followed suit as Biden's delegates shifted their support behind Harris while nearly every top Democrat on Capitol Hill as well as prominent Democratic governors widely seen as potential challengers rallied behind the VP.
