Is Kamala Harris running for president or prom queen?
Superficiality is nothing new in American politics, and Donald Trump certainly knows how to use playground tactics – like tagging opponents with childish, yet effectively humiliating, nicknames.
Trump is about much more than taunts, however.
From immigration to foreign policy and everywhere in between, he’s staked out clear and controversial positions.
The Harris campaign, on the other hand, is trying its best to turn her into a featureless political mannequin.
With a little help from friends in media and tech, Harris’ record as President Joe Biden’s “border czar” and America’s “most liberal” senator (according to GovTrack in 2019) is being erased.
Wikipedia editors removed Harris from a page listing “executive branch czars,” while GovTrack “retracted” its single-year rankings soon after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and cleared the way for Harris.
Aided by the salesmanship of sympathetic journalists, the Harris campaign so far has been all about vibes, not substance.
The latest issue of New York magazine even proclaims “Kamalot,” with a cover blurb boasting, “the Democratic Party discovered its future was actually in the White House all along.”
Biden’s bid for a second term wasn’t struggling just because the president is too feeble to campaign.
The Biden-Harris record by itself was enough to put the Democrats at a disadvantage.
Harris knows her only hope of winning in November is to run on anything but that.
Immigration, foreign crises, inflation – Harris is faced with all the failures of the administration she shares with Biden, without having his decades of experience to draw upon.
So instead of making issues her signature – other than abortion – she’s conducting her campaign like it’s a deleted scene from “Mean Girls.”
Like cliquish teenagers bullying their classmates, the Harris team has taken to labeling their rivals “weird.”
Campaign statements and social media posts brand Trump “old and quite weird” and his running mate, J.D. Vance, “weird” and “creepy.”
Neither Republican is any stranger to name-calling, to be sure.
Trump delights in it, while Vance has lately been pilloried in the press for remarks he once made about “childless cat ladies who are miserable.”
The 2024 election is turning into a high-school popularity contest – who’s sitting at the cool kids’ lunch table?
Yet Vance, like Trump, is unmistakably an issues candidate, with a focus on the needs of the working class and the irresponsibility of America’s elites.
And his resume is anything but weird: Vance served his country during wartime in the Marines and had a successful business career before becoming a bestselling author.
He’s married and the father of three children.
Some Democrats might find the fact that Vance is a Catholic convert to be weird, but voters probably won’t – Biden’s Catholic affiliation certainly didn’t do him any harm at the polls.
Yet Republican and Democratic tickets this year could both stand to learn, or re-learn, a lesson from 2016.
Donald Trump won the White House that year because he gave hope to Americans who’d been written off by the likes of Hillary Clinton, and all too many in the GOP, as “deplorables.”
Trump’s base doesn’t just consist of prosperous businessmen and happily married conservative Christians – it includes people who’ve lost jobs to bad trade deals and excessive immigration, and lost loved ones or limbs to wars the politicians never knew how to win.
Divorced men skew highly Republican; unmarried women, with or without cats, are overwhelmingly Democratic.
In other contexts, Democrats pride themselves on being the party of the weird and misfit, the economic underdog and cultural outcast, but Harris is positioning herself as the queen of the in-crowd.
The problem with running a campaign like a pep rally is that millions of Americans, especially in some of the mostly tightly contested Rust Belt states, aren’t cool enough for school: They’re adults with adult hardships.
They need more than marketing campaigns from the candidates, and if Kamala Harris wants to be president, she’s going to have to talk about immigration, tariffs, the sky-high costs of groceries, housing and raising a family – things Vance has been talking about since he wrote “Hillbilly Elegy” and that Trump understood instinctively when he ran against the Republican establishment and beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The trouble for Harris is that her most enthusiastic supporters are the media’s mean girls, not parents or working-class stiffs, who probably seem “weird” to the kids at places like New York magazine.
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