Dumb and Dumber
On the Harris strategy of silence and the media’s complicity in it.
Kamala Harris, the current vice president of the United States and the Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election, seems to be missing in action. Don’t get me wrong, she did speak at the recent DNC and has held a few rallies across the battleground states, sometimes with her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. But she hasn’t really said a single substantive thing in any of those appearances, focusing instead on “vibes” and “joy.” Her rallies are, in essence, big parties with musical headliners who would draw crowds regardless of the political candidate being promoted. Her speeches are chock full of pablum and canned lines meant to generate applause, but nothing else. Over the past weekend, she didn’t even hold any campaign events – a true oddity for this late in an election year, especially when she is running such a time-limited push for the presidency. She has no policy section on her campaign website, but does have a section dedicated to the potential policies of her opponent – despite his disavowal of the think-tank white paper they’re based on. In short, she might as well be running a campaign generated entirely by AI.
Harris is also studiously avoiding the media, granting no interviews at all since she became the nominee after Biden’s withdrawal from the race in July – although she has now scheduled a joint interview with Walz on CNN. She has received more celebrity endorsements than press questions she’s answered, by at least a factor of ten. Instead of speaking to the media directly, she has offered press releases penned by aides and surrogates pushing heavily vetted talking points to pre-approved interlocutors. Those surrogates and aides have had a heavy lift to turn Kamala Harris from the failed 2020 presidential candidate and vice president to a historically-unpopular president into a candidate of change, a happy warrior outsider going up against an entrenched opponent. Given those headwinds and the breadth of the transformation required, Harris’s media silence is deafening.
The muteness of the candidate is part of a deliberate strategy meant to present Harris as a cipher, a blank slate that can be filled with whatever policies and ideas the electorate desires. To create that (false) image, Harris’s past as a San Francisco progressive – the most liberal senator in the entire body in 2019 – must be whitewashed. Her deep connection with the most radical policies of the Biden administration must be ignored and her continued incompetence at the job of vice president must be overlooked. Her terrible gaffes, awkward cackling laughter, and complete inability to speak extemporaneously must be hidden from the public. The memory hole over at Harris HQ must be running 24/7 at this point.
The Harris campaign, largely run by veterans of Obamaworld, is desperately trying to make Kamala into Barack 2.0. But Kamala Harris is no Barack Obama. The 44th president was a once-in-a-generation political talent, a man who could charm the skin off a snake and say absolutely nothing in a way that sounded profound and wise. The current vice president is grating, abrasive, and says absolutely nothing in a way that makes her seem like a stoned idiot trying to deliver a book report for a work she never read. The choice to hide the candidate from anything unscripted or potentially challenging is meant to obscure these very significant differences and allow the Obama sheen to be applied to something of far less substance. So, the candidate gives teleprompter rally speeches, cuts heavily-edited promotional videos for social media, and otherwise remains painstakingly mute.
Unfortunately for us voters, just as the Harris campaign has gone dumb, the media has gone dumber.
In a patently obvious effort to avoid duplicating the final outcome of the 2016 election, the mainstream press has been completely, embarrassingly in the tank for Kamala Harris. From discussing her as a potential drag on the Biden reelection campaign just weeks before he dropped out and she secured the nomination, the media has metamorphosed into an arm of the Harris campaign since she became the Democratic candidate. They have carried more water for her than a DC-10 air tanker, parroting the campaign’s barebones press releases nearly line for line. In just the past 40-odd days, we have seen stories defending Harris on nearly everything, including ignoring the media itself.
First, Harris was not the Biden administration “border czar” because she didn’t actually hold that colloquial title and only dealt with the root causes of migration – regardless of the fact that she was the point person on the entire issue until it became inconvenient. They have totally erased her continuous failures on the border, pretending that she would be more hawkish on immigration than Donald Trump, a candidate who has built his entire political career on immigration restriction. Her repeated endorsements of far-left proposals like police abolition, the Green New Deal, and decriminalization of illegal border crossing have been walked back through campaign surrogates, but that wouldn’t be enough for the press in any other circumstance. Her role in the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, once a keystone of her national security bona fides, is now being questioned as such.
Amazingly enough, outlets like Politico have gone so far as to pretend that Harris isn’t even a part of the Biden-Harris administration, having almost no ties to the unpopular president and his radical policies. If that is the case, why should anyone elect her? What, pray tell, has she been doing these past 3 years? The most galling version of this media apologia for the Democratic ticket’s conspicuous muteness is the description of Harris’s press blackout as a canny strategy and not an affront to a free press. For a candidate not running against Donald Trump, this would be viewed as a betrayal not only of the media, but of the electorate as a whole, shortchanging them of information about a critical election. Instead, we’ve gotten puff pieces about this bold new tactic and actual information about how journalists should go about pitching themselves to the campaign for an interview. No, I’m not kidding about that.
It’s not as though there is nothing to discuss with the candidate herself. Her candidacy raises significant questions that a competent press would certainly ask: How will you govern differently than the president you currently serve? What happened to make you change your mind on so many of the issues you campaigned on in 2019? What did you know about Joe Biden’s senility and when did you know it? Who is the real Kamala Harris: the left-wing senator and 2020 candidate or the current politician who wants to be seen as moderate? What, exactly, makes you qualified for the presidency? How would you handle the crises that are engulfing foreign affairs? How would a Harris administration deal with economic stagnation? Illegal immigration and drug trafficking?
These are serious issues that deserve more than a press release, some choice words from surrogates, or preplanned pablum from the candidate at a rally. They are the issues that the election will be decided on, and the voters should know where their candidates stand on them in their own detailed words. That is a two-way street: it requires the candidate to put herself out for public scrutiny and the media to actually scrutinize her.
As of now, it seems as though Harris is willing to cease her dumbness. Will the press respond in kind, or will they become even dumber?