Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Cynically running out the clock has been the overarching principle of the entire abbreviated 105-day presidential campaign of Kamala Harris—ever since Joe Biden, at the 11th-hour, dropped out in July.
Harris seems unwilling or unable to answer any impromptu question that she has not been previously prepped for. Her answers at the debate were memorized and canned. They never addressed the questions asked.
Her single, 11-minute post-debate Philadelphia interview was a shipwreck of dodging and dissimulating—even though the host was sympathetically left-wing.
Even socialist Bernie Sanders pointed out that for Harris to get elected, she must temporarily disown her lifelong leftist credentials.
As vice president, she must further deny co-ownership of the unpopular record of the Biden-Harris administration.
Left unstated is that whether she wins the presidency—or loses it and continues as vice president for another three months—nonetheless she will inevitably revert back to her hard-core, lifelong leftist beliefs.
In addition, Harris has reconstructed her privileged upbringing as a child of two PhDs, living in a posh Montreal neighborhood into a struggling, middle-class Oakland childhood.
How can she stage such a complete makeover—and contemptuously count on the voting public to be so easily deceived?
She avoids all news conferences, one-on-one nationally broadcast interviews, and town halls. And like Biden, she will debate only on leftist venues with impartial pro-Harris moderators.
When asked to provide the details of her past responsibility for the open border, inflationary economy, spiraling crime, attacks on fossil fuels, and collapsing foreign policy, Harris smiles, makes hand gestures, and dodges. She changes the subject to her empathetic personality, her “joy” campaign, and her iconic profile as a supposedly dynamic black woman.
When pressed, Harris outsources the task of squaring her hypocrisies and subterfuges to the stonewalling campaign, Democratic surrogates—and the media.
Harris is also certainly not running on her demonstrable experience, vision, or intelligence as much as she is not Trump (or, for that matter, her former partner Joe Biden).
To make that distinction stark, Harris must demonize and bait Trump nonstop and make the country fear him.
So, she paints Trump as a racist and violent insurrectionist, not a former president whose four-year term saw a superior foreign policy, economy, border, and security than during the Biden-Harris term.
Instead, Harris has repeatedly claimed Trump is a dictator and a threat to democracy—as if he had politically weaponized the FBI, CIA, DOJ, or IRS as had Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Trump as Hitler has become a staple Democrat smear for the past decade.
That vicious caricature is so entrenched that major Democratic figures assume it’s okay to joke about, or seriously call for, Trump’s demise.
So, Harris’s current prominent advisor David Plouffe years ago warned the nation that “it is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”
Just last year, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) claimed that Trump “is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be, he has to be eliminated.”
Even after an assassin sought to kill Trump last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025. We must stop them.”
Harris’s dehumanizing of Trump, outsourcing the campaign to the media, avoiding all public dialogue, and temporarily reinventing one’s politics and biography have taken a toll on the country.
Harris was coronated the Democratic candidate without ever entering a primary or winning a single delegate by vote. Some 14 million Democrat primary voters were reduced to irrelevancy.
Like the 2020 Biden campaign, Harris has nationalized a new kind of cynical campaign in which leftist candidates seek for a few months to deceive the public into thinking they are centrist and moderate—until elected.
Avoiding all cross-examination and outscoring the campaign to the obsequious media is now the new norm.
Most news stories deemed unhelpful to Harris—the left-wing, pro-Harris politics of the recent would-be Trump assassin, the lie that dozens of bomb threats were called in against Springfield schools due to Trump, or prominent Democrats before and after the recent assassination attempt blaming Trump for being the target of an assassin—are suppressed by the media.
The recent two foiled assassination attempts on Trump logically follow a near-decade pattern of trying to destroy rather than outvote him.
The Russian collusion hoax, the laptop disinformation con, the two impeachments, the effort to remove Trump from some 16 state ballots, and the attempt to jail and bankrupt Trump through five criminal and civil “lawfare” indictments and suits also led to the current hateful climate of Trump assassination attempts.
Harris thinks her delays, deceptions, and vilifications for the next 47 days will ensure her victory.
But if so, it will be because she, her stealth campaign, and her self-proclaimed guardians of democracy have been willing to systematically destroy it.
The Left has a pretty good system going here.
We can mock them and make fun of them, but our verbal arrows are only visible to our side. They bounce off the well armored hull of the Good Ship Kamala. As these harmless missiles disappear into the water she barely emits a muffled cackle and displays an open-mouthed, toothy fake unhinged grin..
On the debate stage, she can imply that Trump is the incumbent and that she is the agent of change. She can spew nonsense and not be challenged by sycophantic moderators.
She can normalize the act of NOT answering moderator questions. Just go into a rehearsed “response” that has nothing to do with the question. Why have moderators if their questions are ignored? Well, we all saw how the ABC duo did their best to influence the debate in her direction. To the Left, that is the purpose of having “moderators”.
So they have now negated the usefulness of “debates”. Good job.
She can completely change her position on almost any policy and not be called out for doing so. They will just say that she has “evolved”. It does not matter that the position change is certainly temporary.
Only a few months ago she was viewed by the public as a sort of embarrassing, irrelevant, laughing hyena by almost everybody. Now she is glorified as a savior with an occasional awkward Black southern accent. However, onstage with other black politicians, she looks whiter than VDH.
White is black and black is white. Our Orwellian moment
It’s truly amazing and sickening to watch.
I’m sure that her campaign is predicated on the party and elites plan to “steal” the election. Remember, it’s not kamala the sex worker they are trying to elect to office but the President-bot which they think they can control. A win for the democrats means an eventually win for a one party state and rule where “elected” figure heads only serve as place holders or sacrificial oxen on the altars when decisions and policies go bad. Of course the bad decisions they have made was to hire armatures as “hitmen”, else the election would be a shoe-in.
Any- and everything is possible with a liberal media, who for 45 years have delivered the message, “Democrats good, kind, sexy, smart… Republicans evil, racist, ugly, stupid, and white…”