Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
An Opportunistic Mediocrity
In theory, it should be hard for Kamala Harris to win the presidency of the United States.
Under pressure, Harris just completed her first “live interview”—a disastrous performance that was mysteriously taped, edited, and emotionally supported by her co-interviewed running mate. During the interview, she claimed that her values remain the same even though her manifestations of them have admittedly changed. Translated, that means for the next 70 days, she will advocate for popular policies antithetical to her own values, which will inevitably resurface after the election once the current façade fades away.
She is a Berkelyite who, as attorney general of California, had a proud far-left tenure. The lifelong large corpus of Harris’s left-wing enthusiasm and causes are only now being unearthed. But they are singular in that her riffs of embracing wokism, being a radical, erasing ICE, doing away with private health insurance, or being the last person in the room when Joe Biden made his disastrous decisions were all given to sympathetic media or pandered to crowds.
As a result, she often doubled down. Her emphatic statements were intended to stun audiences. Unlike other leftists, she really was a proud woke, radical and wanted everyone else to be one as well—broadcasting her leftism as openly as she is now cloaking it.
In one respected survey, Harris’s voting record was rated as the most left-leaning in the United States Senate. If she voted to the left of the admitted hardcore socialist Bernie Sanders, what exactly does that make her?
Otherwise, Harris was undistinguished, and often overtly so, as she was exposed as inane in Senate hearings. Her envisioned 2019-2020 primary bid proved an utter disaster. When liberal Democrat voters nationwide were first made aware of her radical record, her left-wing agendas, and her weird wash/rinse/spin word-salad chats, they ran.
Harris’s well-funded 2019 campaign quickly blew up early. Indeed, she never entered much less won a single primary–and captured no delegates through voting.
In the frenzy following George Floyd’s death, and the mayhem and nationwide rioting and violence of late spring and summer, panicked 2020 nominee Joe Biden announced in advance he would select a diversity candidate as a running mate. And in no time, and under increasing pressure to trump his braggadocious promise, he boxed himself in by assuring his handlers that his running mate would be preselected as a black woman.
Given there were then no black female governors and only two black women in the Senate, Kamala Harris was a choice of last resort—even though, as a candidate and competitor of Joe Biden, she had condemned him before a nationwide audience as a veritable racist who had habitually cozied up to segregationists. When she labels her own running mate a racist it becomes hard to take her charges of racism against Trump seriously.
As vice president, Harris predictably proved inept. In a variety of tasks as “border czar” and point woman on space exploration, she proved not merely clueless but embarrassingly so—sappy, cackling, and variously labeled by ex-staff and Democratic insiders as “out of her league” and “way over her head.” Her chief role was to break a sometimes 50/50 deadlocked Senate and therefore, in every one of those votes, owns the passage of hard-left legislation that often turned disastrous.
As Biden’s cognitive decline accelerated at a geometric rate, a widely derided Harris was seen by the Bidens as Joe’s Spiro Agnew insurance policy: a vice president so bumbling and unimaginable as a future president that if Biden only breathed, he would be still judged preferable to the travesty of a Harris succession.
Biden utterly imploded on June 13 during a stress-test national debate. His collapse ended the 42-month-long charade that he was “fit as a fiddle.” In 24 hours, Biden was transmogrified by his handlers from an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like health nut to physically and mentally unable to continue as the Democratic nominee.
Left unsaid was that his diving polls, not his debility, doomed Biden. Otherwise, he would have survived his latest public humiliation had his approval ratings been respectable. Harris’s race, gender, and status as vice president made it impossible not to anoint her as the new Democratic candidate.
Her machinations to preempt any challengers were achieved almost instantaneously in the same anti-democratic fashion as the removal of Biden himself from the ticket. In the way of the current Democrats, whatever the billionaire donor class and the DEI apparat decide is reified almost instantly by fiat.
We now suffer a zombie presidency for the next five months. Biden’s own party insists that he is too enfeebled to campaign as a nominee but not too demented to serve as president. Weirder still, a presidential candidate, who has never in her life won a primary and just days ago was written off by her own party as linguistically challenged, is being reinvented in 70 days as the second coming of Barack Obama.
Harris 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…
So, the Democratic political establishment of Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer, the Obama consortia, and the Hollywood, Wall Street, and tech billionaire insiders quickly devised strategies to get Harris elected. And that too was not easy.
Given what they had to work with, their efforts centered around avoiding all press conferences, interviews, and unscripted talks. She is to stay wide of anything that might expose her inanity to the public or remind the nation of her dismal record as vice president and the disastrous Biden tenure that she co-owns and loudly, emphatically, and proudly so.
Winston Churchill once said of Admiral Jellicoe, who commanded the Home Fleet at the gigantic sea-battle of Jutland, that he was the only man who could lose Britain the war in an afternoon; so too Democrat elites know ten minutes of an unscripted, unedited, and televised Harris could sink the entire left-wing cause.
So here we are, witnessing the most anti-democratic effort in modern electoral history—a full-fledged, tripartite effort to:
- a) keep Harris silent and out of the public eye, and outsource her persona and views to a corrupt fusion media, to billionaire-funded ad campaigns, and to political surrogates;
- b) superimpose pseudo-conservative views upon her lifelong record of leftist advocacies and policies—a brief 70-day transformation designed to fool a voting public for which Democratic grandees harbor utter contempt;
- c) reinvent the campaign from Harris versus Trump to fixations on Donald Trump as a Satanic figure that justifies any means necessary to defeat and destroy him.
Will the ruse work?
That’s an open question. There are formidable hurdles that beset and many advantages that aid Harris. In her favor, the campaign cycle has been aborted from one traditionally lasting nine to ten months to a mere three, given her last-minute coronation.
Her first co-interview was mostly a story of dissimulation, soft-ball questions, and no follow-ups to her non-answers—with plenty of stonewalling about what was edited and why. And that may well be as close as the public ever gets to fathoming the ‘Being There’ Harris candidacy.
Biden proved in 2020 that he could avoid the press for almost a year by using COVID as a pretext, all while reinventing himself in absentia as a moderate and unifier.
Moreover, Harris will be inundated with two to three billion dollars, most of it globalized wealth from left-wing billionaires in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the idle, drone elite who inherited late 20th century fortunes.
Insulting the American people
Harris enjoys two other advantages besides a run-out-the-clock campaign and big money. She can count on hundreds of millions of dollars in free media publicity as network anchors spar with Trump, Vance, and Republican senators nonstop. They no longer make any pretense about objectivity but openly distort and prevaricate, again on the reasoning that the orange prince of darkness justifies becoming Pravda.
No one seems to care that for the second time in four years, the Democrats have sought to nullify and warp their own primary process, mask the nature and true condition of their anointed but challenged candidate, and then enlist the media to get elected a phantom president.
But “reimaging” Harris in 2024 also has its challenges.
First, can Harris like Biden really hide for two more months?
In 2020, Biden sought to mask his cognitive decline by claiming he had to stay in his basement due to COVID lockdowns. Harris is just as tongue-tied, but she lacks the COVID lockdown excuse to avoid the public and media.
And whereas Biden ran in Democratic primaries and was a candidate for two years, Harris again neither entered a single primary nor won a single delegate in an election. She cannot claim any experience campaigning, given she may be the first modern president never to have entered a single primary election.
In theory, a normal candidate with such a dismal and abbreviated past would be demanding interviews.
Instead, Harris’s compulsive-obsessive fixation on avoiding the media becomes a doom loop: the more she knows a presidential candidate must at least occasionally speak off the cuff, the more she knows, given her limitations, that to do so endangers the entire progressive project. As a result, Harris haggles over proposed interviews demanding notes, the reassuring presence at her side of Tim Walz, no live transmissions, and a final edited and truncated version released to the public.
So, her paralysis may annoy and then anger the electorate. The more she calls Trump a “coward,” the more she is seen as a craven projectionist.
In 2008, the blank-slate Obama did the hopey/change schtick as an antithesis to the unpopular Iraq War, the 2008 financial meltdown, and eight years of Republican rule. In 2020, Joe Biden reinvented himself as good ol’ Joe the centrist healer as a supposed antidote to four years of the “disrupter’ Trump and the purported “armed insurrection” of January 6.
But Harris is the current vice president. She has five months left on her term. Joe Biden is either on vacation, asleep, or suspended in a zombie state.
Theoretically, she is in control and could implement right now all of the bromides of her equity campaign agendas. And when she trashes high prices, open borders, the national debt, or high interest rates, she is indicting her boss who lifted her out of obscurity and herself as the proverbial and self-acclaimed “last person in the room” who co-owned those decisions.
Note that in her first and likely last (co-) interview, Harris, like a medieval palimpsest, imprints her pseudo-MAGA agendas on top of her real leftist history and policies.
That is, she never quite disowns her prior and innate positions on banning fracking, abolishing ICE, the disastrous Afghanistan humiliation, or any of her unpopular leftist positions.
Instead, Harris simply pastes their antitheses onto them and then has aides contextualize the jumbled mess of discrepancies so as to not alienate her extremist base.
Harris is not so much a flip-flopper as a padder, who supports anything, without any worry about framing each new position by renouncing her original and opposite one.
Her politics are now like an overgrown sandwich, with too many trimmings squashed on top of each other that eventually cause the entire jumble to fall apart.
Her sudden pivot to support Israel and stop illegal immigration exists simultaneously with siding with Hamas and destroying the border. But as political reality pulls her to the right and her innate leftist pulls to the left, she is beginning to split down the middle. When one is for everything, one is for nothing.
So, it will be hard to convince the American people that Harris is not an incumbent but another Obama-like newcomer here to save us from old white guys in their seventies. And even harder will be her task to fuse socialism with MAGA if even for only 70 days.
Rawness Beats Dishonesty
Finally, Trump is running for a third time and better so than he did in 2016 or 2020. His team is more experienced and so is Trump himself. He has a record of four years that polls on the economy and foreign policy far better than Harris’s tenure with Biden.
The five civic and criminal court trials are increasingly seen as Biden-inspired vindictive abuse of the law and illegitimate. For all the Biden-Harris caustic slurs of “convicted felon” more than half the country sees Biden and Harris as more culpable for discrediting our judiciary in their efforts to do in court what they fear they cannot at the ballot box.
Experts insist the race is even or in favor of Harris. But aside from the polls’ history of underestimating Trump’s real support, the current deadlock, and the right/left politics of the race, Trump is running authentically, transparently, and bluntly, Harris disingenuously, covertly, and duplicitously.
Trump’s challenge is to expose Harris for the radical she is; Harris’s is to mask the radicalism that she once proudly asserted and will do so again immediately upon election.
Ultimately, the American people should choose in-your-face honesty and competence over smiley-face dissimulation and incompetence.
Victor, would you please stop referring to June 13th as the day of the debate. the debate happened on June 27th.+I’ve seen several interviews with you referring to June 13th as a day of the debate and that is not it. July 13th was the day that Trump almost got his head blown off. Remember, it was June 27th not June+13th.
Yes, they can. It has been happening before our eyes for weeks now. The liberal media and social media control the news for the majority of Americans.
When describing Harris I think you said it all in “When one is for everything, one is for nothing.” Great assessment sir.
They don’t need to reinvent her, they could put a cardboard cutout as their candidate and get the same result.
As I understand it, Harris wants to be seated during the debate. I don’t think this will help her. In the CNN interview, her eyes looked rimmed with fatigue, her shoulders pads were pushed up in an untidy fashion as she leaned into the table. The whole effect was she too tired to sit up straight. If she presents at the debate looking tired, slouchy and overwhelmed by her shoulder pads, it will be reminiscent of Nixon’s sweaty face. One can only hope that she will be done in by a $3,000.00 suit.
Brilliant analysis. Thank you Dr. Hanson.
It is astonishing, and deeply disturbing, that so many, apparently millions, of Americans fail to perceive what is so blatantly obvious about Kamala Harris: that she is shallow, incompetent, ignorant, dishonest, unpleasant, not very bright, and 100% committed to every lunatic left-wing “woke” idea. That anyone even contemplates the idea of Kamala becoming president means that we have moved from Biden’s realization of George Orwell’s worst nightmares to realizing H.L. Mencken’s formulations:
1. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
2. Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods.
3. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
4. Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
5. Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
6. Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
7. Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
8. If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
9. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the lan
I’m standing for America! I am standing and applauding you. Right now. This day, and every day forward.
Remarkably well put….
I posted, but “they” would not post my comment! I urge you to read this article about Kamala Harris! Victor Davis Hanson, our American Treasure, wrote this article.
Once again a spot-on essay about the “weird” KH. The people must wait until Nov 5th, 6th, or 7th to know if American voters have chosen “…in-your-face honesty and competence over smiley-face dissimulation and incompetence.”
When considering VDH’s excellent essay, one must wonder the degree to which election interference will skew the 2024 election.
Thank you RB. Look for Molly Ball II. American elections are corrupt, & not to be trusted. Republicans seem catastrophically inept, & frightened of their own shadows.
The right choice is obvious, yet I’ve seen Harris-Walz front lawn signs on our block.
As an old white guy in his 70’s I couldn’t agree more, despite living in Berkeley, home of Kamala. The question is what will the voters do? Presently millions remain “suspended in a zombie state.”
And therein lies their problem and, very likely, our problem.
Too many zombies inhabit the Fruited Plain.
Shakespeare might have written:
In seventy days, they seek to shape anew,
A candidate who falters in the light.
Her words once bold, now twisted to subdue,
The truth she veils in shadows of the night.
Her past embraced the woke with fervent zeal,
But now she cloaks her views in soft disguise.
To win the crown, her true self she must seal,
Yet contradictions mark her with their lies.
They mold her image, hiding from the crowd,
Her record left, her words so oft rephrased.
Yet can she truly wear this borrowed shroud?
Or will the weight of truth her hopes erase?
For though they craft a mask of fleeting grace,
Her shifting face, in time, they can’t erase.
Well said. I fail to understand how so many people support her, but then Trump derangement syndrome is a very real thing. Better to torpedo the country they seem to think.
Her campaign is past detecting fault lines and instead rebuilding the aftermath of an enormous quake. I’m not sure there’s enough time. The only possible way forward is to market to a niche of undecided voters and that’s a hard sell based on the last 44 months. Thanks for all your hard work Victor Hanson.
“Will the ruse work?”
She will garner 45% of the vote nearly guaranteed.
The question answers itself.
The ruse is just to give cover and excuses to the 45% to vote for her and Wuhan Walz.
“Ultimately, the American people should choose in-your-face honesty and competence over smiley-face dissimulation and incompetence.”
Yes, but probably not as you intended. Trump was a childish veteran liar who could not be trusted long before he ever took office. He has not learned anything except maybe better ways to promote himself at the expense of others.
Harris is not that well known but at least should be allowed the possibility she is sincere in saying she can learn from past mistakes or changing circumstances.
Please add the /s to the end of you final sentence to show your intelligence. If you cannot, then please feel free to re-read Dr Hanson’s excellent article several times and try again.
We are all so screwed.
The second time in 4 years; how about the 3rd time in 8 years as the Clinton democrat machine tossed Bernie under the bus in 2016 in their attempt to annoint Queen Hillary!
I’ve come to the conclusion that the democrat party is full of people with fewer brain cells than Gomer Pyle USMC. Even Gomer knew not to be fooled a second time but here we have the democrats going all in subverting democracy.
Of course the democrats could not do such a thing without the lame stream media being complicit. Honest brokers of factual news is no longer evident in what previously was ‘The most trusted name in news’ as the other cable news and broadcast news joined in the ratings battle and became talking bobbleheads. Tim Russert may have been the last true reporter of facts; all have become pure opinionated bloviators leaving weak minded viewers to sheeplike nod in agreement.
“Ultimately, the American people should choose in-your-face honesty and competence over smiley-face dissimulation and incompetence……..”
One of your best closing lines this election cycle VDH……one of your best.
“Ultimately, the American people should choose in-your-face honesty and competence over smiley-face dissimulation and incompetence……………”
One of your best closing lines on this election VDH………
I must Admit much of H.L. Mencken’s formulations/satire’s applicable here [Stephen Leonard, Above.]. Some leftist liberals are obviously voting their interests: Government handouts, elitism, a fake sense of morality provided to them by THE Joseph Goebel’s media. However, I sense a good 25% of the electorate are stupid, gullible, disinterested and easily swayed by emotion, Hysteria, Histrionics, paranoia, And popularity. There is no logic. It is quite concerning.
In 2019 Kamala was just one of many Democratic candidates at the primary smorgasbord, and people could easily pass her by. Now she is the candidate, however dishonestly chosen and portrayed. Democrats want Democrats in power. That is what “democracy” means to them. They will vote for her in droves. Independents, it is now that you prove your worth.
VDH,
I just posted this on Tucker Carlson X site.
I know you don’t need anyone to defend you, but you are the best, and all of your fans have your back!!
The best historian is Victor Davis Hanson. Darryl Cooper is not in the same league/ ballpark as VDH.
This guy is a poor substitute for Victor Davis Hanson and you know it.
VDH has been conspicuously absent from your show? Did he criticize you?
Tucker we all know that you are very thin skinned. Your ego is out of control. Shame on you for taking this obvious cheap shot at VDH.
The election will probably depend on how Trump chooses to behave.
If I wrote a song called “I Woke to Darkness”, would it lift my spirit up or drag it down?
Thanks Dr. Hanson for your most comprehensive summation of the task ahead of the Democratic apparatchik requiring the application of a generous coating of lipstick on the pig they propose to become Commander in Chief of our once great America.
There are so many insightful comments already posted to your article that I have nohing further to add except…Never Underestimate the Stupidity of the American Voter!!!
Lord help us on November 5…MAGA. (A 91 Year Old White Guy vet.)
It’s really quite astounding that this is going on. I’m 75, and I’ve observed a lot of crazy political theater in my life, but nothing even comes close to what we are witnessing now. I don’t know what has happened to the American people who would mindlessly vote for this fraud, and if polls are to be believed, at least half of America will be voting for her and the ineptitude, corruption and insanity she and her administration would bring. In the past, we who were rational thinkers somehow knew sanity would eventually prevail and that America would emerge from the craziness of the moment perhaps sadder but wiser. Now I’m not so sure.
“Ultimately, the American people should choose in-your-face honesty and competence over smiley-face dissimulation and incompetence.”
SHOULD seems to be the operative word there.
“Will the ruse work?” Sure it will. The media has pounded the public with, “Democrats good, kind, sexy… Republicans bad, mean, racist…” for 45 years, and that’s the way more than half the country still thinks.
Regarding Harris’s “run to the right”…just note what dogs on the Left are not barking. They’ve been given the heads up that it is just for show.
The Churchill reference of Admiral Jellicoe is priceless. Harris’ lack of bona fides is stunning as relates to almost any public office, yet especially for the Oval Office. Her consolidated lack of credentials screams that the “shadow government” cabal that in less than four short years has set the world on fire and almost gutted our nation will remain firmly in place to continue their depredations unrestrained.
Thank you Victor, for your always insightful writing.
As the deciding vote in the US Senate, she bears sole responsibility for all items in those bills as they passed into law and allowed Pres Biden to sign them. Without her vote, no bill. Seems a listing of those bills, their topics and the policy effects would be helpful in showcasing her policies that are not just words but actions. Difficult to run from.
Love “Rawness beats Dishonesty”. So true.
VDH is my go to for reality check… Thank You for your continued effort to point out the abject ridiculousness of where we are. I am convinced the ‘polls’ are fiction, anything over 40% to KH (that being stupidity 25%, political 15%); the MSM has been instructed to convey a tight race to ease the coverup of ultimate corruption in the wee hours in November.
As someone said earlier, we are so screwed. I am heart broken to witness this massive demise of our country. BHO certainly did a number on us.
Not even a political choice, but a choice between common sense and stupidity. I am appalled that anyone can take KH seriously…inconceivable!
As a child raised in the Depression and through WWII, our schooling was vigorously patriotic. Our national history was familiar. Patriotic songs were sung. Irving Berlin’s God Bless American was our alternate national anthem. Every high school graduate was familiar with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Education was pass/fail. To graduate high school, one had to demonstrate math proficiency up through pre-calculus, complete/pass three years of lab science: biology, chemistry and physics. Four years of Math, English, History, No gimmies. Spelling mistakes on monthly exams penalized your score. Every night you prepared homework. If you were as I and many others, you had an after-school job. Many of my high school classmates went on to university, but the “Korean Conflict” delayed my college entrance. The GI Bill and California Vet program opened the education door for me. I was not the brightest, but I persevered and performed in the upper quartile of my class. On graduating, I was #2 in Finance. Later, completed the Graduate School of Banking, Earned an additional undergraduate in Real Estate. My non-degree Engineering and Geology studies at two universities.
On graduating from high school my adoptive father believed financially helping me enter university would have been a waste of time and money. He was stunned to hear that a business partner and I were occasionally invited to lecture at the University of Southern California, Marshall Graduate School
Very interesting explanation and critique Victor. There is one thing, however that no one seems to be talking about or have noticed yet. It is that Biden, was very very sick. That the media and the Dems cover this up should destroy all credibility that they might hope to have.
And that is the reason he could not speak. Despite the news media’s complicity as de facto, United States Pravda, despite everything that was wrong with Joe Biden, he was very sick. Harris does not have that excuse. She is a young healthy female at the prime of her life. If she cannot perform, speak, communicate now, It should be over, despite the uneven playing field.
If Kamala has any sense she will hide a flask somewhere take several big 80-proof swigs before she takes the debate stage opposite the Lion
Her alternative – to go on stage dry – is one where Trump would shred her into such glittery little leftist ribbons that the audience will be left wondering whether she did or did not help Joe finally beat Medicare
VDH, another excellent opine. Please keep up the good work!
As I read your view and several comments, I am saddened that so few citizens with the right to vote willingly choose to learn nothing about our history, economic results from excessive government spending, and much more. Information is readily available to anyone who cares enough to learn….
Professor Hanson, erudite and powerful piece, as usual. Thank you for that. But as for the “Being There” candidacy, I believe you are too hard on Mr. Chauncey Gardner. Chauncey (apparently we go by first names now, as if public figures are our relatives, like “My Cousin Vinny”) was significantly brighter than Harris, far more articulate, and good-hearted.
I love this article, but, as it stands, I believe it’s value is more rhetorical than practical.
We have less than two months to stop this and we all need to get up to speed on the truth about Kamala fast. So it would have been great for this article to have been covered with links from beginning to end documenting the claims it makes.
Where was it reported that Democratic insiders says she’s “out of her league” and “way over her head”? What survey rated Kamala’s voting record as most liberal than Bernie Sanders? What deadlocked Senate votes did she decide that enacted hard-left legislation?
If, for example, I go to my Dad and just call her an extreme leftist, he’s liable to believe that reflects my own prejudices more than actual reality. If my arguments are going to stick, I need hard facts to back up my conclusions. This article, I think, provides the right conclusions, but none of the facts to back them up to people leaning towards voting for Kamala.
I will, of course, proceed to investigate the VDH’s claims after work and on weekends, as should the 40+ other people commenting here. But time is of the essence, and surely it would be more effficient for one article to provide links (or footnotes) rather than having 40+ people all looking for the same information.
In the meantime, if anyone has a good source for the actual evidence of Kamala’s record, I would love if you’d share it with me here.