Who on the Left Was Privately Delighted by the Harris Defeat? Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

Hillary Clinton. Prior to Kamala, Hillary was accused of running a singularly lousy and failed 2016 campaign as the nation’s first would-be shoo-in female president. Her effort was inept, marred by corruption and arrogance, and she was acknowledged to have blown an easy victory.

Hillary resented deeply the idea that the upstart and vacuous Harris, lacking Hillary’s “depth” and “experience,” would instead become the first American woman president, defeat the Trump monster that Hillary could not, and forever remind the world that she did as well in a tight contest as Hillary did poorly in a supposedly easy one.

And now?

Hillary is no longer the only woman to lose to Trump. In fact, she did better than Kamala and actually won the popular vote. In her deranged mind, Hillary no doubt believes that even in her late 70s she would have been a better candidate than Kamala and Joe (after all, she only called Trump supporters “deplorables” not “garbage”). So, she believes Kamala’s failure enhances her own legacy.

The Obamas. Barack Obama once said his dream of a third- and fourth-term presidency would be to live an anonymous private life while phoning in his presidential orders—in other words, his present role as the puppeteer who in the shadows pulled the strings of the inert waxen Biden effigy.

But Harris? She too closely (and poorly) copy-catted the Obama brand: half-black, prone also to faking her accent to the appropriate audience, and capable of going into full evangelical, black pastor sermonizing mode. Yet Harris as president would not have taken kindly to the Obamas’ remote orchestrations.

Moreover, Obama is our first—and only—African American president, a unique accomplishment about which a defeated Harris now can only now fantasize. Whereas Obama’s mellifluousness, while off-putting, was never entirely vacuous, Harris’s pale word salads were laughable.

In other words, Obama rather enjoys being the first and only black president and feels Kamala’s ineptness as president would somehow tarnish his exclusivity. In that regard, remember rumors that after the Biden dethronement, the Obamas supposedly opposed the Harris coronation and preferred an open convention in which their own preselected candidates would have been “ratified.”

Kamala Herself. Did Kamala really wish to either avoid the media for the next four years or continuously have to script and orchestrate her pre-canned appearances, always in fear that her irrepressible word salads would earn endless derision?

Why tie herself in knots when she knew she could not cackle, could not answer every question with “I grew up in a middle-class family…,” and especially could not lecture a Putin, Netanyahu, or Macron on being unburdened by the passage of time?

Harris reminds me of small-town, high-school sports, in which mediocre coaches sometimes would promote a talentless player because his father was well-connected, rich, and influential. Finally, such a hapless player would commit so many errors, and strike out so many times that he was relieved when a reluctant coach would bench him and relieve him of the misery of his unearned tenure.

So, Harris is relieved that she never again needs to fear town halls, interviews, press conferences, and impromptu presidential interactions. She knows she will never pull off a Richard Nixon or Donald Trump ordeal-and-triumph comeback.

Instead, Harris will enjoy a quiet Dukakis-like thirty years of public seclusion and a footnoted existence—albeit in a celebrity, rich, and obsequious Los Angeles.