Kamala Will Live or Die by Vacuous Hype
Charles C. W. CookeAugust 21, for National Review
Rich writes that, as a candidate, Kamala Harris is “wafer thin”:
Kamala Harris feels thin, fragile, and manufactured. Nominating her without a primary fight was an accident of circumstances, yes, but also probably a necessity.
Her signature phrases are banal (the coconut tree) or risibly vacuous (unburdened by what has been).
Her “brat” branding is derivative — she didn’t come up with the concept or even with the idea that she herself is brat.
This is correct. And, paradoxically, it is both Harris’s biggest strength and her biggest weakness. In recent days I’ve been consumed by the sense that the “vibes” are shifting away from Harris a little bit. Why? Well, partly because she’s started talking about policy, and it turns out that she’s every bit as much the lunatic in 2024 as she was in 2019. Partly because the honeymoon is coming to an end — as all honeymoons do. But mostly because her almost complete lack of substance is proving to be politically unstable.
Because this is so ineffable, it can be tough to explain. But I’ll give it a go nevertheless: With Harris, as with other beneficiaries of hype-driven marketing campaigns, the line between Cool and A National Joke is extremely thin. Done right, the “coconut tree” nonsense is superficially pleasing. But, when the air goes out of the room, it is likely to look suddenly ridiculous. For an analogy, think about other circumstances in which the same stimulus changes dramatically depending on the context. Music at a party feels great until someone there has a heart attack, at which point, quite instantly, it sounds cloying and absurd. A child’s bedroom becomes immediately more poignant after they have flown the nest, even if nothing in it has been removed. A newly purchased boat or golf cart goes from being a fun toy to a stressful liability the second that its owner loses his job.
So it is with vacuous campaigns of affinity. Politicians who are known for concrete ideas or achievements are often able to weather storms. Politicians whose reputations are built atop fluff and adorned with baubles are not. I think that Kamala Harris may well win the election in November. But, even if she does, she is going to come unstuck before long, because, pace all the press-installed scaffolding that is holding her up at present, she remains a shallow, mediocre, off-putting, unlikeable fool. That ghastly cackle that has temporarily been transmuted into a virtue? It won’t appear that way when things get serious. Her total inability to construct sentences that don’t read like a drunk non-English speaker wrote a fortune cookie using Google Translate? When the stakes are high, it’ll be a liability. The preposterous flip-flopping, which is being sold as healthy pragmatism? It’ll bite when applied to a salient issue on which voters do not want to be dismissed.
If, in the last few days, it feels as if the momentum behind Harris has slowed somewhat, that’s likely because, having smiled along at the palm tree emojis for a few days, voters have started to ask what else is on offer and been less excited by the response than they imagined they would be at the start. A façade with nothing behind it is all well and good when the sun is shining, but, as ever, it is considerably less so when you’re in need of somewhere to sleep.
She has started messaging her administration will do a number of things impacting the economy. At some point, the question should be put to her as why she did not push for these things while on team Biden.