Our fixation on what Kamala Harris knows and believes is rather quaint.
It reflects a traditional view of leadership that Democrats have largely rejected. Instead of decisive figures who guide the nation, the party is driven by untold numbers of elected officials and unelected bureaucrats, academics, and media voices who share a leftwing ideology. Harking back to its earlier history, the party is once again a machine. Its candidates are not visionaries but apparatchiks committed to the program.
The name on the ballot is largely irrelevant. No one is really voting for Harris, but for the party she represents. Still, politics needs a face, so when President Biden’s turned too craggy, she was tapped as a more youthful, attractive spokesmodel. Like Biden, her vacuity is her appeal; she is another empty vessel that Democrat marketing whizzes can fill with blithe slogans – Joy! Freedom!! Goldilocks!!!
Also, like Biden, her lack of insight and conviction is a plus as she is unlikely to offer any pushback to the plan. I’ll stand where you want, say what you want, just please compare me to Lincoln.
If that sounds unfair, note that it is precisely what we have lived through during the stage-managed Biden presidency. As if to underscore the point, the president has been largely MIA since he was selflessly forced, kicking and screaming, to withdraw from the race. Who’s running the government? The machine.
Ironically, Harris’ largely ceremonial role adds a splash of truth to her party’s efforts to hide her. She doesn’t need to grant many interviews or hold press conferences because her own thoughts are largely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what she knows about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the intentions of China and Iran, or about the economy, health care, and education. Those decisions will be made by the machine. All she can do is jam the gears with word salads and gaffes.
Where Republicans argue her positions are unclear, we know exactly what she is offering: more of the same. A Harris presidency will continue to ramp up the leftwing policies that have marked Biden’s term. The Democrats will continue their push to transform America into a woke, quasi-socialist republic like those that dominate the broke and feckless nations of Western Europe. They will give us higher taxes, expanded regulation, mounting national debt, and – perhaps most troubling of all – the ever more strident effort to censor and punish dissenting views.
She is not feeding information into the machine, she is mouthing what it spits out.
Hence, the focus on her life and career, the causes and policies she has embraced, many of which she is now renouncing, are a distraction. What she thinks and feels doesn’t matter. The only real threat is if, as president, she tried to rise above her station and insist on consequential actions during a crisis. Lord, help us.
The problem for Democrats is that many Americans are not happy with the machine’s output. They are disappointed with its policies on the border, the spending that has fueled inflation, the growing divisions along the lines of race and gender, the fearsome global conflicts. Where a visionary leader can adapt to new circumstances, turning, if not on a dime, then a quarter, the machine grinds on. What you’ve seen is what you’re going to get. Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer admitted the obvious last week when he said that if Democrats win control of the government this November, they would likely end the filibuster to pass many of the bills that stalled during the Biden years.
Still, there are elections to win. So Democrats are trying to put lipstick on a pig by selling the same old same old as a new way forward. Chutzpah or genius? Time will tell.
All of this shows the folly of the Trump campaign, which seems to believe it is running against Harris. His schoolyard insults of the vice president raise her stature, casting her as a potential world leader instead of a mouthpiece. It gives hope to Americans who are disappointed with the Biden administration – maybe she will be different. It obscures the fact that Trump’s real opponent is a vast machine, a mighty ship of state that may have no captain at the helm but is irrevocably steering the nation on a dangerous course.
J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @jpederzane.
