Kamala rides tsunami of positive press, but skeptics see a risky choice

The media are gushing – there’s no other word – over newly minted Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

She was being portrayed as having the money and the mojo as she headed to Milwaukee. "Harris Hits the Trail, Powered by Endorsements, Money and Delegates," said The Washington Post.

The excitement is understandable. The mainstream press wanted Joe Biden to step aside, the vice president steps in and attacks Trump from an ex-prosecutor’s perspective (and he calls her "Dumb as a Rock"). And given that Harris would be such a groundbreaker – first female president, first black female president, first president of Asian-American background – it’s a hell of a story.

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But with Biden finally planning to address the country tonight – putting to rest absurd rumors that he was dying or dead – the spotlight remains firmly fixed on Harris.

Her Milwaukee rally yesterday was a truncated version of her Wilmington speech the day before – slamming Trump, promising to work for the middle class – a practically verbatim reprise. If she keeps repeating that, it won’t make much news. 

There was nothing personal in the speech, even though Harris has to sell herself and her persona. An hour later, she was on a plane back to Washington, rather than shaking hands in a coffee shop or otherwise getting out from behind the podium.

There's a frenzied push among Democrats to sell Vice President Kamala Harris' persona as something to be uniquely excited about. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

So with the reality that Twitter is not the real world – shocking I know – here is a more skeptical view of her obviously hasty campaign launch.

Liberal New York Times columnist Ezra Klein says the question, after a grueling month, is "How do candidates respond to pressure? Do they seem honest and authentic to voters, or does something about them read as false or opportunistic? Do they have that charisma that convinces people to knock on doors for them, share memes of them, proselytize to family members about them?

"Harris’s reputation was as a candidate with the tangibles but not the intangibles. She was great on paper but, in 2020, couldn’t put the pieces together…

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"But Harris has never won an election atop the ticket in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan. She’s never won an election atop the ticket anywhere but California. The Biden administration’s record is unpopular, and she cannot make a clean break from it. Immediately uniting around Harris feels safe to some Democrats. To other Democrats, it’s risky. They risk making the mistake they made with Biden, which is being so afraid of disunity that they’re failing to gather the information they need to know how their candidate will really perform.

And here’s the truth: It’s all risky. It could all go bad, no matter what path is chosen."

Now that’s a candid assessment.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently observed that Vice President Harris' electoral fortitude has never been proven at the ballot box outside her native California. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The Atlantic’s David Frum, a Never Trumper and former Bush White House speechwriter, says "now the Trump campaign will be defining Harris’s identity too —and no prizes for guessing how they will do that: by casting Harris as a threat to sexual decency and racial order. 

"Also, respects to our potentially new Democrat Challenger, Laffin’ Kamala Harris. She did poorly in the Democrat nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.

"In case you missed Trump’s hint, he’s referencing an old internet smear that Harris slept her way to political success."

(Note: Kamala Harris had a relationship with Willie Brown, who would become San Francisco’s mayor, in the 1990s, and it was not a secret. She was single, and while Brown was still technically married, he had separated from his wife more than a decade earlier.)

"Her midlife marriage, her mixed-race origins, her manner and appearance, her vocal intonations, her career in the Bay Area with all of its association in the right-wing mind with dirt and depravity — those will be resources to construct a frightening psychosexual profile of the Black, Asian, and female Democratic candidate.

"Democrats are taking a risk with Harris — and it’s not only their risk. If she does secure the Democratic presidential nomination, then she becomes the only hope to keep Trump out of the White House for a second term. She becomes the only hope for Ukraine, for NATO, for open international trade, for American democracy, for a society founded on the equal worth and dignity of all its people."

Pollster Kristin Soltis Anderson writes in the New York Times that Harris has her upsides, but on the downside, Biden’s "poor approval rating wasn’t all about his age; on an array of issues, voters say they don’t think his policies made them better off — and his policies are also, in effect, her policies."

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Harris was "designated ‘to lead the White House effort on the border. Republicans will also, no doubt, point to Ms. Harris’s support for things like a controversial Minnesota bail fund to undercut any tough-on-crime-prosecutor messaging." 

On the right, National Review’s Noah Rothman says "contrary to the story Democrats are about to try to sell to the public, Harris’s party has never regained confidence in her abilities…

National Review's Noah Rothman dismisses the notion that Democrats have regained confidence in the Vice President's political viability. (Leigh Vogel/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

"The revolt of the staffers coincided with a one-on-one interview with NBC News [anchor] Lester Holt, in which Harris defended her failure to visit the rapidly deteriorating Southern border by laughing awkwardly while insisting she hadn’t ‘been to Europe’ either. ‘I don’t understand the point you’re making,’ Harris insisted. No one else appeared similarly perplexed."

"The revolt of the staffers coincided with a one-on-one interview with NBC News [anchor] Lester Holt, in which Harris defended her failure to visit the rapidly deteriorating Southern border by laughing awkwardly while insisting she hadn’t ‘been to Europe’ either. ‘I don’t understand the point you’re making,’ Harris insisted. No one else appeared similarly perplexed."

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She was largely sidelined after that, preferring friendly settings like "The View" and a show on Comedy Central hosted by Charlamagne tha God.

"For all the party’s public displays of bravado, Democrats appear to understand that the vice president needs to operate in a rigidly structured environment . . . or else… As a presidential candidate, the vice president will be at least as rigorously stage-managed as Joe Biden was in the closing days of his campaign." So Democrats "have to preserve the abstraction of Kamala Harris for as long as possible."

Vice President Harris was billed as "even more radical and incompetent" than President Biden by Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters. (Getty Images)

In Fox prime time, Jesse Watters said: "Kamala is even more radical and incompetent than old Joe Biden," calling her a "California socialist" and "even more unpopular than the most unpopular president in American history."

"No one who truly loves this country, no one who truly wants the best for the American people, would ever subject us to someone like Kamala Harris," said Laura Ingraham. "They know that Harris is incompetent, just as they knew that Biden is incompetent."

But the beat goes on. Speaking of "The View," the liberal ladies conducted an absolute love fest yesterday with the White House press secretary, the woman who constantly assured reporters that the president was definitely running (as she was told to do). 

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"Please welcome back the fabulous Karine Jean-Pierre," Whoopi Goldberg said.

Other than a skeptical question or two, the spokeswoman said her boss "still has the job. And we have a lot more to get done on behalf of the American people."

Can a Kamala appearance be far behind?

Look, maybe Harris will catch fire and make this a cliffhanger. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries endorsed her yesterday, by which time she didn’t need them anymore. A Quinnipiac poll has her trailing Trump by just 49 to 47 percent, or several points better than Biden. Trump is suddenly the old-guy candidate in the race.

But for now the media cheerleading for Harris isn’t providing the full picture.

Howard Kurtz is the host of FOX News Channel's MediaBuzz (Sundays 11 a.m.-12 p.m. ET). Based in Washington, D.C., he joined the network in July 2013 and regularly appears on Special Report with Bret Baier and other programs.