by Roger Kimball
H. L. Mencken apparently never quite said that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” He said lots of similar things, however, and I like to think he would have been proud of being the sort of chap to whom people attributed such astringent mots.
He would also, I feel sure, regard the theater surrounding the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign as a test case of the proposition.
Last week in this space, I pointed out the irony of the Sudden Harris Ascendancy Syndrome. Here she was, one of the least popular figures on the American scene—someone, moreover, whom everyone, no matter their political coloration, regarded primarily as political life insurance for Joe Biden—and yet, Wham!, the very moment Biden resigns, her media reconstruction begins in earnest.
I almost wrote “media rehabilitation,” but that would not have been quite right. We say that someone is rehabilitated when he has fallen from a previous state of health, competence, or popularity.
Kamala Harris has never been competent or popular. So what the media has done to or with her these last couple of weeks is more of an outright fabrication project. In part, as I wrote last week, it is a product of “magical thinking,” the belief, or at least the hope or pretense, that by saying something is so, you magically make it so.
The primary aim of this bit of theatrical slight-of-hand is positive. It is to make people believe, for as long as they inhabit this theater of the absurd (the show runs, by the way, until November 5) that the person answering to the name “Kamala Harris” is not against fracking, though her doppelgänger, who existed until July 21 when Joe Biden dropped out of the race, was adamantly against fracking.
Similarly, Kamala 2.0 does not believe in open borders. But the original version, who was Biden’s “Border Czar,” did nothing to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants and spoke openly about a “path to citizenship” for them all eventually and Medicare and other benefits for them now.
Pick the issue: if it’s contentious, you will find that Kamala has had a sudden metanoia in the last couple of weeks. She is like the wolf who, addressing a flock of sheep, assures them that as soon as he is elected, he will become a vegetarian.
They are trying the same thing with Tim Walz, but what is uphill work for Kamala Harris is Mt. Everest for Walz. He really did order that tampons be put into boys’ bathrooms in Minnesota schools. He allowed eight babies to be murdered after botched abortions left them alive. He sat back and watched Minneapolis burn when the St. George Floyd riots erupted in 2020. Just a day or two ago, NBC reported that Walz now says he “misspoke” in 2018 when describing his military experience. But he did not “misspeak.” He lied.
Walz is one of the many Democrats who seem to think that George Orwell’s 1984 was a how-to manual, not a sober warning about the dangers of totalitarianism. Remember the COVID insanity? Walz was one of the worst governors during that made-up emergency. Not only did he mandate vaccines, but he also set up a “snitch line” and encouraged Minnesotans to report their neighbors should they dare to venture outside without a mask. Nevertheless, the media has been playing a clip over and over of Walz saying he wants people to “mind their own business.” As if.
The Democrats’ old friend, what the Freudians call “projection,” is evident everywhere in this entertainment. It boils down to accusing your opponents of the very things you are doing or are. So, the memo went out that J. D. was henceforth to be described as “weird,” when in fact he radiates normality, competence, and healthy self-confidence. Walz? Despite the theatrical producers’ best effort, the fact that the man is one sick puppy cannot be obscured.
The strategy of the Biden-Harris—er, make that the “Harris-Walz” campaign depends on people being dazzled by their theater of the absurd. Both candidates claim now to believe things they have spent the last decades attacking. But their supposed conversion is not the result of any heavenly illumination. It’s not like Saul falling to the ground on the road to Damascus. Rather, it is an abracadabra sort of conversion, i.e., no conversion at all, merely subterfuge. It’s an elaborate show we are being treated to, replete with fake polls showing Harris-Walz ahead in some swing states.
Already, the façade is cracking as more and more devastating videos come to light about both candidates. The ridicule machine of Trump and his allies is only getting cranked up. More, much more, will be coming to an internet search near you.
As I say, this show is scheduled to run at least until November 5, maybe longer, depending on how much election fraud the Democrats are allowed to indulge in. But there will be occasional intermissions during which the deciding question will be pressed upon all of us theatergoers. Is this campaign about mood and emotion—is it, I mean, essentially a female campaign? Or is it a matter of competing policies, of things like peace, prosperity, individual liberty, and economic competitiveness?
I am betting that, when the Chardonnay is gone and paper masks no longer fit, every robust voter will decide that he wants to live in the real world of common sense, not the hot-house world of woke theatrics and socialist nostrums. In other words, I predict that Mencken’s diminishing wager about the American public will, at least in this one instance, turn out to be dead wrong.
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Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Photo “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz” by Kamala Harris.
I pray you’re right, Mr. Kimball, but as has been said before, if pigs were to vote, the man with the swill bucket would be elected every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did at other times. People will vote for giveaways, and the Harris / Walz campaign has them. People will vote against candidates that have been defamed by the media, and Donald Trump has been their #1 target for several years. We hope the numbers of such voters won’t overwhelm us.