Commentary: The Strange, Mythological Campaign of Kamala Harris

by Victor Davis Hanson

Increasingly, little if anything remains real about the Harris campaign.

Take ideology and the issues.

It is now well known that Kamala Harris was rated as the most left-wing of all current senators, including Bernie Sanders — according to GovTrack, a non-partisan compiler of evaluators in Congress. The Voteview project found her voting record the most liberal of all senators of the 21st century, except for radical Elizabeth Warren.

Harris as vice president in a 50/50 Senate has proven the decisive passing vote on more deadlocked bills than any other vice president in history — all thirty-three of them proudly progressive legislation. She has done more to ensure left-wing government at the national level than any prior vice president.

Indeed, Harris, as both a California state official and its senator, and as vice president, has for some thirty years championed almost every issue dear to the left — Medicare for all, an end to private health care plans, banning fracking, mandatory EV requirements, unrestricted abortion, wealth taxes, income and inheritance tax hikes, defense cuts, price controls, open borders, ending the border patrol, stopping all deportations, opposition to a border wall, mass amnesties, free transition surgeries for illegal aliens, and mandatory buyback of semi-automatic firearms.

In most of these cases, Harris not only voiced support but did so proudly and emphatically in front of hard-left constituencies. She has declared that she is a radical and woke.

During the 2020 Antifa and BLM riot after the death of George Floyd, Harris unabashedly helped to raise bail for arrested violent demonstrators in Minnesota. Indeed, she went on national television to warn the nation that the protests were a “movement” that would not and should not stop.

Given such a long record, Harris should have been proud of her politics, which had done so much, especially over the last four years, to change the very nature of the nation. Why, then, is she not campaigning on the allegedly superior record of the Biden administration, the innate advantages to voters of the progressive project, and the need to implement a further left-wing agenda? Rather than promising “change,” should she not be advocating “four more years of the same?”

Answer — Joe Biden has proven to be one of the most unpopular presidents in history. His approval ratings hover around 40 percent, and less on the very left-wing policies he and Harris implemented.

So, Harris is not proudly boasting of her past efforts to open wide the southern border, to support defunding the police, or to call for reparations. Instead, she has renounced most of her prior radical agendas and embraced their antitheses. In eerie examples of projection, whatever particular unpopular policy is most associated with Biden-Harris, she claims Trump, out of office since January 2021, was responsible for the fiasco.

Hyperinflation from 2022-2023? Trump did it. Twelve million illegal aliens swarming across the border in 2021-2024? Again, Trump is responsible. The most humiliating military defeat in a half-century? The Afghanistan disaster of August 2021 is Trump’s fault too.

Otherwise, Harris almost sounds like a Trump voter critiquing her own Biden-Harris disaster years. It gets stranger still when she vows to “turn the page” and “move forward” — as if suddenly to distance herself from the very record she and Joe Biden enacted.

In other words, Harris is asking Americas for a suspension of disbelief that what they have seen, heard — and suffered — the last four years was not really the fault of the government overseen by Biden-Harris in power but was due to Donald Trump out of power. Voters are beginning to suspect that come November 6, Harris will revert to her lifelong leftist agenda, regardless of whether Harris loses and continues as a lame-duck vice president or wins and assumes the presidency in 2025.

Central to Harris’s metamorphoses has also been her somewhat massaged biography. She often omits that she is the daughter of two PhDs, a Stanford professor, and a cancer researcher at UC Berkeley. Harris never really lived long in Oakland as claimed but grew up in upper-middle-class neighborhoods in university towns like Berkeley, Palo Alto, and an elite district of Montreal.

Harris, in the past manner of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, does not limit her fluidity to her bio but extends her makeover to the trivial, such as altering cadences and accents in efforts to sound somewhat more authentic to particular black, Caribbean, or Hispanic audiences.

For the first time in her life, Harris also seeks to cement her supposedly conservative middle-class bona fides by reinventing her past and present tastes and experiences. She claims she once worked at McDonald’s, but oddly cannot cite which franchise she worked at and when.

Harris insisted she owns a Glock handgun without specifying when and where she purchased it, to whom it is registered, or which model. Much less does she remind listeners that, as California Attorney General, she made it nearly impossible to purchase many Glock models. The once noted wine connoisseur now populist Harris now, of course, drinks beer on television.

During the recent slippage in Harris support, the campaign has issued a number of near-comical “working-class” commercials. Their aim is to regain support from blue-collar males, especially poor white men without college degrees. But such ads aimed at these constituencies are laughable, with actors caricaturing how elites imagine working males talk and look like when voicing support for Harris.

At times, Harris oddly thinks the best way to win back the male vote is to ridicule it. In a style reminiscent of Hilary Clinton’s disastrous lambasting of Trump supporters as “deplorables,” Barack Obama recently ventured out on her campaign trail to lecture supposedly naïve young black men not to be misled, fooled, or suffer from false consciousness into voting for a supposedly racist Trump rather than a progressive black female Kamala Harris.

Yet Obama, like Harris, is apparently completely unaware that wealthy coastal elites (the Obamas own three mansions in Hawaii, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard) convince few when they begin lecturing supposedly clueless working-class men, both black and white, on why they are being fooled into voting for Donald Trump.

Central to the Harris makeover is also a systemic effort to “redefine” masculinity and thereby convince males that “real” men support Harris’s own mostly progressive agendas.

Just as Harris leads women by over ten points, so too Trump has nearly the same edge with male voters. Unfortunately for Harris, her out-of-touch left-wing handlers apparently believe Harris’s inability to win over men is due to “misogyny,” or male insecurities and fears of voting for a proud black woman.

Thus, the ads, like those directed to the middle class, show ridiculously caricatured “he-men” claiming masculinity is really defined as support for unchecked abortion or other progressive agendas.

Yet Harris seems clueless that her inability to win over men is often because, as the frequent main providers for their families, they have been increasingly unable to do just that. Soaring price hikes in gas, food, rent, power, and insurance — as well as perceptions of anemic responses to national security threats abroad and an inability to crack down on lawlessness at home — are what really alienates men.

And even here, the appeal to a softer, gentler masculinity appears to many manufactured and plastic. The Harris campaign points to Harris’s own husband, Los Angeles celebrity and entertainment lawyer, Douglas Emhoff, and running mate Tim Walz as models of the new, improved male, one who becomes more a real man the more sensitive he is to feminist issues, as defined by the left. Again, it seems a strange way to win over male voters.

Stranger still, Emhoff reportedly broke up his first marriage by impregnating his children’s nanny while arranging to hide both his adultery and the consequences of the pregnancy.

He also, allegedly as reported by witnesses, slapped hard a former girlfriend, leading to the end of their relationship. And most recently, allegations have arisen that he was considered unusually chauvinistic and insensitive to women at his law firm.

Walz similarly is held up to men as a man’s ideal liberal and thus a true masculine male. Yet, most male voters remain unconvinced here too — perhaps because Walz has systematically misled voters about his past in a way that hardly seems manly. Walz falsely claimed that he held a higher military rank, fought in a combat zone, misrepresented an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, used in vitro fertilization for the birth of his child, was at Tiananmen Square during the historic 1989 demonstrations, and visited China either “30” or “dozens” or merely “closer to 15” times.

The problem with all these canned, unauthentic commercials, altered biographies, complete political flip-flops, staged encounters, serial lies, and campaigning as a pseudo-change candidate against one’s own record and self is that it is hard to keep all the contradictions, hypocrisies, fables, and mythologies straight.

No wonder that the chief criticism of Harris is that she offers word salads and endless sappy circumlocutions instead of specific answers to questions or laying out detailed political agendas.

But in her defense, how can either she — or for that matter, Walz — do that when they do not know who they really are, much less what they did in the past and will do in the future?

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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University.
Photo “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz” by Kamala Harris.

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