Can they really make this work?
Can they really make this work?
I t is appropriate that Kamala Harris is from the town of Oakland, Calif., of which it was famously said there was no there there.
It is hard to think of another presidential nominee who has felt so utterly superficial — not as a campaign tactic, but as a reality.
Certainly, she’s nowhere close to as compelling, distinctive, and commanding as Barack Obama and Donald Trump when they rose to become their parties’ nominees.
She’s not the instigator and leader of a movement, the way those two men were (the coalition of the ascendant and MAGA, respectively).
She doesn’t have a distinct mode of politics, whereas both Obama and Trump had the feel of something we hadn’t seen before.
She doesn’t have any signature issues, when Obama and Trump made themselves synonymous with, on the one hand, ending the Iraq war and, on the other, building the wall.
Both Obama (in 2008) and Trump (in 2016) toppled establishment candidates in epic nomination battles — Harris had her nomination handed to her.
She has no flavor.
She’s woke but doesn’t embrace being woke; her policies are socialistic although she’s not a self-declared socialist; she’s a tough law-and-order prosecutor, except when she’s not.
She’s not a party institutionalist like Bob Dole, finally rewarded with his party’s nomination after decades of service, or a “maverick” like John McCain, who, after years being in the wilderness, finally won over his party (temporarily).
Of course, she’s not a Bill Clinton, who rose from relative obscurity based on his unbelievable verbal acuity, charm, and shamelessness that could see him through any fix or scandal.
No, 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.
There’s always an overwhelming sense that she says things because they are things that you are supposed to say, not because she has thought them through and believes in them with any conviction.
Say what you will about Barack Obama, but his speeches are always his own. His address last night at the DNC ended with a long (annoying) rumination about what divides us that has been part of his case for his kind of politics for a very long time now.
There’s no doubt that there is enthusiasm around Kamala Harris, but it feels largely like sheer relief that Biden is off the ticket and that Democrats are back in the game. We are being told that everything is very joyful with an insistence that sounds more like a demand than a neutral observation. It’s insta-joy, a de rigueur joy.
Can Harris win? Yes. And that’s the whole point of the exercise. Just like Joe Biden before her, she’s merely a vehicle. She, too, is a default candidate — Biden was not Bernie Sanders, and Harris is not Joe Biden, at a time when she happened to be the only plausible alternative to Biden.
If this speaks to an underlying weakness of her campaign, it is also one of the advantages of having a coherent establishment. The Democrats and their media allies have had the unity and discipline, so far, to pull off a feat that few would dare attempt: to topple a sitting president and create a political phenomenon out of the thinnest of reeds.
Their gamble is that they can create enough of a “there” to get through the next 75 days.