So, Do You Buy It?

I n March of this year, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker called for Vice President Kamala Harris to do everyone a favor and resign her office. Harris was known then to “embarrass her boss with her sometimes inane, rambling remarks and a laugh that erupts from nowhere about nothing obvious to others.” Harris was, according to Parker (who hadn’t been privy to the universal omertà that would be later imposed across media), “a colossal failure as border czar.” And she could possibly be Biden’s “downfall” in 2024. She had an approval rating of just 37.2 percent. And there was “no reason to think her ranking would spike were she suddenly promoted.”

Harris is now rebranded as the face of a pleasant near-term future in which all political turmoil of the past decade is simply transcended by an assertion of an unexpected joyful emotion. She has nothing to do with the past administration, except to have been so proud of its leader’s gallantly selfless decision to exercise supererogatory nobility and enthusiastically walk away from political power, thereby granting us — and her — this chance at joy. No longer tied to Biden politically, she is running as the challenger, and making the dour, aberrant mood of American politics over the last decade, now solely represented by Trump, into the incumbent against which she is running.

Instead of being the bumbling screw-up and colossal failure of five months ago, she is now the front-runner.

The question is: Do you buy it?

The polls show that Democrats are buying it. The weeks-long Democratic agony after Biden’s debate performance, and the relief when he retired himself from the race, has provided Democrats with an occasion to declare themselves euphoric. And if you tuned in to their convention in Chicago this week, you heard them announce their “joy” over and over again. Democrats have decided that any present political dissatisfaction — over inflation or the chaos at the border — can be safely deposited onto the same ice floe as the current president of the United States.

Harris now runs against negativity itself, castigating Trump and J. D. Vance in the close of her acceptance speech for running down the country. They’ve committed the sin of talking about inflation, uncontrolled immigration, and the fentanyl epidemic as actual problems in need of solutions. Harris is snapping back, America Is Already Great, What Are You Even Talking About? The arena applauded, and Jake Tapper declared it the best speech by a Democrat since Barack Obama was on the scene.

I guess I don’t buy it. I didn’t believe what was indelible in the hippocampus of Christine Blasey Ford. I didn’t think racism was spreading faster than the Wuhan virus. I didn’t think Georgia and Florida were experimenting with human sacrifice when they reopened. And I didn’t think Joe Biden was “sharp, on top of his game, intensely probing, detail-oriented, and focused.”

The last of those — the contention that Joe Biden was just fine, and that all appearances to the contrary were just right-wing propaganda — was a kind of test-run for the Kamala operation. She is now more protected from spontaneous moments with the media than Biden was. The most extraordinary six weeks in modern American politics have just passed us by, and Kamala Harris was the chief beneficiary of these events. And yet she will not sit down for an interview, and the press is basically congratulating her for pulling the trick on them, and themselves for falling for it.

The Secret Service can’t prevent Donald Trump from being shot in the head by a kid whose parents had already called the cops on him. But so far, the media have collaborated with Nancy Pelosi and the Obamas in preventing Harris from shooting herself in the foot. They are rolling her to the presidency as if she were wearing an inflatable sumo suit, to protect her from any possible bump in the road.

To an outsider to progressivism, tuning in to this week’s festivities in Chicago was like watching an arena-sized nitrous-oxide experiment. Democrats were having a crown installed via sharp implements, but the mood was one of giddy delirium.

I understand people who aren’t thrilled that the alternative to this is Donald Trump. But independent and swing voters this week have to ask themselves whether they want a candidate they know and don’t particularly love in Trump, whose campaign at least acknowledges there are political issues and problems in America, or whether they want to go with the Democrats who are offering Kamala Harris, who has never had a political conviction worth retaining or remembering, who supposedly has nothing to do with the administration of which she is part, and who is above all your petty concerns about what happened yesterday or will happen tomorrow. She’s already assured she’s the future.