Whether it’s a product of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, the race is on to make America’s famously maladroit vice president into a cultural sensation.
If there was going to be an upside to Joe Biden’s presidency, its earliest days suggested it might be found in the lack of a cult of personality around the man. The president inspired support and opposition in Americans but not abject devotion. He was a functionary – a flawed and fallible bureaucrat – and it would be healthy for the country to revert to the mean after twelve consecutive years in which the president was regarded by his supporters as the personification of the national will. That experiment ended in failure.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Biden years proved that presidents who are not ballasted by celebrity worship sink into the abyss. The president’s camp conceded as much with its bewildering campaign to popularize “dark Brandon” – a vaguely menacing figure with lasers for eyes and a conspicuous appetite for ice cream, who, as Politico put it, is also “a master of the political dark arts.” The artifice was a bad fit for Biden, but the enterprise acknowledged a lamentable truth: In the absence of a pop mythology and the thoughtless adulation that accompanies it, the president will be evaluated on his or her performance alone. In a polarized era typified by broad and sustained dissatisfaction with the status quo, that would be a heavy lift even for an accomplished chief executive. For the middling sort, it’s the kiss of death.
If that is that is the impression the political class has internalized over the last three years, it helps explain the frantic effort to fabricate stardom for Kamala Harris. Whether it’s a product of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, the race is on to make America’s famously maladroit vice president into a cultural sensation.
“This is not a campaign,” CNN contributor and former Obama administration official Van Jones said of Harris’s nascent presidential campaign, “this a movement.” The evidence for his assertion can be found in the eye-popping fundraising numbers Democrats touted in the hours that elapsed after Biden announced his exit from the presidential race. No doubt, the Harris campaign and its allies raised vast sums, but the Trump campaign can boast of raising similar totals from his core supporters in the wake of major news events. No, what really enlivened Jones was the avalanche of pro-Harris TikTok videos. Overnight, the social media outlet transformed the vice president from a figure of scorn and mockery into a phenomenon.
“All of the things that were cringey about Kamala – her laugh, the coconut tree comment, being unburdened by what – like all those weird things she said,” Jones mused, “she’s gone from cringe to cool in 24 hours as a whole generation has taken all that content and remixed it in all these incredible TikTok videos.”
The spectacle to which Jones refers – manically edited videos featuring Harris meditating on the nature of existence layered over electronica dance songs and the like – is being promoted as though it was the tip of an otherwise invisible iceberg; evidence of a deep wellspring of affection and reverence for Harris, the existence of which pollsters cannot seem to confirm.
Ominously enough, the Harris campaign itself is leaning into the online hype around the vice president’s campaign – an operation that has compelled less plugged-in Americans to familiarize themselves with a definition of the word “brat” that has nothing at all to do with sausages.
“Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has been bolstered by an unexpected group of supporters: Charli XCX fans,” NBC News reported on Monday. The British pop singer deemed Kamala “brat,” a term reserved for the lifestyle embraced by her fans. The Harris campaign adopted the label and promoted her candidacy with the same chartreuse aesthetic that graces Charli’s albums.
But what does it mean? CNN provided a helpful breakdown for the terminally unhip. “For those who are not in the know the way I am, that is a cool thing,” CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel assured viewers. Quoting the celebrity herself, “brat” is defined as being “just that girl who is a little messy, and likes to party, and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.”
Call me conventional, but it doesn’t strike me as the sharpest strategy for a presidential campaign to brand its principal – the potential leader of the free world and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces – “dumb.” But such are the demands of a professional life devoted to chasing trends, however amorphous and ephemeral they may be.
The risk inherent in the project in which Harris’s image makers have engaged is that their pursuit of celebrity for their candidate obscures the world in which high-propensity, persuadable voters actually reside. Democrats who limit themselves to that world are promulgating a wildly distinct version of Harris from the goofy, flighty, fun-loving political dilettante that has taken Chinese-communist spyware by storm. For example, the campaign’s co-chairman, Senator Chris Coons, is busily pitching Harris as a proponent of entrepreneurial dynamism and “wealth creation.” Harris’s allies are populating the nation’s op-ed pages with the argument that Harris’s tough-on-crime record as a prosecutor neutralizes the liabilities that haunt progressives. Still other well-meaning supporters want Harris to play up her record on abortion, her support for government-supported social-welfare programs, and “the nation’s mental health crisis, particularly among our kids.”
How promoting youthful engagement with a mood-altering social media platform populated by seizure-inducing audiovisual dadaism addresses America’s mental-health crisis is beyond me. The effort to make Harris into a meme to which only the “coconut pilled” are attracted is not a recipe for mass appeal. But it’s not hard to see the attraction. Making Harris into an abstraction eases the burden on her backers, who would otherwise have to evaluate a flesh-and-blood human being on her merits. Democrats made that mistake once already with Biden. They won’t make it again.