Kamala Harris is a grievously cracked vessel being asked to carry the hopes of a Democratic coalition that barely agrees with itself and has failed to persuade the country.
I assume most people aren’t familiar with Lars von Trier’s crowd-pleasing film Antichrist. Trust me, you’d hate it, and all you really need to know is that it does a fine job of living up to its title. But one image from it has stuck with me: Willem Dafoe, out walking in the woods, finds a dead fox that somehow comes to life, turns its rotting head toward him, and growls “chaos reigns.” (Seriously: Please do not watch this movie unless you are tired of having good dreams.)
Naturally, this was the metaphor I reached for first when contemplating the state of the 2024 race at the end of Monday night. Where do we even begin? As of Sunday afternoon, Joe Biden is out of the race, but not the presidency. He has not been seen in public since last Wednesday, when he was diagnosed with Covid-19 while at an event in Las Vegas; he was videoed waving weakly to reporters — without a mask — while boarding his plane with an alarmingly unsteady gait. The lack of a mask caused many a wag to suggest that his aides had faked the Covid diagnosis as an excuse to get him off the campaign trail (where Biden was last seen describing his own secretary of defense as “the black man”) and buy time against the push to get him to step down as nominee.
But something was clearly amiss with him and remains so. He resigned the nomination on social media in a limp dishrag of a statement that was clearly penned by a subordinate and not Biden himself. He promised to address the nation sometime later this week to deliver his own eulogy and curiously declined to endorse Kamala Harris (though he did thank her, which made the lack of an endorsement that much more conspicuous). This was only “cured” in a subsequent tweet that by definition had to have been written for him by a staffer — Joe Biden does not have a Twitter game, Jack — leading one to wonder why all these momentous decisions were being taken out of view of the public eye. Finally on Monday morning, as Kamala was addressing her new campaign, he phoned in with a hoarsely slurring voice to offer his endorsement on speakerphone.
I suppose it will suffice for bare proof of life. But it is not proof of health, or fitness for his job. And other than that, he has been a ghost. Joe Biden has functionally been missing in action for five days now, and no true reemergence seems in sight. (Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled meeting with Biden has been cancelled out of what must be humiliating necessity.) So pause to take in what we have just lived through: The president of the United States, in the advanced stages of both mental decline and a losing reelection campaign, resigned from the race via text message and has gone to ground. The fact that this is civically appalling is mostly being ignored right now — there are too many stories to process, too many angles to consider — but we can instantly recognize it as a historic moment both bleakly comedic and yet also depressingly emblematic of the present era. We live in “interesting” times, but also debased ones.
Meanwhile, the idea that anyone other than Harris will be Biden’s replacement has been tamped down like a glowing ember of hope being hurriedly smothered with a fire-retardant blanket. Every major Democratic grandee (except, interestingly, Obama) immediately endorsed Kamala, she is taking on Biden’s campaign manager as her own, and any opportunity to swap her for a politician untainted by the Biden administration’s record to date has passed. What’s that I hear you say? Harris lacks any pretense to legitimacy as the choice of Democrats? Don’t be so naïve, silly voter! Heck, the people behind Biden’s reelection campaign would tell you, if they were being honest, that when you rubes voted for Biden in the primary you were voting Harris for president anyway. (Sure, they concealed Biden’s mental decline and boxed out any serious primary contenders, but in their defense, honesty isn’t their strong suit.)
Literally overnight, the Democratic Party and its media attendants have recalibrated their orbits to center around Harris. At the first day in her new campaign headquarters, she delivered a prepared speech to predictably delirious rave reviews from the left and the media, the whole lot of them convulsing online in rapturous shudders of joy like Pentecostals experiencing their first baptism with the Holy Spirit. (Never before has an entire political class been so visibly thrilled just to see a candidate read off a teleprompter without spontaneously inventing new phonemes.) It’s understandable on an emotional level, however irrational; after staring political apocalypse in the face for the last three weeks with Biden at the top of the ticket, getting a chance to “start over” with anyone — even Kamala — feels a bit like walking out of your own grave.
So Kamala Harris is about to be turned by media coverage into a saint, if at all possible. All of her once agreed-upon flaws and political hypocrisies are going to be downplayed and her relationship to the last four years of failure and deception left unexplored. The nation will be asked to reset its psychological clock and pretend that she simply fell out of the coconut tree last week, unburdened by all that has come before. The unity of effort is remarkable: Democrats are desperate to turn the page on Biden and the media is praying for any shot at salvation, any chance to write a story other than the one of Trump’s inexorable triumph.
Will it work? I am doubtful. As long as Harris is kept to scripted events and friendly audiences, her ability to conduct basic campaigning is light years ahead of Biden’s — she almost appears normal — so it’s safe to bet that she will be kept to tightly scripted appearances and friendly venues as much as possible. The hope is that Trump remains so inherently unpopular that she can win as “Generic Democrat.” But Biden dug the Democrats an enormous hole, and even were it possible to climb out of it in three and a half months, Harris is the candidate least equipped to do so. She is the continuity candidate as Biden’s vice-president, and while she solves the problem of Biden’s senility, progressives delude themselves that this was the only problem people had with Joe Biden’s presidency. Can she be kept away from hostile questions and skeptical audiences until November? Perhaps so, but then it’s hard to see how she overcomes her preexisting unpopularity; she is not the blank slate her newfound champions act like she is.
All the while, chaos reigns. Biden is the lamest duck in recent presidential history — lacking not just a political future but control of his basic mental faculties as well. The replacement candidate is a grievously cracked vessel being asked to carry the hopes of a Democratic coalition that barely agrees with itself and has failed to persuade the country. On Monday afternoon, thousands of Democratic partisans began willing themselves to believe they had avoided a near-death experience. That is their right. By the same token, it is my right to suggest they are still at death’s door, and — much like poor Tim Robbins in Jacob’s Ladder — they have refused to accept that they may actually be experiencing their vision of political hell.