If she becomes the Democratic nominee for president, her famously celestial ramblings will take on a far more serious dimension.
Whether it is attributable to genuine enthusiasm, motivated reasoning, or the premature onset of the bargaining stage of grief, Democrats seem to be convincing themselves that they may have a better chance of beating Donald Trump with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. They might, in fact, although that says more about Joe Biden’s total collapse in the swing-state polls than Harris’s political acumen. Indeed, Democrats seem to have forgotten just how maladroit the vice president can be.
Democrats have conveniently forgotten Harris’s famous proclivity for non sequiturs. They don’t seem to remember her allegation during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings that the future justice had taken meetings with “President Trump’s personal lawyer,” an allegation that thrilled Democrats but went nowhere. They don’t recall her pledge to “eliminate all of that” — “all of that” being the private health insurance industry, a pledge that her campaign was not prepared to keep and engulfed her presidential campaign in scandal. They might not recall that time when Harris accused Biden of being racist for, among other offenses, opposing forced busing. The clear implication in her remark was that forced busing — a program that failed on its own merits and those with living memory of the experiment resent — should be restored in America’s cities. Of course, the Harris campaign wasn’t prepared to go that far.
America’s comedy writers have left a lot of fodder on the table over the course of the Biden years. But some enterprising mainstream humorists have (all too recently) begun to take advantage of all the material Harris has provided them. Harris has a bad habit of ascending to the ethereal plane in mid speech, where she delivers what she clearly believes are deep metaphysical homilies on human nature but that sound to mere mortals like the ramblings of a mystical self-help guru.
“I think it’s very important,” she said imploringly, “for us at every moment in time to see the moment in time in which we exist in our present.” Indeed, the vice president later mused about “the significance of the passage of time,” which has “great significance.” Harris has a complicated relationship with time — perhaps even more so than her running mate, who is on the verge of losing his running battle with the clock. “It is time to do what we have been doing,” the vice president said in a failed effort to defend the Biden administration against criticism, “and that time is every day.”
If time itself is a source of wonderment for the vice president, so, too, is space. “Space is exciting,” she said. “Space, it affects us all, and it connects us all.” Fascinating stuff. Moreover, unless you “fell out of a coconut tree,” we all “exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The vice president seems in a constant state of awe at the cosmological fact of existence itself. “See the moment in time in which we exist in our present,” she demanded. “And to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates, not only to the past but the future.”
The vice president’s speeches are reliably the nearest thing to a hallucinogenic experience this side of a Phish show. For years, this tendency has been a mere curiosity. But if Harris manages to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, her celestial ramblings will take on a far more serious dimension. There’s a reason why Harris has underperformed Joe Biden in polls measuring how voters relate to both the president and vice president. In much the same way that political media failed to keep the open secret of Biden’s increasing infirmities, the press convinced itself that if they called critics of Harris “sexist” and “racist” enough, the voting public would subordinate their discomfort with the vice president’s delirium to their desire to avoid being seen as socially unacceptable. The result of that campaign is that journalists are the only class in America that isn’t in on the joke.
They’re about to get a rude awakening. It’s not hard to foresee the trajectory of Harris’s nomination if she becomes the Democratic presidential nominee. Exuberance over Harris’s historic accidents of birth and relief over Biden’s withdrawal will lead Democrats and Trump-skeptical independents alike to unite behind Harris’s candidacy, but only until she opens her mouth. The omertà to which reporters will commit themselves if Harris succeeds Biden will ensure that the only people talking about Harris’s embarrassing moments will be everyone but the press. And when the inevitable befalls her campaign in November, reporters will insist they saw it all coming.