But you cannot undo over a quarter-century of political commitment with a 90-day ad blitz.
As some know, I’ve hammered on endlessly in recent days about how we are all living in a deeply artificial zone of political unreality throughout this election campaign. And though the “pill” metaphor that folks tend to use online is obnoxious — blue pills, red pills, black, doom, heck if you’ve been reading National Review for long enough you’ve probably downed a bottle of them all — The Matrix has a certain resonance for me nevertheless: because I’m done whining about all this.
If nobody else cares that we’re living in a funhouse bizarro universe where up is down and Joe Biden is now the “president” the same way I was once Time’s Man of the Year, then why should I? Instead, it’s time to sell out like Joey Pants. (If you can’t beat ’em, at least join ’em and enjoy a juicy imaginary steak.) From here until November I shall embrace the truth that — and it’s a pity given the enormous stakes for the country — American politics is about as real as a hologram: both flesh and not.
This naturally brings us to Kamala Harris’s newest national campaign ad, which must be seen in its full glory to properly appreciate. It’s about how strong and tough her border credentials are, and if readers wonder why I write about Harris these days like a man realizing with horror he’s been dosed with bad acid, then after 30 seconds of this I expect that you too will be journeying into an unpleasantly yet hilariously warped political world:
V/O: Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border-state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border. As Vice-President she backed the toughest border control bill in decades. And as president she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. Fixing the border is tough — so is Kamala Harris.
Yes, that’s right. The pitch is “Kamala Harris: Border Boss.” And why not? If voters are willing to buy “Kamala Harris: Fresh Start,” what won’t they buy? What an amazingly disingenuous pitch, too, produced with a bulk eraser eliminating all but the earliest years of her career. Why, if a gray alien freshly arrived in our galaxy today, landed and registered to vote in California, and happened to see that ad, he might genuinely believe that Kamala Harris has a strong record on border enforcement. (Not mentioned once: deportation.)
Actual illegal aliens would not be fooled, however. Even Harris’s own home-state paper — the Sacramento Bee, whose staff saw her up close during her days as California’s attorney general — could barely conceal its disbelief at how Harris has simply rewritten the positions she once took. You’ll notice that the above ad talks about her early career. Then it mentions her support for the (farcical) Biden administration “border bill” as vice president. What happened in between, pray tell? Border czar? No, that never happened, that was a lie. How about her support for free health care for illegal aliens back in 2020? How about her support for sanctuary-city policies as California’s AG? (Actually, I’d love someone in the media to put her on the spot about that one — and also watch closely what happens to the career of the reporter who does.)
Obviously you can’t just ask an opponent to simply lead with their chin so that you can punch them in the face. The border is an issue, and Harris is uniquely exposed on it given her vice-presidential assignments and decade of rhetoric. Nobody expected her to run an ad saying, “Let’s throw open the border and legalize the world eventually!” But anybody reading this column knows how farcical her new position is, given that for the entirety of her national career she used to hold one a good deal closer to my imagined slogan.
There is a deeper and more interesting story to be told here about Kamala Harris’s political bildungsroman. Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney from 2002 to 2011. Back then she was known locally as a relentless and wholly amorphous political climber more interested in the prestige of wielding power than in its proper uses, a woman who paired well in attempting to carve up California’s Democratic political spoils with the similarly ambitious mayor of her town, a man named Gavin Newsom. (In my experience, “NorCal” Democrats hate “SoCal” Democrats more than Union generals loathed their Confederate counterparts, whom they at least feared and thus were forced to grudgingly respect.)
There is no such thing as a moderate in the California Democratic Party anymore, but back in the early ’00s when Bush was riding high, wokeism had yet to take root, and Barack Obama was but a gleam in Bill Ayers’s eye, Harris perceived that her chances for advancement politically at that moment required her to sound “tough” on crime — illegal-immigrant crime being a part of that. She barely edged her way into statewide office as attorney general in 2010 with that profile — humiliatingly, she managed to win only 46.1 percent of the vote (as a Democrat in California), defeating Los Angeles Republican Steve Cooley by 0.8 points. And once she became a statewide elected official (one with obvious plans for federal office), she became as predictably progressive as the entirety of the state Democratic Party itself over that period. Now she finds herself suddenly needing to double back on all the positions she was required to take in order to slick and shuck her way up to the top of the greasy pole of California politics.
I don’t think she will succeed — not on this issue, not this time — simply because the Democratic brand is too inextricably intertwined with uncontrolled illegal immigration. You cannot undo over a quarter-century of political commitment with a 90-day ad blitz, not even with every media partisan nudging you along. And regardless of the positions the Harris campaign takes in written statements (without having to put their candidate out there to field uncomfortable questions about why she changed her mind), voters instinctively understand, in a way that the gray alien I referred to earlier never will, that you don’t vote for Democrats if you’re interested in border enforcement.
That’s all just as well, because I doubt any of the positions she took throughout the years ever meant even the slightest thing to her either. Kamala Harris’s entire political record demonstrates that (to repeat an earlier line) she will be anything in the moment that you want her to be — just please vote for her. But when that moment passes? She reverts to whatever it is The Party — the collective, the zeitgeist, the media lobbyists, etc. — tells her to do.
And this is why Harris’s border ad is fascinating, not just because it serves as an emblem for how aggressively unreal the entire 2024 fantasy campaign has been, but for how it reveals that she is in many ways exactly the same politician that Joe Biden was during his presidency: a hollow vessel, of no particular note or value in and of herself save as a symbol — vulgar semiotics for the insensible masses — of whatever it is a group of twentysomething consultants have determined will “sell” to the public right now. The reality of it will be determined elsewhere, by “top men,” out of sight. Worry about that later — after everyone has woken up from the fever dream of this electoral cycle and realizes they were sold an illusion.