Kamala Harris has been encased in a protective media cocoon even deeper than that of the now-forgotten president.
Every now and again the thought will appear in mind, like a voice raised in alarm echoing faintly from a distance: Nothing is real about the state of American politics anymore. It’s a theme that has run throughout most of my pieces this summer of 2024 (up to and including the one about RFK Jr.’s bear cub), and not because I chose it in advance as a thesis.
Instead, events have conspired to make it unavoidable as a realization. Joe Biden’s reelection campaign was unreal — right up until the moment it collapsed. Donald Trump’s primary campaign was unreal, a substanceless farce with an outcome best summarized by Dylan: “Nothing was revealed.” Then Kamala Harris seemingly teleported into the candidacy without so much as a peep from potential opponents, like one of those aggravating TV magicians from the ’90s.
The selection of Tim Walz opposite J. D. Vance felt like a perverse dare by the Harris campaign to see if it could come from behind and shock the world by blowing its vice-presidential pick as badly as Trump did his. And finally, of course, Harris herself is content to avoid all questions from journalists in front of the cameras, for obvious reasons — why step on all the good vibes? She’s running a campaign specifically designed to avoid contact with reality. Forget all that boring policy stuff, kids (except abortion) — Mama Kamala will fix it, now hush and listen to Bon Iver bleat out a wispy folk song in a trucker cap.
The circus is compelling — and diverting in its distraction. It is, indeed, almost enough to make a person forget that Joe Biden is still the president of the United States. And nobody really wants to talk about that. The man does no work, has given an interview once since his campaign ended (yesterday — it did not go well) and occupies his office only in the technical sense of physical corporeality. Biden’s work schedule is usually empty and constricted mostly to the midday, and Lord knows what happens after the sun goes down. When he gave his interview to CBS yesterday, the results were every bit as bad as any of the other disastrously slurred and fumble-worded attempts he made to save his campaign in the aftermath of the June debate.
So do you ever wonder who the president of the United States really is? Who is making the decisions now? I refuse to believe it is Joe Biden, secretly peppy and spry behind the scenes — and I think it’s weirdly telling that nobody is even bothering to try and retail this lie anymore. They’ve moved on to Kamalamania and would prefer never to look back — or even to the side. Everybody accepts that Joe Biden is mentally and physically decaying; that’s why he had to step down as the nominee, after all. But you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single commentator in the mainstream media — to say nothing of beat reporters — who seems much to care that the man is still commander in chief.
Do you? What does the phrase “the Biden administration” or “the Biden White House” mean anymore? What has it ever meant? I remember Congressman Ro Khanna saying, in the wake of Biden’s collapse at the debate, “We have a great team of people who will help govern,” as if the presidency had been revealed to be a three-year-long regency, like the British parliament caring for mad King George III.
Why aren’t the media concerned at all about this? They stopped at nothing to drive Biden out of the presidential contest — leveling him with a tidal wave of negative coverage that Republicans are well used to but no modern Democrat has ever faced, and time has proven it to have been (just as we all suspected) for the most purely selfish of reasons: to give Democrats a shot to win the presidential race.
Now that he’s out and everyone can celebrate Queen Kamala’s coronation, not only do the media no longer care about Biden — despite the fact that Americans judged him to be so visibly frail that he had to drop his campaign — they well understand that it could only harm Harris’s chances to spend any time exploring this nonsensical state of affairs. They’ve basically written him out of the entire political story of the 2024 election, like Stalin’s censors wiping Trotsky out of every Revolutionary-era photograph.
What remains so unreal about all of this — to the point of startling someone as cynical about the folkways of the mainstream media as I am — is the speed with which they made that turn. And of course the ghost of Biden’s presidency still lingers in the form of Kamala Harris. Harris has been encased in a protective cocoon even deeper than that of the now-forgotten president, which is all the more remarkable as she has brazenly avoided all unscripted events while running as the new Democratic candidate for president of the United States. Harris will not take questions on camera — but the media are satisfied with this, as Politico reports, because journalists on her airplane get to talk to her “off the record.” Harris makes out well on that exchange, and I’m sure the journalists lucky enough to have seats on her jet are perfectly tickled at the arrangement as well. It’s just a shame that the voters of the country don’t get a say in the joint charade they are being sold.