by Roger Kimball
So on Thursday, Kamala Harris was finally allowed out to meet the press.
Well, she was allowed to sit for about 18 minutes for a carefully scripted interview on a Dem-friendly network — CNN — with a partisan media head — Dana Bash — who came with a satchel of softballs. Apparently, Harris has yet to be certified for solo flight, however, since she was chaperoned by her pick for VP, Minnesota governor and serial fantasist Tim Walz.
How did it go? The journalist Jon Concha put it delicately but not inaccurately when he described it as a “dishonest train wreck.”
As an aside, I might note that if our media censors had their way, phrases like “dishonest train wreck” would probably be sanctioned as “hurtful,” maybe even “hateful,” “disinformation” or “malinformation,” the latter meaning statements that may be true but are nonetheless unacceptable because they are embarrassing to the powers that be.
About these “powers that be”: who are they? In a way, that is the basic, fundamental question with which the cackling campaign of Kamala Harris confronts us. Many commentators, including me, have noted the profoundly undemocratic maneuver with which this group – “The Committee” – erased Joe Biden and installed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. After all, nearly 15 million people voted for Gibbering Joe in the Democratic primary. He won, hands down because that same committee made certain that other candidates — including RFK Jr. — were shunted to one side. They had done the same thing to Bernie Sanders years before. “Democracy” for them is the name not of a political system but of a pleasing emotional shudder.
Another aside: I see that The Committee is currently road-testing “joy” as an adjunct to “democracy,” though to my ear, the slogan “Strength Through Joy” has more resonance in the original German: Kraft durch Freude. Perhaps, for now, anyway, such candor is still a bridge too far. I wonder if The Committee is cognizant of the, er, rich historical emanations and penumbras of the phrase?
During the brief interview — so brief that it might have been taken as a preview of coming attractions — Dana Bash did occasionally offer a simulacrum of a real question. But it was always in the mode of a chess player who refuses to take his hand off a piece he has moved until he gauges his opponent’s reaction. “How about I move my bishop here?” Just so: “Gee, wasn’t your position on fracking/fossil fuels/the border/welfare and Medicare for illegal immigrants/taxes, etc., etc. a tiny bit different in the dim distant past . . . ?”
Bash never bashed the question home. There was always plenty of wiggle room, never any serious follow-up. She did, however, allow “America’s Dad” Super Sergeant Major Walter Mitty Tim Walz to make a fool of himself. Queried about his habit of exaggerating his military rank, postings (“Exactly where in Bagram Airfield were you stationed again, Gov?”), and combat experience, Bash let him tell the audience that he suffered, if not from PTSD, then at least bad grammar.
Bash: “You said you carried weapons in war, but you never deployed in war. Did you misspeak?”
Walz: “My grammar’s not always correct.”
At least Walz is a good source of lines for comedians.
There are two main takeaways from this pseudo-interview. One is concealed just below the surface of phrases like “flip-flop,” “walk back,” and “my opinion has evolved.” It is clear to everyone that Kamala will say anything in order to curry favor with potential voters. She was there encouraging the IRS to give extra scrutiny to tax filers who had income from tips. But then Donald Trump began saying that he wanted to exempt income from tips from federal taxes. I offer no opinion about the merits of the proposal, merely note that it was popular with voters. So Kamala begins aping it. Inconsistency (a nicer word than “contradiction,” “hypocrisy,” “lying”)? No, it’s that same species of cynical bluster John Kerry deployed when he told us that, regarding the Iraq war: “I was for it before I was against it.” It was for such occasions that the English essayist William Hazlitt noted that “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.”
The chief obstacle, the bone-in-the-throat embarrassment of what Christopher Rufo has been calling Kamala’s “vaporware” campaign is to be found in the screeching disjunction between her emoticons and the adamantine, unignorable fact that the Biden-Harris administration has been, well, the Biden-Harris administration. Kamala keeps saying she wants to clear a “new way forward,” to “turn the page on Trump.”
One of her main campaign slogans is “We’re not going back.” But that bad place she wants to escape is her own creation. Maybe, just maybe, Dana Bash suggested, voters would like to go back to the Trump era when the cost of living was lower, wages were higher, and the country was at peace. She found a soft spot but she refused to push.
The cruel fact is that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have been running the country, sort of, these last three and a half years. They are the incumbents. All the talk of joy and sampling of caramel-covered cakes cannot obscure that reality. It was Kamala, in her role as President of the Senate, who cast the tie-breaking vote on many left-wing initiatives, indeed she has cast more tie-breaking votes than any vice-president in history (32, one more than John C. Calhoun).
This is an insuperable, intractable problem for the Harris campaign: she owns the situation she wants to “move forward” out of because, as vice president, she helped to create it. “Vote for me! I’ll undo everything I have done!” That dog will not hunt.
The second main takeaway from this Potemkin interview was touched upon by Vivek Ramaswamy. “Kamala’s interview last night,” he observed on X, “was a reminder that we’re not running against a candidate. We’re running against a *system*. They require a candidate they can control, which means having original ideas is a disqualification. That’s exactly why we get Biden, then Kamala, and so on.” That rubs up against my passing reference to the fact that Biden and Harris have only “sort of” been running the country these past three and a half years. Really, deep down, it’s what Vivek calls “the system,” what I have been calling “The Committee” who is in charge. Who’s on the governing board, the executive council? The exact composition of this globalist posse is classified, but the spiritual doorknobs of the requisite chambers should be dusted for fingerprints. Exactly who, for example, told Joe Biden he had to go, the voters be damned? Whoever it was you can be sure that they’re on The Committee, they’re voting members of “the system.”
One way of articulating what is at stake in this election is to ask whether you want to hand the country over to this shadowy council that supplies our presidents, wages our wars, and commits us to various policies about everything from abortion and the border to taxes, free speech, and individual liberty? The alternative — it’s the only live alternative — is the MAGA agenda of Donald Trump, filled out and supplemented by JD Vance and now Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. More people will be joining this caravan. Will the Strength-Through-Joy flotilla be able to prevail against this robust alternative? Already the crumbling of the cackling cavalcade suggests that the answer is No.
Watch the full CNN interview:
CNN – KAMALA HARRIS INTERVIEW BY DANA BASH [FULL LENGTH] pic.twitter.com/VUbp34OLjR
— The Gas Stove (@TheGasStovee) August 30, 2024
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Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Kamala Harris.
