Cackling Kamala by Kyle Smith
Mayday, Code Red, and SOS! As fires bust out everywhere on the Hindenburg of vice presidents, Democrats are sending out dire cries of emergency, not via radio but using their own signaling systems: Politico and Axios and the Washington Post. “How do you solve a problem like Kamala?” the Democrats who demanded a woman of color on the 2020 presidential ticket are asking themselves. Who would have guessed that, as a moss-brained 78-year-old president stumbles around aimlessly through half a dozen crises of his own making, the Halloween screams in the Democratic Party are mostly about the president’s heir apparent?
Kamala Harris is a heartbeat away from becoming the first woman president, the first Asian president, the first woman-of-color president. Big wins all around, right? So why are the Democrats so nervous? They appear to be on the verge of calling in the Henry Wallace treatment and dumping Harris before Joe Biden runs for president again, this time with the election weeks before his 82nd birthday, in 2024. “People think she’s f***ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent,” one Democratic operative told Axios. White House aides use earthy language like “sh**show” to describe Harris’s “poorly managed” office. It’s “an abusive environment,” a staffer “with direct knowledge” told Politico, adding, “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like sh**.”
What if Biden should decline to run for reelection as an octogenarian? Harris, as his lady in waiting, would almost have to be the party’s designated successor because she is black and female. To replace her, according to the party’s prevailing thought codes and its media enablers, would be racist and sexist. Yet the prospect of riding into battle behind Kamala Harris’s generalship has every Dem in D.C. reaching for the Maalox, if not the Ativan or maybe the hemlock.
Dems including “many current senior administration figures,” says Axios, do not think she could beat any potential foe, from Lord Voldemort to Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Donald Trump. If the options facing the American voter on a future ballot turn out to be “Kamala Harris” and “Literally Anyone Else,” Harris is going to be not just an underdog but a longshot. She’s a lady whose trademark gambit — the deranged cackle, which she Jokerishly emits anytime she can’t answer a question — makes Hillary Clinton seem as lovable as a litter of golden-retriever puppies. Unlike Hillary, Harris does not make people feel sorry for her for having been ritually humiliated in her marriage to an intern-abusing lech. Unlike Hillary, Harris doesn’t make people think “She earned it” or “She paid her dues.” Madam Cankles looks like a redoubtable candidate compared to Madam Cackles.
The voters understand that Harris is in the position she currently occupies for a completely unearned reason. She is a woman of color, Biden promised Dem primary voters he’d run with a woman, then a woman of color, and this wild-eyed, tone-deaf, unbelievably toxic and yet somehow colorless candidate was the best he could grab from a very limited menu of offerings. As a political candidate venturing anywhere less safe-spacey than the Democratic Party of California, Harris couldn’t beat gravel pizza or tinfoil breadsticks. She couldn’t beat head lice or swamp fever.
Ted Kennedy famously couldn’t answer the question why he wanted to be president. Kamala Harris can’t answer any question, at least not with words. Sneak peek at a transcript from October 2024:
“Hey, Kamala Harris, why does everyone hate you?”
[Weird, loud cackle.]
“Could it be the cackling?”
[Hysterical, sustained, lunatic cackling.]
Keeping track of the gaffes, miscues, and cluck-ups by our vice president is like counting the grains of sand in Dune, or the dollars that Democrats propose to spend on social programs. So this list may be outdated a few days from now when it’s published.
In October alone, Harris posted an unbelievably tone-deaf tweet that showed her getting out of a limo and climbing onto her gigantic jet for the purpose of flying all the way out to Nevada to yak about climate change. She ruined the optics of her own fake surprise birthday party two days later when she entered a room by calling out “Surprise!” She was so embarrassing in a video promoting NASA to kids that the clip went viral among right-wingers for its unintended comic valence, drawing eleven times as many dislikes as likes on YouTube, where comments were disabled to forestall rude discussion.
Harris’s biggest blunder of the fall came when this not notably soulful politician made a “souls to the polls” video message for airing in black churches in Virginia. Ordinarily, simply reminding black churchgoers to vote is the standard play, but Harris went much further, urging Virginians to check a box for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Old Dominion, which happens to be illegal given that churches’ tax exemption is conditional on their not taking partisan political positions. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Democrats who run both the permanent bureaucracy and the elected branches of the federal government to take an interest.) “If this is legal, then it’s surprising to me,” former Democratic governor of Virginia Doug Wilder, the nation’s first black governor, told the Washington Examiner
Before that, in her electronic sequel to the Potemkin village, Harris sat with a group of child actors who fake-enthused over her dull remarks on space exploration so that the White House could post the video purporting to show Harris winning over a cross section of random American kids. That’s right: Kamala Harris’s team has to pay children to act like kids around her. (The video was produced by Sinking Ship Entertainment, in a blast of symbolic mojo that couldn’t have been worse for Kamala if it had been filmed by Cacklin’ Jackal Productions.)
In that instantly notorious ten-minute NASA outreach video, the gathered kids seemed to be around 13 — so naturally Harris spoke to them as though they were five-year-old slow learners. “You guys are going to see, you’re gonna literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes,” she told them. “With your own eyes, I am telling you!”
“Oh my goodness!” the children chimed in dutifully, as the thought balloons over their heads read, “Why does she think we want to look at moon craters when season two of The Baby-Sitters Club just dropped?” Kids of this generation have grown up able to see anything they can think of on their phones, their attention spans move at hyperspeed, and the vice president coaxed them to D.C. for the purpose of . . . looking at some divots on the moon?
“It is going to be unbelievable, so that’s one of the things we can do here too which makes it so exciting,” Harris told the kids in the video that begins with an astronaut saying to the young folks, “I challenge you to go outside and look at the moon.” Has any less enticing offer ever been made to kids in the guise of a treat? “Hey, kids, let’s watch water evaporate!” “Hey, kids, have you ever thought about how dust settles?!”
In that video — the typically clunky title appears to be “Vice President Kamala Harris and an Astronaut? What a Day! Get Curious with Vice President Harris” — five overly emoting demographically and geographically diverse adorable stage children (“Where’s the library? Maybe it’s down here.” “Guys, there it is!” “Whoa!” “Oh my gosh!”) come to the Naval Observatory to tell whatever audience might be watching that an astronaut “told us that [a telescope] works by using lenses on both ends of the tube.” Exciting, if true.
While a soupy, have-you-considered-term-life-insurance musical score plays aggressively on the soundtrack, the kids feed the veep such extremely scripted lines as “I may not always be fast to take my parents’ advice, but what is the best advice your parents have given you that perhaps you can share with us today?” You can tell these are not spontaneous exchanges because none of the kids asked an actually interesting question, such as, “What is your favorite swear word?” The answer, Politico informs us, is “motherf***ah.”
Staffers in Harris’s office later pretended — surprise! — that they didn’t know these kids who were obviously reciting bad dialogue were actors, but even Team Kamala is not that dumb. Despite running less than ten minutes, the show credits not one but two Hollywood screenwriters (their other credits include the Hulu sci-fi series Endlings). If Harris were having an “unscripted” chat with “actual kids,” you wouldn’t need “professional screenwriters.” Though it’s hard to imagine Kamala didn’t just improvise her lines. She shares such insights as “The Earth is kinda small” and “I just, I don’t know what it is about those craters on the moon [cackles].”
The Biden administration seems at a loss about what to do with Harris. Everything she touches crumbles to dust. When Biden made her “border czar” in March and COVID-infected illegal immigrants began flooding into the country, she laughed and informed interviewers that she was in no hurry to go down and see things for herself. When Lester Holt of NBC pressed her on the question of why she hadn’t gone to the border, she famously replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t — I don’t understand the point that you’re making.” Laughing dismissively, responding with a non sequitur, and then confessing she doesn’t understand the rudiments of politics (even the easiest rules, such as the one about appearing to take problems seriously while photographers snap away): Kamala Harris is the lady who lines up a three-inch putt but then manages to shank her Titleist off a tree.
She didn’t even bother with a perfunctory toe-touch in El Paso until June, and the crisis continues to boil over. Several high-level Biden-administration officials, including the attorney general, the secretary of state, and the head of DHS, attended a border-security meeting in Mexico City on October 8; Harris spent the day posing for photos at a day-care center in New Jersey.
In September, giving a speech at George Mason University, she bungled an exchange with an Israel-hating student who told her that U.S. funding of the Iron Dome defense system amounted to a contribution to “ethnic genocide.” Harris told the student, “Your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed.” Harris’s office later had to clean up that mess. In observing Columbus Day, she said of our European forebears, “Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations — perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease.” Because none of those things happened before white people arrived.
Attempting to retreat to safer ground by reminding us all that she’s got two X chromosomes going for her, on October 22 Harris began promoting a 42-page block of unreadable committee-written verbiage dubbed a “National Gender Strategy” whose goals include “promoting gender equity in mitigating and responding to climate change,” encapsulating the Democrats’ incoherent view that we are facing an existential global climate emergency that should be dealt with by maximizing the usual Democratic patronage schemes.
Recalling The Onion’s November 4, 2008, headline about the first black president – “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job” — activists have been complaining that the first black vice president was essentially handed a bag of garbage and told to make party favors out of it. “You give someone a portfolio that’s not meant for them to succeed,” CNN political analyst and ally Bakari Sellers said at a panel discussion hosted by Washington’s Politics and Prose bookstore. Keith Boykin, a former White House official, added at the same event, “I think she’s in a bad, bad position. . . . I don’t think she’s going to be very successful in 2024 or 2028 and in reaching out to black voters if she’s tied to a Biden administration that is incapable of accomplishing anything for black people.”
Team Kamala thinks Biden doesn’t want competition from his No. 2. So Joe Biden is setting her up to fail? If so, that would appear to be Biden’s one unambiguous success.
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