Levitation 101 Victory for the Democrats will depend on the perpetuation of the illusion that Kamala Harris is in any way a plausible candidate for the presidency of the United States. By Roger Kimball Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/22/levitation-101/
Every honest commentator, and even some dishonest ones, acknowledges the supreme oddity of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
As has been oft remarked, the oddity begins with the campaign’s origin. Exactly how is it that Kamala Harris even became the candidate? By what process was Joe Biden, the undisputed winner of the Democratic primary, ousted, eliminated and defenestrated from contention? The rumors and stories are plentiful, but the actual facts—to say nothing of the dramatis personae behind the facts—remain obscure.
But somehow, exactly two months ago, Joe Biden raised his sleepy head in Rehoboth Beach and announced his departure from the campaign but not, pointedly, from the presidency. (Will that happen before January 20, 2025? I wonder.)
No sooner had the public begun to get its head around that surprise than they were hit with an even bigger one: Biden’s replacement would be Vice President Kamala Harris. How did that happen? Who voted for her? Shhh! Some questions are mood breakers, and it was clear from the get-go that the Harris campaign was going to have to depend heavily, some experts say nearly exclusively, on mood.
In the weeks since July 21, when Biden made his fateful announcement, there has been a lot of Dr. Johnson’s dog about the Harris campaign. When it came to female preachers, Dr. Johnson said, we are reminded of dogs who can walk on their hind legs. They do not do it well, but we are surprised they can do it at all.
Mindful of Harris’s, er, challenges in public speaking and responding ex tempore to questions from interviewers, her handlers have been assiduous about keeping her out of such dangerous situations. The more she vocalizes (I almost said “talks”), the more damage she does to her candidacy. Her embarrassing performance on a ninety-minute livestream exchange with Oprah Winfrey in Detroit a few days ago underscored the problem.
Even Winfrey, a prominent anti-Trump Harris supporter, seemed taken aback by her guest’s incoherent flights of flaccid, cringe-making glossolalia. Harris supporters just winced and bit their tongues while critics pounced upon and ridiculed the seeping, leaking emission of empty saccharine vocables.
There are only 45 days left until Tuesday, November 5, the nominal election day. Of course, we dispensed with election day back in 2020; now we have an election season. It begins long before the designated day and continues on until Democrats conclude they have reaped all the extra votes they can muster.
Nevertheless, victory for the Democrats will depend not only, or perhaps even principally, on cheating. It will depend on the perpetuation of an illusion: the illusion that Kamala Harris is in any way a plausible candidate for the presidency of the United States. And that illusion, in turn, can only be perpetuated if she is kept far from the klieg lights of public scrutiny.
Because of the shadowy forces playing out behind the Biden-Harris administration, one often hears it compared to the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the little dog Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals that Oz, the great and terrible, was just a doddery old man.
There’s something to that, but the puppeteers pulling the strings and managing the stagecraft that conceals the vacancy of the Biden-Harris duet depend for their success on a curious magic trick. Biden was—I mean, “is”—what we might call a simulacrum president, what Gertrude Stein would have called an “Oakland president” (“There’s no there there,” she once said of that California city). The trick was to wheel him out, as the stuffed corpse of Jeremy Bentham is still wheeled out to preside, “present but not voting,” at board meetings of University College, London.
It worked, sort of, for quite a while with Joe Biden. It is not clear how it is working out with Kamala Harris. Again, the trick is to keep her image before the public while strictly rationing any actual contact between voters and the candidate. Sightings are acceptable; interviews, press conferences, town halls—all such events must be choreographed down to the last softball question and pliable interlocutor.
Can the Dems keep it up? I do not know. A canny friend compared the process to levitation. “Her campaign,” he said, “depends upon how long the media can keep it levitating in the air, disconnected from reality. We are confident reality will set in, but maybe they can keep the thing floating for longer than we think. We talk about the post-industrial society; the post-liberal society; etc.; what about the post-reality society?”
We might well be there already. I will close by noting two things. One is that when reality is denied or obfuscated, it has a way of rushing back in unpleasant ways. Whatever else it is, Kamala Harris’s joy-to-the-world socialism is a fantasy mask whose clown-like rictus conceals a multitude of dreadful realities.
My second observation is more in the way of a prediction. While it is possible that Kamala Harris will win or, even if she doesn’t win, that she will be installed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 20, 2025, it is much more likely that Donald Trump will win and will once again get the keys to the domicile at that address. In other words, I do not believe that the levitation act will be successful. Harris’s campaign will fall to earth before November 5 and—though this is not what the polls currently tell us—Trump will win in something approaching a landslide.
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