Fake Crowds, Fake Ads, Real Ridicule: A Week of Failures for Harris-Walz What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious. By Roger Kimball
If I may start with an understatement: It has not been a good week for team Kamala Harris. First, there was the scandal of her interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes. Asked about US influence on Israel, Harris delivered one of her signature, zero-calorie word salads. We know this because the network released a preview of the interview on social media, where it was promptly pounced upon and mocked. But when the entire interview aired, the interview was edited so that Harris’s original answer was replaced by a brief answer lifted from another part of the interview.
That bit of techno-fraud was instantly pilloried and deposited a lot of unsightly egg on the corporate face of CBS. I have not seen anything resembling an apology or even an acknowledgment from the network. As of this writing, calls for an unedited transcript of the whole interview to be released have gone unanswered. As the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote, CBS’s refusal is “a huge scandal” that, among other things, “suggests that much of the entire finished product was manipulative and deceitful, and not just the one horrible example that was discovered.”
Bad though the episode is for CBS, it is also humiliating for Harris. As Macbeth noted in another context, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” The 60 Minutes débâcle was only the advance guard assaulting team Harris last week. Then there was a disastrous “town hall” meeting in which, again, multiple humiliations were assembled. First, some attentive scribe noticed that Harris was reading her replies off a teleprompter. Remember that was supposed to be an open forum in which Harris could connect with voters personally. But here she was, repeating scripted replies to pre-formulated questions.
And that was not the worst of it. A little digging revealed that the audience, too, was scripted. As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by an ‘audience-for-hire’ company and weren’t allowed to ask questions. The event was completely stage-directed and fake.”
An “audience-for-hire company”? Yep. I am not sure exactly which company team Harris employed, but it turns out that such initiatives are a booming business. Consider, for example, the company Crowds on Demand. Their website advertises “PROTESTS • RALLIES • ADVOCACY” and goes on to boast that
Whether your organization is lobbying to gain approval of a project, move forward a legislative initiative, bring additional pressure within complex litigation or trying to see swift and effective action in another way, we can set-up protests, rallies,
demonstrations, alternatives to litigation or business disputes, coordinate phone-banking initiatives and even create non-profit organizations to advance your agenda.
I suspect that Democrats have frequent recourse to such companies. The Harris campaign, at any rate, is nearly 100% synthetic. Its crowds are actors or activists for hire. Ditto the figures populating its ads. In what has been derided as the “cringiest political ad ever,” a Harris satellite, attempting to address the campaign’s masculinity deficit, just released the truly horrible “I’m-a-man-and-I’m-voting-for-
Like many people, I at first thought it was a spoof, an anti-Harris production designed to make fun of her and her running mate, Tim Walz. That certainly was the effect. But it turns out that the half dozen men in the ad were not random XY creatures who just happened to support Harris for president. No, they were B-list actors, recruited and paid to deliver their lines. (And what lines they were. One actor who pretended to know something about cars, said “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast.” I am thinking of offering a reward to anyone who can tell me what that means.)
One enterprising commentator discovered who wrote the ad—Jacob Reed, a writer for the late-night talk host Jimmy Kimmel—and the real-life biographies of the actors. Let’s just say that none is a poster child for masculinity. The comments have been brutal. “Zero testosterone was used in the making of this ad”; “A Real Man instantly realizes that there isn’t a single Real Man in this pathetic beta male cringe-fest of a propaganda video”; “From the party that can’t tell you what a woman is”; “As a man, I think I walked away from this ad with a yeast infection.”
The world was still ridiculing the ad when the news came that Tim Walz, in another effort to assuage the doubts about his masculinity, had invited journalists on a pheasant hunt. A bunch of photographs of the “hunt” are circulating. You’ll see lots of outdoorsy garb and a few dogs. What you won’t see are any shotguns. In a real hunting party, every hunter would have a couple of shotguns to hand. But in the fake, synthetic world of Harris-Walz, no guns were thought necessary. As someone quipped, perhaps they were planning to catch the pheasants by hand and strangle them. Eventually, Walz was given a gun, but it was painfully clear that he had no idea how to handle it. As one commentator noted, Walz’s “gun handling skills make Dick Cheney look like the safest shooter in the world. Perhaps that is why Cheney endorsed him.”
All this happened in a matter of days, and the days in question are barely three weeks from the election. What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious. Strange things can happen in the last days of a presidential campaign. Sudden reversals of fortune are not unknown. Candidates can suddenly turn things around and emerge victorious after weeks or months of trailing in the polls. The most difficult obstacle to victory, however, is being made to appear ridiculous. That is almost inevitably fatal. Harris and Walz have made themselves ridiculous time and again this last week or two. I do not believe they can recover.
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