RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/18/the-collapse-of-kamala-harris/

On July 26, in the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s ruthless midsummer coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, this column predicted that the elevation of dimwitted cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris to the party’s presidential slot would “spectacularly backfire.” More specifically, I wrote: “Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history.”

I’m feeling pretty good these days about that prognosis.

Harris recently campaigned in Erie, Pennsylvania—a crucial regional hub in this election cycle’s most important battleground state. Conspicuously absent from that snoozefest was incumbent Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.). Harris tried to pass off the snub as a nothingburger, suggesting that Casey was doing the more important work of knocking on doors and getting out the vote. This doesn’t pass the laugh test. Facing a spirited challenge from Republican hopeful Dave McCormick, Casey has clearly concluded that Harris’ immense Bay Area lefty baggage—her history of endorsing the Green New Deal, a national fracking ban, and crippling electric vehicle mandates—is an electoral albatross around his neck.

It’s tough to blame Casey. Other vulnerable Senate Democratic incumbents, such as Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.), reached the same conclusion a while ago. Such a conclusion makes a great deal of sense: A recent Marist national general election poll, for instance, shows Trump up a whopping 10 points on Harris with registered independents. If that margin ends up being anywhere near accurate, it is extraordinarily difficult to see a scenario in which Trump loses.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=818c491012

The American presidency has definitely had its ups and downs over the years, but at least the occupants of the office, and the contenders who have sought it, have taken the job of being President seriously. Until now, uniformly, they have thought it important to outline some kind of a vision for the country, and to propose policies intended to achieve that vision. Even if in some instances you might disagree entirely with the candidates’ vision, at least they had it. Or, if they really didn’t have a vision, or much of one, then they pretended to.

In this sense, has there ever been a more fundamentally unserious candidate for President than Kamala Harris?

Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, so it has now been nearly three months since Harris became the presumptive nominee. In that time, Harris has studiously avoided all occasions to make clear statements about vision or policy. Until this very night, she has declined all interviews with any outlet that might be even slightly challenging. Even more incredibly, she has not held a single official press conference. From Fox News yesterday:

Vice President Kamala Harris has gone 86 days as the presumptive, and now, official Democratic nominee for president without holding an official press conference.

A press conference would be a signal opportunity to get broad public exposure, particularly to people who are not already her supporters. Any serious candidate ought to be affirmatively seeking opportunities for such exposure. The failure to hold a single such event points strongly to the conclusion that she and/or her advisors believe that she is not up to the challenge.

I haven’t yet had a chance to watch tonight’s interview, so I will update this post after I have had that opportunity. However, from what I can quickly learn, she showed up late, severely limited the time available, and filibustered questions in order to run out the clock for possible follow ups. Here’s a review at the Federalist from columnist Eddie Scarry.

The last time I went looking for Harris’s official positions on any issue or policy, her campaign website was completely silent on the subject. Since then, a section has been added to the official Harris website called “Issues,” so I guess that’s progress. But review of that section reveals a combination of platitudes and evasions calculated to avoid the key questions.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/17/election-2024-those-who-lecture-versus-those-tired-of-being-lectured/

The election is finally shaping up to be not only liberal Democrat Harris versus conservative Republican Trump.

Instead, it has become a larger contest between those who talk down to their fellow Americans and those who are increasingly sick and tired of being lectured. How smart is it, for example, for Harris supporters to claim nonstop that ex-president Trump is a fascist dictator—and thus, by extension, those also who vote for him?

Women voters poll about 53-5 percent for Kamala Harris. Trump enjoys a similar, although likely somewhat smaller, majority margin of male voters.

Yet Harris—along with campaign surrogates Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—has been lecturing both black and white male voters nonstop that they are misled.

Or they supposedly suffer from false consciousness—as if they have no clue that Harris and her progressive agenda are really in their own self-interest.

Such haughtiness reached a zenith when Harris ran ads of actors costumed as supposedly working-class men. They voiced scripted talking points to prove that “real” men are progressive Harris supporters.

But the actors were so patently ridiculous, their canned lines so unreal, that most viewers likely thought the ads were run by Trump himself—to show how arrogant, out-of-touch elites must imagine how the so-called “clingers” and “deplorables” think and talk.

The Trump campaign also tries all sorts of strategies to win over women voters, from promising to rectify the Biden-Harris hyperinflation to reducing spiraling crime in towns and cities.

But one method they avoid is claiming women are ignorant of their real self-interest and deluded by Harris—accurately assuming that a candidate does not win voters by belittling their intelligence.

Harris and Obama both dressed down black men, claiming they are especially culpable for not voting en masse for Harris—even though a far higher percentage of black males will vote for Harris than for Trump.

This hectoring the electorate on its supposed ignorance or moral shortcomings has become a Harris campaign trademark.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/the_donald_trump_you_never_see.html

On October 9, the renowned lawyer and professor Alan Dershowitz posted a video on his show, The Dershow, titled “Is Harris winning or is Trump losing?”  In it, he argued that the polls are beginning to trend in favor of Harris.  Professor Dershowitz asked:

What is the reason for that?  Is it that Harris is winning more voters, or Trump is losing more voters?

Professor Dershowitz said that he doesn’t think the election is about policy as much as it is about personality.  He said,

A lot of people I know are saying, “Look, I much prefer Trump’s foreign policy, and economic policy, but I just can’t bring myself to vote for the guy … because he did this or said that.”

Trump does say and do things that turn people off.  In addition, when he says things that are perfectly okay, the left wing, the media, and his political opposition twist what he says to mean something terrible and then claim he said it.  A classic example of that is when Trump said that there were “some very fine people on both sides,” referring to a clash in Charlottesville between people who wanted to remove the statue of General Lee and people who wanted to protect the statue.  Malevolent distortions of what Trump said about that clash never end.  Headlines include “Trump again blames both sides for violence at white supremacist rally in Charlottesville” (Politico), “Why Can’t Trump Just Condemn Nazis?” (The Atlantic), “Trump revives his controversial claim equating white supremacists and anti-racism protestors in Charlottesville clashes” (The LA Times), etc.  The press leaves out Trump’s clarification, which he made in the same press conference:

And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white Nationalists. They should be condemned totally.

The left wants us to think that Trump makes Nazi-like statements and that he is a right-wing antisemitic extremist who is against freedom and democracy.  Leftists are successful in persuading people.  At one point, they even convinced J.D. Vance, Trump’s current running mate, that Trump is like Hitler.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamalas-charm-blitzkrieg-fails-miserably/

There are some people so incompetent that they could blow a tap-in putt. “Hand me the wedge,” they say as they overlook a 2-inch gap. You can’t help these people, even though they are likely the most in need of saving anyone, because you can’t save people from themselves. This, I suspect, is why the handlers of Kamala Harris have chosen to run the campaign they have.

Hiding is the only defense against incompetence. The only problem is that no matter where you hide, there you are. A person can escape a lot, themselves is not one of them.

After two months of hiding not working, as the public notices the Democratic Party’s nominees for president and vice president haven’t really done much talking beyond scripted, vapid stump speeches, the Harris/Walz campaign has decided to launch a “charm offensive.” They decided to let their candidates talk in what can only be described as either uber-friendly or softly-scripted interviews with supporters…and they still did horribly.

You can tell a lot about the amount of faith a campaign has in its candidates by the people they’re willing to talk to. For example, Donald Trump will do pretty anything and to almost anyone, unless they’ve mistreated him in the past.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, on the other hand, would need their own family members screened and topics agreed to before they’d sit down for breakfast with them. (In Kamala’s case you might be able to understand it, as news reports indicated her husband allegedly has no problem smacking a woman around if she displeases him.)

Aside from a 3 on a 1 to 10 scale of toughness interview with 60 Minutes, Democrats could not have played it safer than they have. Howard Stern has fully transitioned into everything he mocked in order to become famous in the first place, with whatever testicles he had left actually ascending back into his body, seemingly all the way into his throat.

https://www.nysun.com/article/william-jefferson-clinton-election-denier?lctg=1474934676&recognized_email=

Bill Clinton, election denier? That’s the prospect heaving into view now that the 42nd president is raising doubts about the legitimacy of the vote tallies on November 5. What he said is that he’s wondering “whether we can get an honest, open count.” With the presidential contest in a “dead heat,” as NBC News puts it, Mr. Clinton’s remarks suggest an emerging Democratic strategy if the votes don’t go their way: Challenge the integrity of the balloting.

On the hustings in Georgia for Vice President Harris, Mr. Clinton mused that “what will decide the outcome,” NBC reported, is “who wants it bad enough.” A Clinton aide clarified that “various reports of threats and intimidation against election officials” prompted the remarks. Yet Mr. Clinton’s comments remind that while President Trump is often excoriated for his refusal to accept the outcome in 2020, the Democrats are better on this head.

Feature, say, Secretary Clinton and other members of her party who, after Trump’s win in 2016, insinuated that Russian meddling in the race had made him an “illegitimate president.” Mrs. Clinton, after losing, pointed to “the many varying tactics” deployed during the 2016 campaign, “from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories” as among “just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”

Then again, too, what about the Democrats who doubted the fairness of the 2000 and 2004 elections won by President George W. Bush?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/3-reasons-why-kamala-harris-still-cant-define-her-vision

Who is Kamala Harris?

Despite an uptick in interviews, several weeks on the stump, three years as vice president, months spent campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, four years as a senator and seven as California attorney general, many Americans still don’t think they know the “real” Kamala Harris.

How can that be? Remaining undefined after all this time as a public figure is astonishing. Equally shocking is Harris’ obvious terror of being in the spotlight. That’s the only plausible explanation for the “word salads” that are tossed to interviewers when a teleprompter goes missing. Or the ill-timed bursts of laughter meant to cover her anxiety. 

As Maureen Dowd wrote recently in The New York Times, “Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.” 

True, she did well during her debate against former President Donald Trump, but that performance required weeks of rehearsal and memorization, a giant assist from partisan moderators and – let’s be honest – an inexpert opponent.

Why is Harris so insecure? One possibility is that it is because she knows she is not qualified, and that she has landed on this lofty perch for all the wrong reasons. That she became V.P., because Joe Biden had promised to pick a woman of color, and not because of her accomplishments. And that she was tapped to be the 2024 nominee because Democrat pooh-bahs realized a diminished Biden could not beat Donald Trump and ran out of time to find someone better. 

Another explanation is that Kamala Harris is pretending to be something she is not: a moderate politician. She may be struggling to mask her progressive beliefs, the ones she ran on unsuccessfully in 2019. Her father was a Marxist economist and her mother a liberal activist; both presumably had some influence on their daughter as she grew up in San Francisco.

Harris has said her core values have not changed, but that would suggest that her flip-flopping on important issues like fracking and Medicare-for-All are political gambits, meant to reassure critical centrist voters. After all, she didn’t hold leftist opinions in college; she held them just five years ago.  To broaden her appeal, she may be lying about a great many things; that would make anyone uncomfortable.