The Extraordinary Vapidity of Kamala Harris

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

 

As if to put to rest forever all of those ticklish inquiries about Providence, the grave and trying moment in which we now find ourselves has brought with it a hero capable of rivaling any other. Her name is Vice President Kamala Harris, and she is to the nugatory platitude what Michelangelo was to the marble block: All challengers flee before her, all pretenders quit their thrones at the mere mention of her name. Listen carefully and one can hear the desperation as the most accomplished rattlebrains in America issue condign sighs of dismay. How talented is Harris? Talented enough to make the inanities uttered by her rival Pete Buttigieg sound substantive, concise, and apprehensible. Talented enough to make Dan Quayle seem like Pericles. Talented enough to make Marjorie Taylor Greene remind one of top-form Jane Austen. Never, in the field of human rhetoric, has an experiment in political growth been such a spectacular and unmitigated bust.

 

To the uninitiated, Harris’s exquisite bromides may seem all to run together, like The Ring Cycle or Ulysses. And yet, as the Eskimo is able to distinguish between 400 types of snow, so the experienced Harris-watcher will learn to differentiate between the many innovative ways in which she is able to convey that she has no damned idea what she’s talking about. The key, counterintuitively, is to look not at what Harris says — that is fruitless — but at what her tone and vocabulary say about the vibe for which she’s aiming. When discussing energy, Harris has in mind a vague, albeit wholly unanchored, futurism. Thus we get sentences such as, “That’s why we’re here today — because we have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen.” On foreign policy, Harris wishes to project a sobriety that is half-Churchill-in-the-House-of-Commons and half-Brutus-delivering-his-funeral-oration, but, because she has not done the reading and rarely knows where she is, she ends up sounding like a punch-drunk Napoleon at the opening of a suburban toy store. “I am here,” Harris said last week, an ersatz frown rippling awkwardly across her face, “standing here on the northern flank, on the eastern flank, talking about what we have in terms of the eastern flank and our NATO allies, and what is at stake at this very moment — what is at stake this very moment are some of the guiding principles . . .” On medicine, she, well, who knows, frankly? “This virus,” she has said. “It has no eyes.”

 

Glad we cleared that up.

 

With the possible exception of the amusement that is signaled by her cackling, Harris’s most frequently expressed emotion is surprise. “I mean, listen, guys,” she demanded in Munich a few weeks ago, barely stifling a duuuuuuude. “We’re talking about the potential for war in Europe!” Subsequently asked by a radio host to elaborate “in layman’s terms, for people who don’t understand what’s going on,” Harris took her exposition all the way down to the studs. “So, Ukraine is a country in Europe,” she floated, before proceeding as if by “layman’s terms,” her interlocutor had meant that she should assume he didn’t know what a country was. “It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.”

 

As it happens, maps seem to be of particular fascination to Harris. Ignoring a reporter’s question about inflation last week, she cleared her throat with some choice nonsense — “In terms of the discussions that the President Iohannis and I had, they ranged in subject, including the issue of the Black Sea, and I’ll let him explain in more detail as he would like, but we are, again, fully aware and apprised because we are in constant communication with the president, with his administration here about the concerns that they have about the entire region and, frankly, the vulnerability,” she said, before snapping quickly back to childlike wonder. “All you have to do is look at the map and see that where Romania exists geographically — and as is the case for our Allies on the eastern flank — that there are potential vulnerabilities, which is why we say very clearly: We will dedicate — and have been especially enhancing, over the last few weeks — our support based on their current needs.”

 

Back in 2019, during her brief run for the presidency, Harris frequently insisted that we must have more serious “conversations” about the topics on which she had being asked to comment, and yet, for some reason, never quite got around to participating in them. Now, we know why.

 

Cometh the hour, cometh the bromide. One never likes to say “never,” but, at this rate, it is going to be impossible for capable dunces such as Madison Cawthorn and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even to compete with Harris in the inanity stakes. She is a wonder, a phenom, a once-in-a-generation prodigy, and to keep her crown indefinitely, she’ll need only to remember that it is time for her to keep doing what she has been doing, and that time is every day.