By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
If there was going to be an upside to Joe Biden’s
presidency, its earliest days suggested it might be found in the lack of a cult
of personality around the man. The president inspired support and opposition in
Americans but not abject devotion. He was a functionary – a flawed and fallible
bureaucrat – and it would be healthy for the country to revert to the mean
after twelve consecutive years in which the president was regarded by his
supporters as the personification of the national will. That experiment ended
in failure.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Biden years
proved that presidents who are not ballasted by celebrity worship sink into the
abyss. The president’s camp conceded as much with its bewildering campaign to
popularize “dark Brandon” – a vaguely menacing figure with lasers for
eyes and a conspicuous appetite for ice cream, who, as Politico put it, is also “a master of the political
dark arts.” The artifice was a bad fit for Biden, but the enterprise
acknowledged a lamentable truth: In the absence of a pop mythology and the
thoughtless adulation that accompanies it, the president will be evaluated on
his or her performance alone. In a polarized era typified by broad and sustained dissatisfaction with the status quo,
that would be a heavy lift even for an accomplished chief executive. For the
middling sort, it’s the kiss of death.
If that is that is the impression the political class has
internalized over the last three years, it helps explain the frantic effort to
fabricate stardom for Kamala Harris. Whether it’s a product of motivated
reasoning or wishful thinking, the race is on to make America’s famously
maladroit vice president into a cultural sensation.
“This is not a campaign,” CNN contributor and former
Obama administration official Van Jones said of Harris’s nascent presidential campaign,
“this a movement.” The evidence for his assertion can be found in the
eye-popping fundraising numbers Democrats touted in the hours that elapsed
after Biden announced his exit from the presidential race. No doubt, the Harris
campaign and its allies raised vast sums, but the Trump campaign can boast of
raising similar totals from his core supporters in the wake of major news events. No, what really enlivened
Jones was the avalanche of pro-Harris TikTok videos. Overnight, the social
media outlet transformed the vice president from a figure of scorn and mockery
into a phenomenon.
“All of the things that were cringey about Kamala – her
laugh, the coconut tree comment, being unburdened by what – like all those
weird things she said,” Jones mused, “she’s gone from cringe to cool in 24
hours as a whole generation has taken all that content and remixed it in all
these incredible TikTok videos.”
The spectacle to which Jones refers – manically edited
videos featuring Harris meditating on the nature of existence layered
over electronica dance songs and
the like – is being promoted as though it was the tip of an otherwise
invisible iceberg; evidence of a deep wellspring of affection and reverence for
Harris, the existence of which pollsters cannot seem to confirm.
Ominously enough, the Harris campaign itself is leaning
into the online hype around the vice president’s campaign – an operation that
has compelled less plugged-in Americans to familiarize themselves with a
definition of the word “brat” that has nothing at all to do with sausages.
“Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for the
Democratic presidential nomination has been bolstered by an unexpected group of
supporters: Charli XCX fans,” NBC News reported on Monday. The British pop singer deemed
Kamala “brat,” a term reserved for the lifestyle embraced by her fans. The
Harris campaign adopted the label and promoted her candidacy with the same
chartreuse aesthetic that graces Charli’s albums.
But what does it mean? CNN provided a helpful breakdown
for the terminally unhip. “For those who are not in the know the way I am, that
is a cool thing,” CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel assured viewers. Quoting the celebrity
herself, “brat” is defined as being “just that girl who is a little messy, and
likes to party, and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.”
Call me conventional, but it doesn’t strike me as the
sharpest strategy for a presidential campaign to brand its principal – the
potential leader of the free world and the commander-in-chief of the armed
forces – “dumb.” But such are the demands of a professional life devoted to
chasing trends, however amorphous and ephemeral they may be.
The risk inherent in the project in which Harris’s image
makers have engaged is that their pursuit of celebrity for their candidate
obscures the world in which high-propensity, persuadable voters actually
reside. Democrats who limit themselves to that world are promulgating a wildly
distinct version of Harris from the goofy, flighty, fun-loving political
dilettante that has taken Chinese-communist spyware by storm. For example, the
campaign’s co-chairman, Senator Chris
Coons, is busily pitching Harris as a proponent of entrepreneurial dynamism
and “wealth creation.” Harris’s allies are populating the nation’s op-ed pages with the argument that
Harris’s tough-on-crime record as a prosecutor neutralizes the liabilities that
haunt progressives. Still other well-meaning supporters want Harris to play up her record on abortion, her support for
government-supported social-welfare programs, and “the nation’s mental health
crisis, particularly among our kids.”
How promoting youthful engagement with a mood-altering
social media platform populated by seizure-inducing audiovisual dadaism
addresses America’s mental-health crisis is beyond me. The effort to make
Harris into a meme to which only the “coconut pilled” are attracted is not a
recipe for mass appeal. But it’s not hard to see the attraction. Making Harris
into an abstraction eases the burden on her backers, who would otherwise have
to evaluate a flesh-and-blood human being on her merits. Democrats made that mistake
once already with Biden. They won’t make it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment