Can Republicans Beat Kamala Harris and the Media?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 02, 2024

 

The sense of euphoric inevitability that prevailed when Republicans gathered in Milwaukee for the party’s nominating convention is gone. Victory, once all but assured, is now in doubt. The Trump campaign has struggled to break into the Kamala Harris–dominated news cycle in a positive way. And maybe most dispiritingly, the press now has something to prove — not to news consumers, who were let down by its effort to whitewash Joe Biden’s deteriorating condition, but to those who counted on the whitewashing to succeed. Republicans are resigned not just to a race against a tougher opponent but to an array of cultural and journalistic institutions acting with reckless disregard for their reputations to shield Harris from scrutiny. It’s all rather depressing.

 

That is not an irrational response to a near-unprecedentedly shameless display of kowtowing from the press. From Harris’s taste in cookbooks to her preternatural knowledge of Los Angelean restaurants, Harris is being transformed from a national punch line into a rock star. There is no pressure on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to sit for interviews, hold press conferences, or even merely speak extemporaneously for more than a few sentences. Even what may be Harris’s foremost vulnerability — her inauthenticity — is presented as an asset. “Code-switching” — a polite way of describing a person who overhauls her whole demeanor depending on the audience — is “one of the most effective communication tools that politicians of color use to wield influence and gain power in venues where they have historically not had it,” the Associated Press recently mused. It all seems to be contributing to Harris’s rising stock.

 

Republicans have been running against both Democrats and “the media” for decades, and, contrary to the fatalism that so often becomes currency on the right, the GOP does occasionally win those races. That is in part because the collective enterprise that manifests as media bias is self-destructive. When the journalistic establishment sets expectations that do not match observable reality, voters tend to catch on — even if the press does not. Indeed, the less the public seems inclined toward the dubious narratives that media outlets occasionally propagate, the harder the press works to convince voters to ignore the evidence of their own eyes. Sometimes, this exercise blows up in the press’s face.

 

That’s what happened with Joe Biden’s border crisis, which was by no means a “crisis” for at least the first 18 months of the president’s only term in office. The mainstream press would surely prefer to forget how it contorted itself to combat the notion that a staggering influx of migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border constituted a crisis, but the Washington Free Beacon never forgets:

Americans did not placidly defer to the unreality on offer from reporters. By the summer of 2022, most Americans told pollsters that it was either “somewhat” or “completely true” that the United States was “experiencing an invasion” at the border — trends that accelerated into the fall. That is attributable not just to the obviousness of the crisis but also to the coup that Republicans engineered by paying the freight for migrants destined for northern cities. By the eve of 2023, the truth had to be told. “Everyone can now agree,” CNN’s headline from the time read, “the U.S. has a border crisis”

 

This dynamic also typifies the trajectory of the controversies surrounding Hunter Biden. The president’s relationship with his addled son was, for much of his presidency, cast in a sympathetic light by reporters. But voters noticed as President Biden’s claim to have never had business dealings with his son’s partners evolved, even despite efforts by mainstream media outlets to insist that this shift was, in fact, old news.

 

Much like the border, press outlets were dragged into covering Hunter’s misdeeds as substantive evidence of his father’s poor judgment only after the public demonstrated that it was not nearly as dismissive of those claims. When survey respondents began to tell pollsters they not only took the GOP’s claims regarding Hunter and his father seriously but that they also had little faith in the Justice Department to conduct an investigation into the president’s son objectively, the media firewall collapsed.

 

Joe Biden’s enfeeblement is both the most audacious recent model of media-led efforts to alter reality and the most spectacular example of how that undertaking fails. What began with an effort to simply ignore the story soon transformed into an attempt to frame the story as a nefarious plot crafted by wily Republicans. For example: The GOP was said to be “weaponizing Biden’s age against him,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney insisted late last year after the facts of Biden’s decline became too much to just dismiss. Still, Republicans were “lying” when they implied the president was near “senile” or “demented,” the Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich agreed. “Mentally,” the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, agreed, “he’s quite acute.”

 

This consensus was reflective of the guild-enforced like-think that dominated the culture in professional journalism until, once again, the polls proved voters weren’t buying it. All of a sudden, reporters began asking tough questions of Biden’s allies about his age. This was followed by a backlash among progressive activists, whose opinions receive outsize attention from their allies in media. Pushback from the Left and the halls of power convinced media outlets to retail absurdities, like the notion that Biden’s many senior moments were fabrications, until the president’s infirmities were put on national display in the most undeniable way. Only then did the worst-kept secret in national politics become the subject of profound disquiet in the national press, even if it was framed as evidence of a dastardly White House “cover-up” rather than journalistic malpractice.

 

The problem for the GOP is that this process takes time — years, in some cases. The truncated political calendar and the determination displayed by journalists to polish Harris’s apple are working in Democrats’ favor. But the pace of events has quickened over the summer. Moreover, the Republican narrative has the same advantages that allowed the Hunter Biden scandal, the border crisis, and Biden’s disqualifying decrepitude to go mainstream. Kamala Harris is insincere. She is an awkward campaigner. She is vulnerable to being tagged as a champion of the Biden-administration policies that voters resent. The open question is whether the Trump-led GOP has the discipline to consistently and repeatedly insist on a shared set of facts to which a critical mass of voters are already amenable.

 

That’s a big “if.” It demands a level of discretion that is rare in Donald Trump’s approach to campaigning. And yet, the press makes itself vulnerable when it attempts to alter the course of events rather than simply report on them. The all-hands push for Harris is transparently designed to drag her across the finish line in November, even if that means sacrificing objectivity along the way. That approach has backfired on reporters before. It just might again.