Kamala Harris Is Fortunate in Her Enemy

By Judson Berger

Friday, August 16, 2024

 

It is said that Donald Trump is fortunate in his enemies. Consider this another advantage Kamala Harris has taken from him in the cruel summer of 2024. The presumptive Democratic nominee would be heading into her party’s convention next week on the back foot — were it not for her opponent.

 

The Democrat’s campaign betrays a lack of confidence in several respects. Harris continues to evade the press save for 71-second encounters, she has reversed a whole suite of policy positions to suit general-election purposes with little explanation, she’s adopted her rival’s bad tax proposal, she’s reprised the administration’s war on price-gouging to distract from its record on inflation, her campaign is reportedly rewriting news headlines and descriptions in Google ads, and it just produced a bizarre spot casting her as a merciless border hawk despite the all-hands effort to memory-hole her border portfolio as VP.

 

But exuberant crowds, equally exuberant media coverage, and polling don’t register any of this.

 

That is, in part, a reflection of the lasting euphoria Democrats have allowed their voters to experience by doing what every poll told them to and ditching Joe Biden, and of the media’s trading their role of chronicler for that of the ticket’s in-house press shop.

 

It is also a reflection of how Republicans don’t have a nominee capable of busting the myth of Kamala Harris. The gaseous feel-goodery of a movement that the Democratic ticket is cramming together from “joy”-huffing factions of what used to be a coalition can only be countered by a campaign of substance. Donald Trump is not running one, notwithstanding his statistic-heavy press conference in Bedminster on Thursday. He is, instead, playing into exactly the contrast the Democratic ticket hopes to strike, and will surely strike in Chicago next week if the convention isn’t drowned out by anti-Israel theatrics.

 

Granted, his press conference in New Jersey had more meat (literally, figuratively) than the one at Mar-a-Lago a week earlier. Say what you will about the cereal boxes, sausages, and other food props he displayed while rattling off inflation figures; at least he was using them to talk about kitchen-table issues (literally). But this sort of demonstration is more the exception than the rule. Soon, Trump will return to falsely claiming his rival “A.I.’d” a fake crowd at an airport. Or to making fun of Senator Jon Tester’s stomach. Or to going after the popular GOP governor of Georgia or hitting Harris for not committing to a single racial identity. Nikki Haley’s critique — “you can’t win on those things” — is correct.

 

Trump’s first press conference, in Florida, was a prime opportunity for the Republican nominee to contrast his command of the facts and willingness to meet the press with his opponent’s (Jim Geraghty imagines here what could have been). Instead, he botched a story about Willie Brown, whined about Harris’s “border czar” performance without elaborating, pitched his plan to save Social Security by depriving it of funding, oddly described Biden’s spending spree as “all of the different borrowings that he did,” and tried to hit Tim Walz’s record as Minnesota governor by . . . talking about former Virginia governor Ralph Northam.

 

Donald Trump is like Bill Clinton in all of the bad ways and none of the good ways. The Trump of today speaks in his own shorthand, as Dan McLaughlin writes — a language indecipherable to most. He has proposed three debates with Kamala Harris. Phil Klein warns, “If Trump doesn’t sharpen his attacks in the coming weeks, he could very well get smoked when they face off.”

 

It was on Twitter/X, of all places, that voters caught a glimpse of a Trump campaign message that could actually stick, posing the Reaganesque question, “Are you better off?” “If he is going to turn around his bid, he’ll need to do more of this and less of what he has been doing,” writes Charlie Cooke. “. . . Naturally, I have absolutely no confidence that Trump can do this.”

 

Meantime, the mood of the Democratic Party no longer funereal, Kamala Harris is about to blow the roof off the United Center. The campaign just announced a $90 million media buy through the end of the month targeting battleground voters. Mark Wright predicts the convention’s fawning media coverage on top of it will only sustain her surge.

 

Practically overnight, and with Trump as her opponent, Harris has flipped the Democrats’ liabilities on their head through the audacious act of not being the sitting president. Trump is now the candidate for whom age is an issue. Trump is now the candidate tagged as representing the past. And until Harris is forced to return to the public eye, unscripted, Trump is the candidate who’s out there bumbling and rambling and mixing up his facts.

 

With an enemy like this, who needs allies?