By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Biden’s Arrogance Destroyed His Party
It’s an obvious truth — already a commonplace — that Joe
Biden deserves an enormous portion of the blame for Kamala Harris’s failure
last Tuesday; the only debate is whether he is more or less at
fault than Harris herself. It really depends on whether you view the campaign
in terms of proximate or distal causes. Because proximately, the fault
was all Harris’s. It’s true that Joe Biden sure wasn’t helping there during the
final month of the campaign, pointedly associating Kamala with his agenda in
his appearance on The View or accidentally-on-purpose calling all of
Trump’s supporters “garbage.” But truly the fault was all Kamala’s. (I’ll refer
you to my autopsy of Harris from last week — which was admittedly
a bit cruel to have performed as a vivisection.)
In a longer-range sense, however, of course Joe
Biden was the author of Democratic failure in 2024. I’m not even referring to
his ruinous economic and immigration policies, his fumbling and ineffective
foreign policy, or any of the substantive reasons Americans hated life under
the Biden administration. No, Biden doomed the Democrats beyond any hope of
redemption for reasons that were not necessarily preordained in 2020 but rather
in 2022 — the moment old Joe misinterpreted the midterm election results
and decided to run for president even though his mind was already well on its
way to melting into puddled frogurt. Some would argue that Biden’s original sin
was in selecting Kamala Harris as his vice president in the first place. A
known mediocrity throughout the world of Democratic politics, at least since
her pitiful primary run in 2019, she was embarrassingly chosen because Biden
promised to select a black woman, even though in that category, only one had
the requisite senior status — and it was Harris.
But while people can argue about exactly which point in
time Harris doomed herself in a general election — whether in that 2019
primary, when she staked out the furthest-left position possible on every
single boutique elite activist issue and had to drop out before Iowa, or in
2021 when she was laughably appointed “border czar” — the true hinge of fate
was Joe Biden’s inconceivably arrogant decision to run for office again and not
drop out until a full month after he had already crumbled to dust like the Witch-King of Angmar at the first presidential debate.
Because that prevented Democrats from holding a primary —
a primary that under no possible circumstances could Harris have won. One can
only wonder whether a different candidate would have defeated Trump — the
headwinds against Democrats were fierce, yet Trump remains Trump in all his
divisiveness — and I confess I would have loved to see Gavin Newsom grasp the
nettle and still get defeated (because Gavin Newsom looks
like the villain from every single movie made between 1985 and the present
day). But when Biden made it impossible to replace him via an orderly process,
Democrats were left with only one choice. There was good reason for the panic
that beset the party.
I’m So Glad We No Longer Have to Pretend Doug Emhoff
Is a Man
Unlike my feelings about Joe Biden, I cannot really bring
myself to feel contempt for vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, whose surprised face during the VP debate will now perpetually be
associated in search engines with the phrase “surprised face.” A terrible
governor of Minnesota, he was inadequate to his new task, but I felt more pity
than anything else for a politician so clearly out of his depth standing next
to J. D. Vance. What’s more, he seems like a genuinely good family man — as the
father of a special-needs child myself, I was moved by his son Gus’s obvious
love for his dad when he was speaking at the DNC in August. That kind of spontaneous
emotion is impossible to feign and tells me that, regardless of his egregious
politics, Walz is probably a decent man.
Meanwhile, one of the most underrated reasons to be glad
that Kamala Harris will never occupy the White House is that her utter slug of
a husband, Doug Emhoff — a cheaply smudged facsimile of masculinity if ever
there was one — will never be able to join her there as First Gentleman. Where
to start with this pimp-slapping, nanny-canoodling fraud of a man? Emhoff’s
first marriage — one with two children — ended after he slept
with and impregnated his nanny. (Did the woman have an abortion? We still
don’t know. Nor do we know what Emhoff’s role in that might have been.) Then,
before meeting and marrying Harris, he was allegedly seen “forcefully” slapping his then-girlfriend in the face in
public for “inappropriate flirting.” (She has come forward anonymously to speak
to the press, and multiple witnesses have confirmed the incident.)
How much did you hear about any of this from the
mainstream media or television coverage of the race? (Since you read National Review, you probably knew at
least something about it.) I can guarantee you these allegations never led the
evening news anywhere outside of Fox, and the media displayed zero interest in
following up on easily confirmable facts and asking obvious questions.
Instead, during this campaign, we were fed servile,
odiously cynical propaganda from writers trying to cast him as the Ideal
Progressive Man for female voters. The Washington Post’s Catherine
Rampell wrote one of the most embarrassing columns of the cycle in late August,
declaring Emhoff a “modern-day sex symbol” and opening with lines I cringe
merely to reprint: “Move over, Ryan Gosling. The modern female fantasy is
embodied by the man who might soon become our first First Gentleman. Emhoff appears
to be a genuine mensch with an impressive career.” A Guardian columnist wrote of Emhoff, “God knows we
need an antidote for all lousy men in the news — and I think we’ve found one.”
The persistently ridiculous Jill Filipovic practically wept tears of joy as she celebrated Emhoff as “the final manifestation of what
equal partnership means” and “a successful, ambitious man who is a great
father—and who centers and backs his wife without hesitation.”
And all of these fawning tributes were written long after
knowledge of Emhoff’s tawdriest of affairs had become public. Perhaps some
would argue that it’s inappropriate to press too closely into the past lives of
political spouses. I would then submit to you that this standard was certainly
never applied to Melania Trump — a woman who has carried herself with
remarkable composure and grace throughout truly surreal times — when her old
nude-modeling photos were turned into a scandal du jour. It is hard not to feel
a measure of satisfaction that she will be returning to a position she held
with dignity, whereas he will be an obscure footnote to political history.
Democratic Celebrities Weren’t Helping Either
Finally, let’s turn
to MSNBC commentator Joy Reid for a moment and empathize with her
perplexity at how Kamala Harris lost the 2024 race: “This campaign really was
an historic, flawlessly run campaign. She had — Queen Latifah never endorses
anyone, and she came out and endorsed her! She had every prominent celebrity
voice! She had the Swifties! She had the BeyHive! You could not have run a
better campaign.” And indeed, by Reid’s standards it was a truly peerless
campaign for Harris, racking up an impressive number of big-name celebrity
endorsements. (The full list can be found here — wow, Will Ferrell? Damen Lindelof and
J. J. Abrams? Too much!) She even brought scads of them out to perform for
her at various campaign stops — whether it be Bruce Springsteen funereally
moaning his way through the most depressing “Dancing in the Dark” ever
performed or Katy Perry slaughtering the already putrid “The Greatest Love of
All.”
I don’t think I need to explain to my readers why all
this failed to win Harris the prize. (One theory not to ignore: notorious
musical criminal Jon Bon Jovi actually released a Harris theme
song.) Modern conservatives may be inured to the lure of celebrity glamour
in politics — what was once the party of Ronald Reagan is now the party of
Donald Trump, after all — but if you want a celebrity to have a game-changing
effect on the voters, then, well, the celebrity had better be on the ticket.
Politics has never really been affected — save at the margins — by celebrity
endorsements, because people don’t automatically repose trust in people merely
because they’re famous for being witty or having good singing voices. Celebrity
does not equal persuasion. With someone like Taylor Swift, the hoped-for result
was activation — the idea that legions of young women would feel
inspired to vote for Harris merely because their idol commanded it. But again,
this completely misunderstands the nature of celebrity and fandom.
The online mockery of celebrities for their futile endorsements has
gotten so bad that Variety (the entertainment industry’s most respected
trade journal) felt the need to editorialize in defense of Hollywood:
“Stop Blaming ‘Celebrity Endorsements’ for Kamala Harris’ Loss: We Need to Hear
From Artists Now More Than Ever.” For once, I am happy to agree with the
headline in full: Celebrity endorsements didn’t help Harris, but they didn’t
hurt her either (except perhaps by reminding people of her associations with a
certain kind of California culture overall). In fact, the only people hurt by
the endorsements are the celebrities themselves. So I say: Let’s hear from
over-politicized progressive celebrities as much as possible.
Until next time.
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