Kamala Harris Truly Was Historically Terrible

By Jeffrey Blehar 

Thursday, November 07, 2024 

 

I remember padding lazily downstairs to the breakfast table in November 2004, the day after an election in which John Kerry was temporarily declared president by the major television networks (via comically flawed early exit polling) before George W. Bush was ultimately reelected with a popular-vote majority. I sat down with my bacon and eggs and noticed my mom’s fierce facial expression as she hunched over her copy of the Washington Post, taking repeated quick-fire sips from a giant mug of coffee as she contemplated the aftermath. She looked up at me, with a mischievous smile, and said: “After a decent interval, I expect to see some crucifixions.” 

 

The interval has passed. I’ve gathered together a bunch of crooked timber, a surfeit of nails, and I brought my trusty hammer too (nickname: “Ol’ Reliable”), so let’s get to recriminating and erecting some crosses. Who gets nailed down and hauled up first? (This is probably the first in a series of posts; I’m only just starting work on the carpentry.) 

 

Democrats are united in telling you that the man to crucify is Joe Biden, who unbelievably still remains the president of the United States. (That is, of course, when they aren’t looking to simply blame American voters outright for their shameful racism.) Heck, National Review readers might want to nail me to a block of wood for having vacillated and flip-flopped on my election prediction — it was terribly fitting that I submitted my Electoral College map to my friends two weeks ago and then, one week ago, told them, “I repudiate that, that’s not going to happen anymore.” (I was completely correct, down to the last number, as it turns out — and I can’t even properly revel in it.) 

 

But no, the blame begins with none other than Kamala Harris. I can think of no more brutally honest way to describe her entire political life than as a fundamental error with historical consequences. Harris quite simply chose the wrong career path. A politician like Harris should never have existed in a just world — naturally, this is why she hails from California. She should never have even been in a position to run for the presidency. She was and remains a mindless cipher whose sole previous success had come from a lifetime spent slavishly slicking and shucking her way up the greasy pole of California politics: a land where merit and intellect matter vastly less than do demographic profile, looks, and availability. (I don’t even think it would be possible for me to carry on a conversation with her as an intellectual equal — much like her home city of Oakland, there simply is no “there” there. Utter vacuity.) 

 

Harris was, as my colleague Charlie Cooke pointed out awhile ago, a world-historical idiot. She is simply unintelligent and constantly conveyed as much every time she was forced to open her mouth and speak outside of scripted venues. It’s not something that can be conquered, either — you’re either dumb or you’re not. Politico, which up until Tuesday night was running the most viscerally pro-Harris media task force in American journalism alongside CBS News, now hilariously concedes that Harris “had just more than 100 days to mount her campaign — something viewed by Democrats who know her best as an advantage.” The fact that people “who knew her best” thought that less time in the spotlight was an advantage tells you all you need to know about her utter worthlessness as a candidate. 

 

Do Democrats want to blame Joe Biden for picking her back in 2020 and thus forcing the 2024 result upon them? Fine, Joe Biden is too senile to even care what people say about him anymore. There are proximate causes and indirect causes of Tuesday’s Democratic defeat (Barack Obama — coming up in my next piece!), and obviously Biden played an enormous role in the longer-term ones. But, ultimately, we must start with the absolute unworthiness of the candidate herself. I’m a Republican, so I don’t normally like to hand out tips to Democrats, but in this one case I’m willing to because every Democrat on planet Earth needs to look at Kamala as the object lesson in what not to be. People should be downright scared to behave like her ever again. Everything that’s wrong with our modern politics somehow managed to coalesce into the form of her campaign. No wonder she managed to lose the popular vote to Donald Trump, of all people.