Joe Hildebrand: Why Kamala Harris is the Meghan Markle of politics
If there were any remaining doubts that Kamala Harris is the Meghan Markle of politics, she helpfully put them to rest this week, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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If there were any remaining doubts that Kamala Harris is the Meghan Markle of politics, she helpfully put them to rest this week.
It is an old cliche that a person’s true character is revealed in adversity. In fact it is revealed when they get everything they want.
Just as Markle got everything she wanted – a prince, a mansion, fortune and fame – and still cried oppression, so too Harris, an affluent Californian elite, got offered the most powerful job on the planet on a silver platter and still managed to screw it up.
No human being in the 250-year history of the world’s oldest modern democracy has had an easier path to the presidency than Harris, and no one’s failure has been more complete.
Harris not only lost the presidency but also the popular vote – the first time for a Democrat in 20 years – as well as all seven swing states.
Democrats also lost both houses of Congress and there was not a single county in which Harris outperformed Biden.
Kamala’s campaign loved Nazi comparisons so let’s put this in terms they can understand: To say this is embarrassing is like saying Hitler’s invasion of Poland was a bit of an overreach.
But Harris herself is clearly not self-aware enough to have any sense of embarrassment or shame, nor any understanding of why she lost.
As millions of Americans were struggling with life-and-death cost of living pressures, Harris was babbling word salads about joy.
As millions of Americans struggled with the collapse of industry, Harris was rolling out celebrity endorsements on an industrial scale.
Excruciatingly, this was the exact mistake Hillary Clinton made in the dying days of her own campaign, when she was hanging out with Beyonce while Trump was rallying blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania.
Maybe Kamala figured that Hillary’s problem was not enough celebrities. More likely she wasn’t figuring anything at all, which is why the entire campaign was a vacuous bubble of froth that instantly dissolved upon contact with reality.
Clinton’s “I’m With Her” slogan was about as bad as it gets in politics – a demand for what voters should do for a candidate instead of what a candidate will do for them.
It was the worst possible message any campaign could send. But at least it was a message.
By contrast you could deploy all the codebreakers at Bletchley Park and they still couldn’t decipher whatever it was Kamala Harris supposedly stood for.
Neither, for that matter, could Kamala herself. This was clearly someone who had no political values beyond those she may have discovered on Ancestry.com; the ultimate incarnation of the vacuousness of identity politics.
Chosen as Vice President by Joe Biden on the basis of gender and colour, her competency was sent to Coventry.
In a report by CNN quoting news TV channel MSNBC – just process that for a minute – Biden said in 2020: “I am not committed to naming any (of the potential candidates), but the people I’ve named, and among them there are four Black women.”
That in itself is a Waldorf to put Kamala’s leafy greens in the shade but you get the picture: White man chooses Black woman.
Not since Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder did Ebony and Ivory has racial equality been so easily achieved. Tragically this was not the great metric for success that Democrat masterminds assumed.
In short, the Democrats’ identity politics-driven choice of a running mate and their sycophantic devotion to an increasingly brain dead Biden ultimately led them to the existential destruction they suffered this week.
Had anyone in the room been half as smart as they thought they were, they would not be salting their salads with tears today.
And so we get to Kamala’s long-belated post-election speech, the ultimate exposition of an art form we might call the Meghanesque.
If the Democrats are going to have a single hope in hell of relating to normal, working-class, middle America, they need to say they are so sorry for the complete loss of contact as they became obsessed with the abstract ideals of the affluent elite.
Instead Kamala Harris said this: “I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time but, for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing – if it is America, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant billion stars. The light, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth, and service.”
Yes, after proving herself such a narcissist that she refused to even come out for the thousands of supporters who waited all night for her to appear, Kamala eventually blessed them with blurt that sounds like a Hallmark card on acid.
Honestly, what the f--k does that even mean?
The Democrats have become the Teals of America. They need to sack everybody who works for them and then sack themselves. And then, only then, they might win bigly again.
Listen to The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand wherever you get your podcasts
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