Can Kamala Harris make it in the talkies?

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz wave to the crowd after speaking at the campaign rally at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Picture: AFP.

Movie buffs often look for a film that catches the political moment. Before Joe Biden dropped out, it might have been “The Last Hurrah” (1958). Now it’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), a picture about the emergence of the “talkies” in the mid-1920s, when sound was added to films.

The shock came when glamorous figures suddenly had to speak and, in some cases, their voices and accents made the audience cringe. The captivating siren, threatened with exposure in “Singin’ in the Rain,” is the invincible, unteachable Lina Lamont. In the movie, Lina is played by the veteran Jean Hagen, but the turnabout comes in our own politics, where she is played by Kamala Harris.

Or rather, Ms. Harris is now our Lina Lamont, who must be carefully guarded by her handlers and barred from speaking, for her own good (and that of the Democratic Party). That her managers have kept her shielded and confined to scripted performances confirms their own judgment that she simply isn’t up to it.

Lina Lamont in Singin in the Rain. Picture; YouTube.

In “Singin’ in the Rain,” Lina’s songs are dubbed while she lip-synchs. Ms. Harris can make the sounds; the point of resemblance is that the words aren’t hers. So it was, one might say, for all presidents between Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama. Calvin Coolidge used to plead that he had to decline so many invitations to speak because he didn’t have the time to do the research. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speechwriter Sam Rosenman knew the style and sensibility of the patrician figure for whom he was trying to write. With Ms. Harris, there is no fixed persona or style, confirmed in writing and speech. She is something for her writers to invent.

Donald Trump’s comic style may come over as a boorish shtick, but it is his, and if he’s boorish, he is as authentically boorish as he means to be. But the moment may meet his absorption of the Borscht Belt comics. His natural line for the campaign would be: “She can’t talk!” The plan is to keep daring her to prove that she can.

In “Singin’ in the Rain,” Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor have to take elocution lessons for their own entry into the talkies. And so they try: “Moses supposes his toeses are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously.” The trick for the Trump campaign is to induce or tempt Ms. Harris to speak. Does she support the Biden administration’s open-borders policy, its electric-vehicle mandate, its softness on Iran?

In the movie, Lina is exposed when the curtain is pulled and the audience can see Debbie Reynolds doing the singing. If the curtain is pulled now, whom will we see as the real voice of Kamala Harris?