After almost two months of the most aggressive marketing rollout for a product since Coke reinvented Santa Claus, Kamala Harris has stormed out to a bit more than a 1-point lead in the opinion polls. Give or take. Within the margin of error. Some polls have Donald Trump leading.
It’s hard to say whether this meagre return for such profligate hype and what remained of the media’s credibility is a tribute to the savvy incorruptibility of the American voter or merely a reflection of how ossified our politics have become. With loud amplification by excited journalists, the Harris campaign has spent the summer promising joy, freedom, peace, a secure border, abundant homes, cheap food and the salvation of democracy. After all that, the American merely shrugs and says: I’ll get back to you. Ingrates.
And that was the easy part. Shuffling Joe Biden off to a permanent stool at the ice cream counter, launching a campaign with hundreds of millions of eager donors’ dollars, tapping a vice-presidential nominee brimming with ersatz bonhomie, staging a convention rich in adulatory unity. Surely we should all have the vibes by now, “white dudeing for Kamala,” exchanging coconut tree memes and proclaiming the significance of the passage of time, right?
Can the freshness that the youthful vice president promised so excitingly to pour forth on a country for old men really have gone stale seven weeks after the president (yes, he’s still there, in case you had forgotten) passed the glowing torch?
Her opponent has been doing all he can to help facilitate the Harris apotheosis. The former president has spent most of the summer babbling away in the usual fashion, sharing mosquito experiences, casually abandoning yet another tenet of conservative ideas with a promise to protect “reproductive rights,” mugging for the camera among the hallowed dead in Arlington cemetery, and explaining how one of the largest tax increases in American history — his proposal for universal tariffs — would reinvigorate the economy.
To be fair, he was nearly assassinated eight weeks ago, so perhaps some slack can be cut in his direction. Incidentally, can anyone explain the incuriosity of the vital guardians of our way of life about that attempt to interfere in our fragile democracy in such a potentially catastrophic way? We were an inch from the first murder of a presidential candidate in 56 years, and our law-enforcement units seem so far to have drawn a scarcely interested blank on the whole why and wherefore. Meanwhile they have been hyperbusy identifying the real threat to our democratic stability — uncovering an alleged plot by those Russians to pay some halfwit American conspiracy theorists a shed load of money to do what they were doing in the first place.
So we enter the final stages of a campaign that is essentially tied. Voting starts next week in Pennsylvania, where Democrats will hope that the dying embers of the short-lived Harris flame can be fanned sufficiently to heat up excitement in the critical swing state.
Before that, it’s debate night again in America. It seems like 11 years but is less than 11 weeks since that other debate, in which President Biden reminisced about “beating Medicare” and presiding over an administration that hadn’t lost a single member of the armed forces — and which was followed by the stunned acknowledgment by Democrats and the media that he really wasn’t up to the job after they’d told us how sharp he was.
The conventional wisdom is that Ms. Harris has most to lose on Tuesday as for the first time she faces the possibility that someone will actually ask her to explain herself. But I doubt the showdown will change much. If Mr. Trump is for once able to adopt the stance of a forensic inquisitor and spend the evening challenging the vice president over her long list of abandoned policies and trying to find out exactly what she has been doing for the last four years, the effect could be productive.
But we are all familiar with Mr. Trump’s recipe for debate nights: a soup of self-obsessed grievance followed by a salad of nonsense and falsehoods topped off with a heaping helping of bombast.
Even if the debate changes nothing, the odds seem to favour Mr. Trump in November. If all Ms. Harris can get from seven weeks of ecstatic PR is a nudge toward parity, she can’t hope for much in the remaining time. And even this nudge leaves her well below where both Mr. Biden and Hillary Clinton were at this stage of the campaign in the last two elections.
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Then we await only the inevitable October surprise. Perhaps that will produce one final shake-up in this year of shocks. But I wouldn’t count on it. Our politics are so settled, our partisan lines so firmly drawn, that Ms. Harris could be revealed to be a real Manchurian Candidate for Communist China, or Mr. Trump could actually shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and we’d still be waiting days to count Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballots before we know who’s won.
The Wall St Journal
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