Kamala Harris’s political strategy: vibes in a vacuum
The Democrat convention demonstrates the sheer emptiness and dishonesty of US presidential politics. The surface civility of what we’ve just witnessed conceals a ruthless machine.
Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention continued the convention’s vibe. It focused mainly on the usual autobiographical sentimentality. My mother… our neighbourhood… and all the heart tuggung emotion of every American political speech. Whose upbringing is not worthy of a sentimental treatment? It’ a good thing that Australia doesn’t have that stylistic obsession.
There were almost no specifics in the Harris speech, but it certainly, and perhaps unexpectedly, reached the right register of love of country and high aspiration.
It wallowed in abstract nouns and mainly got specific when it denounced Donald Trump.
Nonetheless Harris’s speech had a few unexpected wrinkles. First of all, like the whole convention, it was overtly patriotic.
The Republicans have effectively pushed Democrats into a much more explicit embrace of America, its history and ideals, a more muted critique of the ills of American history and society.
There were American flags everywhere. The crowd broke into chants of “USA! USA! USA!”.
That’s cute and quite smart by Democrats, stealing a characteristically Republican chant.
Also, she showcased the new Democrat way of dealing with Trump, to present him in part as a bit of a joke.
“Donald Trump is in many ways an unserious man,” Harris said.
“But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious.”
That’s a cleverer combination than Democrats have had in the past. The whole convention focused a lot on the alleged dangers of Trump, but in a less hysterical tone.
Indeed, one of the features of the convention was a series of anti-Trump Republican speakers. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinziger was especially effective.
The best part of Harris’s speech were a few strong paragraphs on foreign policy. Unexpectedly perhaps, she strongly backed Israel and its right to defend itself but also reasonably labelled what’s happened in Gaza as devastating.
She also said she’d always provide for a powerful US military, “the strongest and most lethal force in the world”, which runs against her quite recent advocacy for cutting defence spending.
She pledged support for Ukraine and criticised Trump for endangering NATO. That was orthodox presidential stuff but she’s never done it before.
Harris hardly mentioned Biden and tried to recapture some of the campaign magic of Barack Obama.
She still offered almost nothing specific on the US economy.
It was still almost entirely about the vibe. A few sentences of substance were welcome but all the more stark because they were so lonely.
Harris thinks she’s going to become president in November. The candidate who couldn’t win a single vote when she ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, who five minutes ago had a lower approval rating than the departing Joe Biden, whose manifest lack of experience and competence was one reason Biden selected her as an unthreatening deputy, thinks she will sweep the board and, to mix the metaphors, surf into the White House on a wave of joy and love and happiness and IVF and abortion.
At least, that’s the message from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It was a brilliantly produced and nearly flawlessly executed affair, a Hollywood winner, all the more effective because it shifted towards the new fashions in the genre.
Oprah and the all-stars
All the stars performed. Barack Obama, certainly the most effective political speaker of his generation, and Michelle Obama, licensed to be the angry Democrat. Bill Clinton, fading a little but still with lots of magic. Hillary Clinton, not quite right as ever. And the newly discovered governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, presenting as the folksy goodie nice guy dad, football coach, high school teacher, aw shucks, just the sweetest guy in the room. Biden, like a garrulous grandpa, on the first night talking and talking and talking endlessly, endlessly, endlessly with his old anecdotes and political war stories, until way after midnight, way after not only his bedtime but everybody else’s as well, then sent away from the party, never to be seen again.
And the biggest star of all – Oprah Winfrey! She’s still got it. She was Barack Obama’s most important endorsement in 2008. Some studies say she got him a million votes. She didn’t campaign for Hillary, and look what happened. But now she’s back in the ring for Kamala. “Choose common sense over nonsense,” Winfrey says.
And Kamala herself, intermittently present, still yet to give an unscripted interview since Biden, more than a month ago, announced he would not run again, the most perfectly curated candidate since Robert Redford in The Candidate, offering the most inviting blank canvas for every hope to be written on since Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.
Bill Clinton suggested Harris, who worked in a fast food restaurant as a youngster, would eclipse his record as the president who spent the most time at McDonald’s. Surely this other record, the first new frontrunner candidate for the presidency to go longer than a month after announcing her candidacy without giving a single unscripted interview, is the more significant record.
The Democratic National Convention, while mostly civil in tone and joyous in the way the laughter track on an old 1960s sitcom is joyous, also demonstrated the new hollowness, the intellectual bankruptcy, the sheer echoing emptiness of modern presidential politics, which has become a kind of universal celebrity dancing-with-the-stars performance. There was almost no mention of policy of any kind, barely a line about foreign policy, certainly nothing so otiose as defence policy, until a couple of sentences in Harris’s own convention speech. Similarly, there was nothing about cyber security, budget deficits or any of that boring old yesterday’s stuff, the looking at the past kind of old politics.
Instead, everything was about the vibe, a perfectly conceived series of empty, and often quite dishonest, emotional high points.
There was less Hollywood than in previous Democrat conventions. The politicians still wanted a bit of entertainment glamour, but mostly they mined their own backstories for ersatz glamour. Pete Buttigieg, the Transport Secretary, an impressive performer in anyone’s books, nonetheless said absolutely nothing about transport and spoke instead almost exclusively about his gay marriage.
The first night was all about feminist women celebrating the wonderful identity politics of Harris’s candidacy. To be clear, any background can furnish a good presidential candidate. Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice would have been superb Republican candidates. But do you really vote for someone because of their ethnicity or sex?
Michelle Obama put the biggest stress on black identity politics.
“For years,” she said, “Donald Trump did everything he could to make people fear us. Who is going to tell him the job he is seeking might be one of those black jobs?”
Her reference was to Trump saying that illegal immigrants were taking black and Hispanic jobs. This was a clumsy, even ugly, formulation by Trump, for sure. But his meaning was harmless. Illegal immigrants were taking jobs that African-Americans and Hispanics traditionally occupied in very large numbers. But Michelle Obama labelling the presidency “a black job”, is that really an example of “when they go low, we go high”?
Similarly, there was the first night’s highlight, Hillary Clinton – we put some cracks in that glass ceiling but on the other side of those cracks is Kamala Harris being inaugurated as president!
The Democrats dialled back identity politics a bit, but it’s still central to their pitch.
As well as dialling down identity politics and Hollywood, the Democrats, in a measured and limited way, dialled up God and patriotism.
Everybody seemed to finish their speech with God bless America, which for some years had gone right out of fashion among Democrats. Lots of folks talked about the help of God and going to church. There were several one-line denunciations of anti-Semitism, and only a few of them were accompanied by the formerly obligatory simultaneous denunciation of Islamophobia.
One or two speakers said they wanted the war in Gaza to end as soon as possible, an idea so wonderfully generic that anybody from any party in America could sign up to it.
You could just about see the team of Democrat script writers calibrating everything. There was even just the right amount of anti-Israel demonstrators outside the convention. The presence of left-wing demonstrators helps reassure middle America that the Democrats are not themselves left-wing extremists, but the fact the number of demonstrators is not too big means they won’t generate any real energy against the Democratic ticket on the left.
This was nothing like 1968, when the US commitment to the Vietnam war ripped Democrats apart and there were passionate debates on the convention floor. Nothing happens now at conventions that is not perfectly scripted. As a result conventions are much less meaningful as democratic exercises. The political parties like it like that. No political professional wants an outbreak of real democracy. The DNC was every bit as contrived and artificial as the Republican National Convention a few weeks earlier. Both parties create a kind of fantasy America in which the other side is a mortal threat to democracy and only their party can come to the rescue.
Image is everything. Memes are bankable currency. Democrat congressional leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a speech that seemed staccato and a bit demented until you realised it was a rap performance designed to go viral, or at least to be a little contagious.
Speaker after speaker labelled Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and Republicans generally as “weird”, but this too was carefully calibrated. Mostly each speaker, even the big beast former presidents Obama and Clinton, used the word only once, lest the mere repetition of the word weird should start to look weird itself.
Of course, “weird” is a pretty mild insult. Trump himself has been so brutishly and coarsely insulting, indeed childishly insulting, about anyone he doesn’t like at any given moment, and has himself so often said things that are completely untrue, that he has no claims to sympathy over having his honour or reputation trashed.
Nonetheless, it’s important to see when the Democrats are telling the truth, and when they’re telling lies. The Democrat convention trafficked in untruth at three levels.
First, it offered no policies, while claiming to be providing a choice between good government and weirdness. But American politics is now entirely dominated by the dynamics of celebrity. Policy is the last thing anyone talks about.
Second, it pretended the Biden-Harris record simply didn’t exist, or that Harris had no part in its many manifold failures.
Before the convention, Harris outlined some bare scraps of an economic policy. Inflation was too high, she proclaimed, and she would tackle it. Inflation was high, in her view, because of corporate greed and “price gouging”.
In fact, inflation has risen because of the massive increase in government spending that Biden, with Harris as his Vice-President, has driven. Not only that, prices paid by producers have risen as quickly as prices paid by consumers, which means price gouging is the least of all the problems.
The few concrete policies Harris has proposed, such as government-imposed price caps and government-imposed rent increase caps, would be disastrous and have support from virtually no serious economist. Similarly, Harris has said she’ll tackle illegal immigration. Yet the crisis on the Mexican border was entirely created by Biden and Harris.
Third, and perhaps most seriously, the Democrat convention consistently lied about Trump and the Republicans. I don’t mean here shades of grey or exaggerations but just plain outright lies. Almost every third speech, it seemed, mentioned the threat of Republicans not only to absolute legal abortion from conception to birth but also to IVF fertility treatments.
I found this intriguing because I wasn’t aware of any Republican proposal to restrict IVF. It turns out there is no such proposal. Some anti-abortion activists are opposed to IVF because it involves creating and disposing of embryos. No Republican politician is remotely opposed to IVF, certainly not Trump or Vance. There was a court case in Alabama that threw some doubt on IVF’s legality and the state Republicans immediately rushed to make sure it remained legal. Trump and Vance support it, as do more or less all Republicans.
The lie that Republicans plan to ban IVF is so brazen that when you hear it consistently over several days your first reaction is to assume there must be some serious proposal among Republicans to at least restrict IVF. In fact there is none.
Senate Democrats introduced a declaratory bill mandating a national right to IVF, and a similar bill on contraception. Republicans all said they supported IVF but leave the matter to the states, none of which inhibits IVF. So this pure stunt is then used as a justification for a wholly fraudulent claim that Republicans actively plan to outlaw IVF. No wonder so many Americans hate politics.
No one connived in this deception more than the new Democrat vice-presidential nominee, Walz. Walz is the latest in a long line of reassuring white guys Democrats put on their ticket to balance any identity-politics adventurism at the top of the ticket.
Barack Obama, the first African-American major party presidential nominee, chose as his running mate the platonic ideal of a bland reassuring white guy in Biden. Hillary Clinton made a similar choice in the justifiably obscure senator Tim Kaine as her running mate in 2016. Now Harris has chosen Walz. And Walz, teacher, football coach, hunter, National Guard soldier, does this terrific mid-west, regular guy, dad joke-telling shtick.
He won a congressional seat in a traditionally Republican district: “Don’t ever underestimate a public school teacher.” And, like seemingly almost everyone else at the convention, he and his wife used IVF to have a family. Except it turns out they didn’t.
Walz’s speech, a very folksy effort, went over well. It was exactly like Sarah Palin at the Republican convention in 2008. I remember CNN’s Anderson Cooper commenting on Palin’s speech: “She sure hit that out of the park.” She too was folksy and funny and appealing, all the way from Alaska. She had been a small-town mayor, had lots of kids: “What’s the difference between a soccer mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”
But in the end, it didn’t amount to much. Walz seems to have a serious problem with the truth. The idea that he and his wife used IVF and if the wicked Republicans had their way he wouldn’t have his two lovely children seems compelling until you find out they didn’t use IVF, they used an entirely different fertility treatment that doesn’t involve creating and discarding embryos and that no one, even among the most fervid anti-abortion campaigners, opposes. And in any event Republicans support IVF. So all this moral outrage is based on falsehood.
It also turns out Walz routinely claims he left the National Guard a full rank higher than he ever achieved. And for many years he claimed that he was mistakenly judged to be drunk in a drink-driving incident because of hearing problems caused by his military service. Of course he never served in combat, leaving his unit when it was about to be deployed to Iraq. And he was indeed convicted of being drunk and driving at 96 miles per hour, because he was, indeed, drunk.
That was a long time ago and is not remotely a disqualification, but lying about it is worrying.
Walz, like Harris, is still substantially unknown to Americans. He entered congress as a centrist but moved way to the left as Minnesota Governor. His state has done poorly under his leadership and he has gone to the furthest reaches of LGBTQ gender ideology. Harris and Walz will be, if elected, the most left-wing combination ever to enter the White House.
The organisation GovTrack ranked Harris “the most liberal” of all US senators. Previously she declared she wanted to cut defence spending, end fracking, defund the police, backed the Black Lives Matter demonstrators and raised bail for those in jail for violence at the demonstrations. She was chosen by Biden partly to balance his ostensible centrism with an appeal to the left of the Democratic Party. Like a good politician she’s abandoning all these positions now. But her every instinct would be to govern from the left.
For the moment, Democrats are wholly united behind Harris and Walz. Trump unites Democrats and divides Republicans. The Obamas, the Clintons, all the Democrat heavyweights were there to support Harris. But the only living Republican ever to win a majority of the popular vote in a presidential election, George W. Bush, won’t vote for Trump and wasn’t invited to the Republican convention. Nor was Trump’s vice- president, Mike Pence. Nor was the other recent Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Nor the significant number of Trump cabinet secretaries who came to regard him as too chaotic to be a good president.
That doesn’t mean Trump will lose in November, but it’s a real weakness for Republicans.
The stylistic triumph at the Democrat convention came when Barack Obama attacked Trump and the audience booed. “Don’t boo,” Obama admonished, holding up a finger and silencing the crowd in a second.
A big part of Obama’s appeal was always his courtly manner.
But the surface civility conceals an utterly ruthless Democrat machine. The Biden White House, and the whole Biden career, has been gamey with self-interest, as the storied career of Hunter Biden attests. The Democrats have ruthlessly, systematically weaponised and subverted the US legal system to mount politicised legal prosecutions of Trump.
Both sides of US politics are at a low ebb. Trump versus Harris is a slightly better choice than Trump versus Biden, but not much. Harris will likely get a poll bounce from a well-managed convention, but overall the race is still way too tight to call.
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