Kamala Harris was dismissed by her party in 2020 before she had stood in even one primary. Her attractiveness had proven shallow and brittle, and the same was demonstrated of her mind when the doughty Tulsi Gabbard KOed her live on air in the Democratic primary debates.
The 2020 Dem strategy was to make the election about Trump and associate him in the guts of the voters with the chaos of COVID, the endless riots of that summer, and the four years of political chaos that they themselves had organized. To succeed, they needed a candidate who would seem ordinary, non-controversial, and could be plausibly marketed as a uniter. (READ MORE: Five Quick Things: Is Trump Suffering From the Assassin’s Veto?)
Kamala didn’t fit that bill. She was rated by GovTrack as having the most liberal (here meaning left-leaning) 2019 voting record of all the 100 senators, including Bernie Sanders. That rating placed Harris outside of the emerging strategy — her public record didn’t jibe with anything remotely sellable as uniting. She was also widely seen in a video clip speaking with Stephen Colbert about the violent demonstrations, in which she said: “They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels. That they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”
Even though these demonstrations were accompanied consistently by large-scale lawbreaking, including about 40 deaths, property damage into the billions, injuries to hundreds of police officers, arson of a federal courthouse, and more, Harris made no qualifications in announcing her support for them on nationwide TV. (Contrast the qualifications that Trump included when addressing problematic demonstrations in his support.) This kind of record made her a liability for the strategy of pinning America’s chaos entirely on Trump.
Lipsticking a Pig One More Time
Harris never recovered the glitter she had at the beginning of that primary campaign. As a candidate for vice-president (and then later as veep), when the president himself was a mere front for the Obama-ites and others who still had fully functional minds, Harris gave identity-politics cred to the ticket, something for which talent and merit were unnecessary. As loyally left-leaning as the media is, it still couldn’t help but comment on the never-ending chaos on her Harris’ staff when she took office as veep. It reported faithfully on each new task she was publicly assigned, most memorably, what the media dubbed her role as “Border Czar” (yes, Winston Smith, those articles have been shoved down the memory hole since Old Joe was buffaloed into quitting his campaign). Embarrassingly, there were never any triumphs to report. None of this helped her reputation within her party.
But now, following Biden’s implosion in the debate, with the green curtain being pulled open by Toto, the media and the Dems (same folks, different hat) have tried to put everything into one last massive attempt to pull off their old magic, and lipstick a pig one more time.
Now we have the new Kamala magically reborn with every virtue imaginable, so perfect that she can never be allowed a moment off-script, let alone to sit down for anything other than a fawning celebrity interview. (READ MORE: This Time, We ALL Have Dodged a Different Kind of Bullet)
To be sure, as a Hall of Famer sings, we all need second chances. To be sure, it is a pillar of the biblical tradition and therefore of Western civilization that we can and must change for the better and we are not stuck in our failures unless we choose to refuse change. If there is anything worth conserving for a conservative, it is the ever-open possibility of meaningful moral change in Ezekiel’s challenge: “Have I any desire that the wicked should die? declares the Lord God; it is rather that he should return from his path live.”
Second Chances Require Real Change
But the return that is being asked of us is not an image makeover. It is not one more coverup, one more scam, just better executed. What is required is actual change. The medieval rabbi, physician, author, jurist, and community leader Moses Maimonides encoded what the measure of true return is in his magisterial code of law:
What constitutes return to God? That a sinner should abandon his sins and remove them from his thoughts, resolving in his heart, never to commit them again… [He must reach the level where] He who knows the hidden will testify concerning him that he will never return to this sin again… He must verbally confess and state these matters which he resolved in his heart.
When hurt has been done to others, furthermore, only confessing to God is not enough.
Sins between man and man — for example, someone who injures a colleague, curses a colleague, steals from him, or the like — will never be forgiven until he gives his colleague what he owes him and appeases him.
The change that we must accept, that we must welcome, is not a PR coup. It must meet the stringent test of the real world. We must give evidence of the change by acting differently when in the same circumstances.
I’m ready to accept real change. How will we heal as a nation? How will we heal as a world without it? But let’s have it set out and testable by those who suffered from her incitement to riot — through her championing the weakening of law enforcement and the desertion of duty by prosecutors that have devasted the great cities in the one-party states of Washington, Oregon, and California or from her cheerleading radical transgenderism’s mutilation of children, ensuring that they will be infertile and unable to have sexual pleasure and that they will be condemned to a lifetime of hospitalizations to deal with impossibly complex reconstructive surgeries — this might do for a credible beginning.
If only. We can only hope. But real change requires hard, bright accomplishment, moral courage, owning up to mistakes, and clear evidence of change.
Harris Hasn’t Changed. She’s Merely Been Rebranded.
The evidence so far is, instead, for more of the same. Ms. Harris’ PR people are trying hard to toss down the memory hole all evidence of Kamala’s extremism. Case in point – here is Fox reporting on the sudden disappearance of GovTrack’s radical evaluation of Sen. Harris’ voting record:
The self-described “government transparency website” scored Harris as the “most liberal compared to all senators” in 2019, outranking Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at the time.
But the web page with the ranking, which was widely covered in news reports during the 2020 election, was recently deactivated. The link now displays a “Page Not Found” message. The Internet Archive shows the page was deleted sometime between July 10 and July 23, with some on X claiming the page was still up on July 22.
Hiding the truth, constructing something else in its place. Forgetting that committing to the truth would create its own publicity.
But those who do not trust in truth and would rather not change will double down on manipulation and control and hope always to evade the consequences of the pain and the injury the policies they espouse inflict on others. (READ MORE: Kamala Harris and the Civilizational Jihad of Democratic Street Thuggery)
Campaigns ideally reveal who the candidates are. But if we aren’t paying attention, the revelation will be missed.
Look well and see. Reward the truth. Hope for real change. And when the failure of the manipulators makes its own publicity, let it change our politics for the better.