Over the last couple of years, as familiarity has bred contempt, and contempt has bred exasperation, I have got into the habit of distilling into very blunt terms what I think of our most prominent political aspirants. My modest verdict on the incumbent president, Joe Biden, was that he was “an asshole.” My considered take on his predecessor, Donald Trump, was that he is “a lunatic.” Herewith, to complete the trilogy, I will offer another candid take: Kamala Harris is a "dumbass."
Like the little boy staring at the naked emperor in the famous fairy tale of yore, I can scarcely believe what I am seeing before my eyes. Since she replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, reporters have struggled mightily to find kind ways of describing Harris’s ineluctable inability to convey anything comprehensible, complex, or concrete. Harris, the New York Times has variously proposed, has been “strategically vague,” “light on detail,” and “careful.” Alternatively, she has “put her own stamp on the art of the dodge”; learned to respond “to unpleasant questions without answering them”; and shown an ability to “avoid delineating her stance on some issues.” And yet, if one were to search for a single world to sum up her candidacy, that word, apparently, would be “joy.”
I disagree. I think that word would be “dumbass.” Harris isn’t “vague” or “careful” or disinclined to “delineate her stance.” She’s wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth. She’s not “light”; she’s dull. She’s not a “dodger”; she’s a fool. She’s not “joyful”; she’s imbecilic. As Gertrude Stein once said of Harris’s hometown, Oakland, there’s no “there there.” She’s a nullity, a vacuum, an actress, an empty canvas that is incapable of absorbing paint. Search through Harris’s historical press clippings and you will be astonished by the vastness of space, for, in more than two decades of analysis and reporting, Harris has not once been credited with a single valuable or original idea. What you see on TV is what you get in private: a broken battery-operated toy that can’t talk, that can’t argue, that can’t laugh in the right places, and that badly malfunctions if expected to transcend the superficial. Asked by Stephanie Ruhle what would happen to her plan to “raise corporate taxes” and make “billionaires and the top corporations” pay “their fair share” if the “GOP takes control of the Senate,” Harris seemed unable to process the concept. “But we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes,” she replied. “And we’re going to have to raise — we’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. That’s just it.”
Shakespeare observed that the wish is father to the thought. Add in the corollary that the thought is the father of the word, and one begins to understand Harris’s problem — which is that she has no useful thoughts because she has no useful wishes, and she has no useful words because she has no useful thoughts. “Why,” asks the commentariat, “has she not improved her answers over time?” The answer is simple: Because she has not improved her thinking over time. It may be true that, in addition to being an idiot, Harris is “nervous,” or “overwhelmed,” or “indecisive,” but, properly understood, those are less separate diagnoses than symptoms of the same underlying ill. The word-salads; the awkward cackle; the stunned repetition of agnostic phrases — they are all byproducts of Harris’s debilitating suspicion that she has no earthly clue what she’s doing. She can’t debate policy because she’s never examined policy. She can’t sell a worldview because she’s never had a worldview. She can’t deftly navigate a paradox or a hypocrisy or a surprise, because, like a man attempting to cover up his infidelities, her political promiscuity has left her tangled in a web of no rhyme, reason, or design. Harris’s aim in each and every moment is to get through the next minute, the next hour, or the next day without being conclusively exposed as a cipher.
Last week, Harris was asked on The View what she would do differently than Joe Biden, and, though that remains the key issue in the election, it became clear that she’d never considered the matter before it hit her ears. A few hours later, when talking to Stephen Colbert, she still didn’t have an answer to the layup. She won’t have one tomorrow, or next week, or next year, either. This is who she is, who she was, and who she will always be. She cannot outrun it. If Americans notice prior to November 5, she will lose and retire in ignominy. If they notice a little later, she will win but be disdained within a matter of weeks. Donald Trump’s gift to the nation was to prove to a new generation that character is destiny. Kamala Harris is set to confirm that idiocy is, too.
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