Kamala Harris suffered a humiliating loss in November, the result of an incompetent general election campaign combined with the catastrophic exposure of a conspiracy to cover up Joe Biden’s senility. Ever since, for some inexplicable reason, Democrats and pundits have speculated on what Harris’ next choice for an incompetent campaign might be. Governor of California? President again? Brat Queen of the Central Valley?
The mind boggles, truly. It’s as if no one paid attention to the trainwreck or Harris’ role in the Biden cover-up conspiracy.
Perhaps a new book on the campaign might shake Democrats and the Protection Racket Media (a redundancy, admittedly) out of their Joy-Joy reverie. The book tells the story of how Harris blew the one decision that she had to make as potential commander-in-chief — the choice of running mate. This decision was a slam dunk, and yet the trio of reporters behind 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America explain that Harris got suckered into the worst of all options:
“2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” released Tuesday by journalists Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal, Tyler Pager of The New York Times and Isaac Arnsdor of The Washington Post, described a vetting process that came down to three finalists: Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.
All three candidates did a final interview with Harris at her residence, the book explains, adding that when asked what they wanted to drink, Shapiro and Kelly chose water while Walz chose Diet Mountain Dew.
There’s nothing wrong with water, and nothing wrong with Diet Mountain Dew either. (Not my favorite, but I might have chosen a Diet Dr. Pepper. YMMV.) Why include that odd detail here? The New York Post/Fox News report suggests it might be relevant in a very strange way:
Appeal with rural voters was a top priority for the Harris ticket and the book states that Harris’s advisors felt that Walz was the best candidate to do that.
Wull, yerp, us country bumpkins never drink rain juice, yuk yuk yuk! To be fair, it’s not clear from this report whether this reflects Kamala Harris’ snobbery or that of the NY Post or Fox. I have my suspicions, however, and it’s not that Fox would associate “mountain dew” with hicks in the sticks.
Even apart from that, this assumption demonstrates the absolute incompetence of Harris and her team. The idea that Walz could connect with rural voters because he won a few terms in MN-01 farm country completely ignored Walz’ political transformation as governor. In the House, Walz was a semi-quasi-demi-moderate for Democrats. Ever since the 2018 gubernatorial campaign in Minnesota, however, Walz had reinvented himself as an Academia-drenched progressive. He won those two gubernatorial elections on the strength of the Twin Cities metro area, not Minnesota’s rural districts, as both David and I pointed out after Harris picked Walz:
Harris and her team weren’t the only ones snowed by the Rural Man Walz con. The media fell hard for it too, I noted, due to an utter lack of research or curiosity on their part:
Apparently most of the other media just swallowed the line from the DNC and Team Kamala that Walz had shown electoral strength in rural ares without bothering to check. So much for the old reporter’s maxim, If your mother says she loves you, get a second source.
But this isn’t just a media failure. Harris chose Walz for this very same reason, or so the campaign insists. Did they bother to look at Walz’ lack of success in rural Minnesota? Did they bother to think through what that might mean for people outside of Minnesota, who will have little or no connection to Walz’ earlier political identity as more of a moderate?
It would have taken less than five minutes on Google to disabuse them of the notion that Walz had any significant draw among rural voters even in his own state. I can attest to that because it took both David and me less than five minutes combined to find that data. And it didn’t take much more than that to pull up Walz’ infamous Stasi-esque pandemic “snitch line,” wherein neighbors were encouraged to tattle on neighbors for being too social with each other, the harsh shutdown treatment of churches and congregations, not to mention Walz’ utterly incompetent handling of the George Floyd riots four years earlier.
So why didn’t Harris choose Shapiro? Ostensibly, she was off-put by — wait for it — Shapiro’s ambition:
“He came across as overly ambitious, pushing Harris to define what his role would be. He also conceded it would not be natural for him to serve as someone’s number two, leaving Harris with a bad impression,” the book states.
Bwa-hahahahahahaha. The woman who ran for president after only two years in the Senate finds ambition disqualifying? The deuce you say. We all know the real reason, though:
“Much of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party declared war on Shapiro, largely because of his support of Israel,” the book said. “Some Shapiro allies saw the criticism as deeply unfair and borderline antisemitic, since the governor was an observant Jew, but his positions on the Palestinian conflict broadly aligned with the Biden administration and the other vice presidential contenders. The lawyers vetting Shapiro did flag some comments they viewed as more incendiary, particularly as it related to pro- Palestinian protests on college campuses after the October 7 attacks.”
In other words, Harris chickened out of the obvious and potentially Pennsylvania-carrying choice. That’s why Harris picked Walz — because of her “gut”:
Ultimately, the book says Harris “went with her gut” and chose Walz believing he was the “better fit” in a decision her staff was “unanimously behind.”
It wasn’t Harris’ gut that made that choice — it was her gutlessness. But even to the extent that we can credit this choice to Harris’ political instincts … shouldn’t that be entirely disqualifying in itself? If her gut told her to go with Governor JazzHands McSnitchLine because he wore plaid and could barely handle a shotgun, that’s not an argument to try again. It’s an argument that Harris should never hold executive office in any form, and perhaps not even legislative office, where she can do far less individual harm.
In other words, Harris’ political “gut” needs a massive dose of probiotics. And that goes for all her incompetent advisers who followed Harris down the primrose and effluvium-drenched path, not to mention the media that spent weeks trying to play along with Walz as anything more than a progressive clown.
