The Thought Experiment Campaign
Harris' stealth campaign is getting ridiculous
It is becoming increasingly obvious that Democrats are running nothing more than a high-stakes marketing campaign. Kamala Harris is a Madison Avenue creation. An avatar. An empty vessel into which people can pour whatever they want to create their ideal candidate. And she is not about to shatter that illusion by doing anything crazy like, you know, communicating with voters.
Harris has been a major-party nominee for well over a month and has given NO press conferences, no challenging interviews, answered no adversarial questions...nothing. Her policy "announcements" are given by surrogates, or leaked by friendly anonymous sources to their willing stenographers in the mainstream press.
Even her website is short on policies. But it DOES feature 9 different gender options you can choose from. (See below, courtesy New York Post)
It doesn't take a political expert to ascertain Kamala Harris' politics. It is the same as she has had the past 35 years. She did not quickly transmogrify into a blue-dog Democrat over the past month. Not a chance in hell. She was/is/always will be a coastal progressive. Period. That is hardly surprising since she rose through the political ranks in what is most certainly America's most liberal metropolitan area. She could not have won anything in San Fransisco without being quite progressive.
But I find it insulting that not only is she trying to convince me she has had a political epiphany over the past few weeks that would rival The Grinch’s in sheer magnitude, but also that she is using other people to communicate this modern miracle without saying a single Goddamned word on her own.
This is like a high-stakes troll campaign. It is an experiment to see just how far a candidate can ride another candidate's vast unpopularity. It is a thought experiment that is trying to determine if enough people will vote for the equivalent of a cardboard cutout if the other option is seen as sufficiently gross.
The sad part is, it may very well work. It may be that in a few months we will be swearing in a candidate who has said next-to-nothing about their political goals and priorities, running on a campaign that is no deeper than, "I'm not him." Of course, we will assuage ourselves with the knowledge that the culinary preferences of our new Commander-In-Chief are well-known.
The kicker is that each side had a chance to nominate a halfway-reasonable candidate and they would be mopping the floor with the other one right now. Candidate D. Normie would be a welcome contrast to Trump’s bluster and bombast, while candidate R. Normie would be a refreshing alternative to a cackling progressive who cannot be bothered with boring stuff like answering questions from the plebes.
Again, for the umpteenth time, I can't stand Trump and will most certainly not be voting for him. For the third straight cycle all Democrats had to do to get my support was to nominate a candidate slightly less loathsome than Trump. And once again, they have failed. That is the equivalent of missing a four-inch putt. On three consecutive occassions!
I won't jump on the hyperbole train and claim that either nominee will auger the end of the Republic. But neither of them will make the Republic a stronger, better place either. We will be worse off no matter who is taking the oath on January 20th.