The Secret of Kamala’s Success
The Vice President flops with rank-and-file citizens but is catnip to left-wing elites.
The ever-diligent and never-cocky Jim Geraghty took a close look today at “The Chronically Underestimated Kamala Harris”. If the Democratic nominee is, as conservatives widely believe, “a bumbling dunce”, how is it that she has a 50/50 chance of being elected President on Guy Fawkes Day? That’s more than you or I or millions of people who clearly are not bumbling dunces can say for ourselves.
Do you know how many ruthlessly ambitious Democratic men and women have desperately yearned to get where she is? How many smart, tough, shrewd, often underhanded and cold-blooded pols have tried to claw their way up the greasy pole and fallen short?
And somehow this supposed dunce managed to do it?
The record indicates that whatever Harris’s results are on an I.Q. test or other measure of intellect, she is particularly talented by another measuring stick, one that may be even more important in politics: She is exceptionally skilled at getting other people emotionally invested in her success.
Mr. Geraghty’s aim is to cool Trump supporters’ overconfidence. “Harris’s past is littered with older and more experienced men who saw her as easy pickings and came up short on Election Day.” Don’t get cocky is always good election advice. I will take that as given (not that I am personally cocky)1 and dwell instead on what can be gleaned about the “real” Kamala beneath the brat façade.
It’s unlikely that Kamala has a mediocre IQ. Her parents earned doctorates and had successful careers in intellectually demanding fields. While it’s not unknown for smart parents to produce moronic children, that’s not the way to bet. A reasonable presumption is that the Harris daughter’s IQ falls a standard deviation or two above the mean. According to a credible anecdote quoted in the Geraghty column, a Head Start official exclaimed enthusiastically to Kamala’s mother about the preschool girl’s high score on an intelligence test: “Kamala could go to college!” It isn’t clear whether Mrs. Harris was offended or amused; it is clear that she wasn’t surprised.
Despite the benefits of native intelligence and an upbringing by a genuinely brilliant mother (an accomplished biomedical researcher), Kamala appears to have been academically so-so. Her college (Howard University) and law school (Hastings College of Law) were respectable but not elite. If she had an outstanding academic record, she has hidden that light under a bushel. She passed the California bar exam on her second try and embarked on a legal career whose accomplishments likewise lie in darkness. No one claims that her subsequent advancement was due to her legal mind and brilliance. Rather notoriously, she moved up by lying down, that is, as the mistress of California’s most powerful politician, Willie Brown. The least important favors he bestowed on her were a BMW and two state patronage jobs, for which she was paid more than $400,000 (twice that in current dollars) over a five-year period. More important were contacts with the upper echelons of California Democratic politics.
Kamala never had to rely on herself rather than her patrons until she ran for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. Then she failed miserably. The reason is clear. She is lazy, not necessarily in the sense of being unwilling to work but of being unwilling to exercise her mind. She has confined herself to the clichés of progressivism, never even bothering to master the arguments that underlie the clichés, must less become acquainted with opposing arguments. She doesn’t seem to know that the latter exist.
Mr. Geraghty relates, with supporting documentation, “the story of how she became a rising star in the sharp-elbowed world of San Francisco city politics. The short version is that Harris was exceptional at persuading wealthy San Franciscans to invest in her political rise.” As a generally favorable Politico profile published during her abortive Presidential campaign in 2019 put it:
As she advanced professionally, jumping from Alameda County to posts in the offices of the district and city attorneys across the Bay, she was a trustee, too, of the museum of modern art and active in causes concerning AIDS and the prevention of domestic abuse, and out and about at fashion shows and cocktail parties and galas and get-togethers at the most modish boutiques. She was, in the breezy, buzzy parlance of these kinds of columns, one of the “Pretty Thangs.” She was a “rising star.” She was “rather perfect.” And she mingled with “spiffy and powerful friends” who were her contemporaries as well as their even more influential mothers and fathers. All this was fun, but it wasn’t unserious. It was seeing and being seen with a purpose, society activity with political utility. . . .
Outfitted in sharp designer suits and strands of bright pearls, Harris kickstarted her drive to become San Francisco’s top cop – in its ritziest, most prestigious locale. Predominantly white Pacific Heights – hills upon hills, gobsmacking views of the Golden Gate strait, mansions built and bought with both new tech money and old gold rush cash – is home to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom and others, one of the country’s foremost concentrations of politicians and their patrons.
Just why this “Pretty Thang” attracted the backing of political queenmakers is left fuzzy. Kamala can hardly have been the only attractive young woman striving to move from the outskirts to the center, but she was the one on whom the stars doted. Support from Pelosi and Feinstein, among other eminences, in the contest for San Francisco district attorney in 2003 helped her defeat far left incumbent Terence Hallinan. One can get a taste of the impression that she made from an article about that race in San Francisco magazine, which described Harris as “black-eyed, raven-haired, latte-skinned,” and “smart and strategic, ribald and flirty”. (Years later, the writer said that the article now embarrassed her.) In 2004 the Los Angeles Times was comparing her to Barack Obama. As Mr. Geraghty summarizes:
At every key moment in her career until her presidential campaign, Harris has had bigger, wealthier, more powerful, and more influential names sizing her up and concluding she was the one. And she’s taken that and her politicking skills to two terms as city district attorney, two terms as state attorney general, one term as senator, and one term as vice president. Because she dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary before any votes were cast, she’s never actually lost a race in her life; the closest she came was finishing second out of three candidates in the first round of that 2003 district attorney race, qualifying for the runoff.
“Her politicking skills” were on display in 2019 and again after Joe Biden was shoved onto the metaphorical ice floe. It is patent to any but the most willfully obtuse observer that those skills, so far as they involve making a case for herself to ordinary human beings, are negligible. Over the past twenty years, she has not so much risen as been lifted up.
Kamala never had to rely on herself rather than her patrons until she ran for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. Then she failed miserably. The reason is clear. She is lazy, not necessarily in the sense of being unwilling to work but of being unwilling to exercise her mind. She has confined herself to the clichés of progressivism, never even bothering to master the arguments that underlie the clichés, must less become acquainted with opposing arguments. She doesn’t seem to know that the latter exist. That, rather than intellectual insufficiency, is why she cannot extemporize answers even to gentle challenges.
The most damning evidence isn’t her floundering Fox interview but CBS’s unabashed redaction of her appearance before friendly interrogators on 60 Minutes:
When interviewer Bill Whitaker queried Harris about the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomatic relationship with Israel, Harris began with a rambling, lost prelude that amounted to her typical rhetorical churn [which was included in a preview of the 60 Minutes broadcast]. Then she collected herself and remembered her canned answer.
Later on, when the interview aired on 60 Minutes, that opening word jumble – which made Harris look remarkably weak – was edited away from Harris’s response. Instead of looking like a deer in the headlights unable to quickly answer, she was presented to viewers as a crisper speaker and thinker than she was. . . .
Let us set aside the fact that it is in fact of great and newsworthy importance if Kamala Harris cannot answer a simple question about her Middle East policy without backfiring like an old gasoline-powered lawn mower. Let us forgive the obvious exercise of “news judgment” in a manner so clearly prejudicial in favor of Harris, concealing her most glaring weakness – her vacuous incoherence. Let us instead ask why CBS News and 60 Minutes still refuse to release an unedited transcript of their interview with Harris, despite having done so when Catherine Herridge interviewed Trump for them back in 2020. Imagine what it must conceal.
Earlier today, the Harris campaign itself gave the candidate another layer of insulation. London’s Daily Mail, in many respects more informative about American elections than our soporific press, reports:
A town hall event with Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday featured a shocking revelation after one voter simply wondered whether she could ask a question.
Former California First Lady Maria Shriver admitted while hosting the event with former Rep. Liz Cheney in Royal Oak, Michigan that she would only include ‘predetermined questions.’
‘Are we going to be able to ask a question?’ asked a woman in the audience. 2
‘You’re not, unfortunately we have some predetermined questions,’ Shriver replied. ‘And hopefully I’ll be able to ask some of the questions that might be in your head, I hope so.’
Unfortunately, Presidents don’t get to predetermine the questions that they will face, and no one furnishes them with canned answers.
Aside from my very limited confidence in Donald J. Trump’s ability or willingness to conduct a winning campaign, I think that the Harris juggernaut’s huge advantages in money and “ground game”, probably assisted by a soupçon of fraud, will carry Kamala to victory in most of the swing states. I can easily envision Trump winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College. It’s a consolation that we will then enjoy four years of silence about how the American electoral system affronts democracy.
[Author’s note:] That is itself a question. I imagine that the former Mrs. Schwarzenegger regrets allowing a deviation from the ground rules.