Tidings of Comfort and Joy?
The Kamala-Walz campaign preaches anger and calls it "joy".
You may have heard – or you may live in a deep, dark cave without Internet reception – that the keynote of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s Presidential campaign is “joy”.
It’s not clear what this “joy” consists of. The emails that I receive several times a day from the Harris-Walz campaign are all about the dire threats that Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose to democracy and democracy’s most important component, unrestricted abortion, and how those dark forces can be thwarted only if I send Kamala five dollars or seven dollars or twenty-five dollars or as much more as I can afford. “Joyous” seems like not quite le mot juste for her message: that only she and “Tim” stand between America and the Trump reign of terror. A few excerpts from recent Harris-Walz effusions that have landed in my inbox (all emphasis in the originals):
The plan for a second Trump term, written by his closest aides, calls for banning abortion nationwide, slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending the Affordable Care Act, and defunding public schools.
It’s a nightmare!
The stakes couldn’t be higher -- our very democracy hangs in the balance. So please, Edward, this is important.
We can't allow hate to be given safe harbor on our shores. We can’t let the MAGA movement succeed at ripping away our freedoms and destroying our democracy.
Lately, Elon Musk has been added to the ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night:
The richest person in the world is now on Team MAGA.
Musk already ruined Twitter by allowing hate speech and disinformation to flood the platform. Now, Musk is using his vast fortune to try to control our democracy.
Edward, it's simple: We can't let Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, buy this election.
Unlike our opponent, we aren't beholden to billionaires like Musk, to Big Pharma, to Big Oil, or the NRA.
Doesn’t that just make Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” ring in your ears?
So far as I can decipher the Harris-Walz dictionary, “joy” is its synonym for “brat”, “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes” – just what the Resolute Desk needs in a time of economic uncertainty, persistent inflation, uncontrolled illegal immigration, rising antisemitism, encroaching censorship,1 and dangerous wars in Europe and the Middle East.
Some past Presidential campaigns could reasonably be called “joyful” or at least bright and optimistic. That is a natural approach when an incumbent President is seeking reelection at a moment of peace and prosperity. The exemplar is Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercial in 1984:
It's morning again in America.
Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history.
With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years.
This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future.
It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?
Kamala can’t say any of that about the past four years, which is why she now pretends that she had nothing to do with how the country was (badly) governed during that time. She has nothing joyous to applaud. Instead, she cackles and dances and exclaims how much fun it is to be a brat.
Those who are complacent about censorship might want to think about this letter sent by a high-ranking European Union official to Elon Musk “in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform X of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself”.
I have seen excerpts from the Democratic campaign like the ones that you post above and wonder how it is that they say that the Republican campaign is entirely based on fear with a straight face. Maybe it's Botox.