HANSON: Can Harris’s cynical, run-out-the clock campaign succeed?

Published Sep 22, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris steps off Air Force Two as she arrives at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, N.Y., on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. Photo by KENA BETANCUR /AFP via Getty Images

Cynically running out the clock has been the overarching principle of the entire abbreviated 105-day presidential campaign of Vice-President Kamala Harris — ever since U.S. President Joe Biden, at the 11th hour, dropped out in July.

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Harris seems unwilling or unable to answer any impromptu question that she has not been previously prepped for. Her answers at the debate were memorized and canned. They never addressed the questions asked.

Her single, 11-minute post-debate Philadelphia interview was a shipwreck of dodging and dissimulating — even though the host was sympathetically left wing.

Even socialist Bernie Sanders pointed out that for Harris to get elected, she must temporarily disown her lifelong leftist credentials.

As vice-president, she must further deny co-ownership of the unpopular record of the Biden-Harris administration.

Left unstated is that whether she wins the presidency — or loses it and continues as vice-president for another three months — nonetheless she will inevitably revert back to her hardcore, lifelong leftist beliefs.

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In addition, Harris has reconstructed her privileged upbringing as a child of two PhDs living in a posh Montreal neighbourhood into a struggling, middle-class Oakland childhood.

How can she stage such a complete makeover and contemptuously count on the voting public to be so easily deceived?

She avoids all news conferences, one-on-one nationally broadcast interviews and town halls. And like Biden, she will debate only on leftist venues with impartial pro-Harris moderators.

When asked to provide the details of her past responsibility for the open border, inflationary economy, spiralling crime, attacks on fossil fuels and collapsing foreign policy, Harris smiles, makes hand gestures and dodges. She changes the subject to her empathetic personality, her “joy” campaign and her iconic profile as a supposedly dynamic Black woman.

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When pressed, Harris outsources the task of squaring her hypocrisies and subterfuges to the stonewalling campaign, Democratic surrogates and the media.

Harris is also certainly not running on her demonstrable experience, vision or intelligence as much as she is not Trump (or, for that matter, her former partner Biden.)

To make that distinction stark, Harris must demonize and bait Trump nonstop and make the country fear him.

So she paints Trump as a racist and violent insurrectionist, not a former president whose four-year term saw a superior foreign policy, economy, border and security than during the Biden-Harris term.

Instead, Harris has repeatedly claimed Trump is a dictator and a threat to democracy — as if he had politically weaponized the FBI, CIA, DOJ or IRS, as had former president Barack Obama and Biden.

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Trump as Hitler has become a staple Democrat smear for the past decade.

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That vicious caricature is so entrenched that major Democratic figures assume it’s OK to joke about, or seriously call for, Trump’s demise.

So Harris’s current prominent adviser David Plouffe years ago warned the nation that “it is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

Just last year, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-NY, claimed that Trump “is destructive to our democracy and … he has to be eliminated.”

Even after an assassin sought to kill Trump last week, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025. We must stop them.”

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Harris’s dehumanizing of Trump, outsourcing the campaign to the media, avoiding all public dialogue and temporarily reinventing one’s politics and biography have taken a toll on the country.

Harris was coronated the Democratic candidate without entering a primary or winning a single delegate by vote. Some 14 million Democratic primary voters were reduced to irrelevancy.

Like the 2020 Biden campaign, Harris has nationalized a new kind of cynical campaign in which leftist candidates seek for a few months to deceive the public into thinking they are centrist and moderate — until elected.

Avoiding all cross-examination and outsourcing the campaign to the obsequious media is now the new norm.

Most news stories deemed unhelpful to Harris — the left-wing, pro-Harris politics of the recent would-be Trump assassin; the distortion that dozens of bomb threats were called in against Springfield, Ohio, schools by Trump supporters when most, if not all, were perpetrated by foreign actors; or prominent Democrats before and after the recent assassination attempt blaming Trump for being the target of an assassin — are suppressed by the media.

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The recent two foiled assassination attempts on Trump logically follow a near-decade pattern of trying to destroy rather than outvote him.

The Russian collusion hoax, the laptop disinformation con, the two impeachments, the effort to remove Trump from some 16 state ballots and the attempt to jail and bankrupt Trump through five criminal and civil “lawfare” indictments and suits also led to the hateful climate of Trump assassination attempts.

Harris thinks her delays, deceptions and vilifications for the next 47 days will ensure her victory.

But if so, it will be because she, her stealth campaign and her self-proclaimed guardians of democracy have been willing to systematically destroy it.

— Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, from Basic Books. You can reach him by emailing [email protected].

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