The Harris Coronation Risks Repeating the Biden Mistake

Having succeeded in muscling an incumbent president out of his reelection campaign, Democratic power brokers and their media allies are ready to attempt their next feat of strength: propelling Vice President Kamala Harris to victory over the former President Donald Trump.

The defining issue of this election may not be the choice between Trump and Harris but elite narrative-shaping power and its limits.

One of the most absurd pieces of spin since the president was put out to pasture is the contention that the media’s anti-Biden blitz proves its political neutrality. But press coverage of Biden only grew unrelentingly hostile after the June 27 debate made it impossible to deny his frailties and, even more importantly, Democrats arrived at a consensus that he could not beat Trump.

Just days before that debate disaster, the New York Times endorsed the “cheap fakes” dismissal of various video clips of Biden looking old and out of it, reporting that in addition to Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the president was up against the “distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.”

By July 2, when Democrats were in full-blown post-debate panic, the New York Times reported on the increased frequency of Biden’s “lapses,” acknowledging that “by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Mr. Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago.” Some of the examples cited included the same events described as deceptively edited video content in the previous reporting. 

There were exceptions, of course. There was a much-discussed Wall Street Journal story published in early June that arguably skewed too Republican in its on-the-record sourcing but served a valuable purpose in getting Democrats on the record about the age issue as they disputed the reporting. Some of the same Democrats who pushed back against the piece when it first appeared turned against Biden in the days and weeks after the debate.

In some cases, the tone of the coverage shifted after the debate because Democratic sources were more willing to talk about Biden’s decline, editors became more comfortable running stories with blind quotes about Biden slip-ups, and that some of the on-the-record quotes that once only came from Republicans were now coming from Democrats. 

But even this suggests Biden was wrapped in layers of protection that Democrats and legacy media institutions decided to withdraw. Now that protective bubble is being installed around Harris.

The Democrats’ rush to coronate Harris rather than have a competitive open convention is in many ways a repeat of foregoing a competitive primary process when the imperative was pushing Biden across the finish line. Democracy, its self-described defenders know, is messy. A chaotic convention, like a top-tier Biden primary opponent, might only weaken the incumbent or quasi-incumbent without producing a better nominee. A lack of competition means that any flaws of the favored candidate may not be litigated until it is too late, however.

All of the people who pretended Biden was perfectly fine until the debate pierced that delusion are now singing Harris’s praises as a generational political talent on par with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. The number of people who really believed the latter on July 20 isn’t much bigger than those who subscribed to the former on June 28. 

Yet the media and Democratic leaders are not invincible. If that were the case, Trump would never have become president and would not be a viable candidate eight years later. Biden trailed Trump, and Democrats were beginning to lose confidence in his campaign strategy, months before the debate. A poll found that 94 percent of Democrats under the age of 30 already wanted to replace Biden as the nominee over two years ago. 

Harris is running substantially the same campaign with the same people Biden was. She is attempting to frame the race as a referendum on Trump rather than the Biden-Harris administration. The optics of a woman who has been a prosecutor talking about abortion and Trump felonies are better for Democrats. It is also a telling retreat from the incumbents’ actual record. Harris’s first campaign ad contained zero mentions of Biden or anything she herself had done as vice president.

That’s not to say Harris cannot be unburdened by what has been. Reporters who once covered her as a joke known for churning staff and frequent gaffes will now speak of her historic candidacy. Trump has for the first time in his political career experienced weeks of more favorable coverage than his Democratic opponent. (Spare me your “but her emails” false equivalency.) That’s gone, and likely not coming back even if Harris turns out to not be the Democrats’ savior.

Democrats now have hope and energy where they once had none. The campaign no longer feels like a slow death march to certain defeat. Morose Democratic operatives’ predictions of Biden’s electoral failure were on the verge of becoming self-fulfilling. Harris is at least free of all that.

Whether the same operatives and a compliant media can will her into the White House against a disciplined opposition determined to make use of all the material that is there, assuming that is how Trump and the GOP actually behave, is another question.

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