The Non-Entity Who Would Be President

Americans have not been proud of the government that’s supposed to serve them for most of this century so far. The first president to take office in the 21st century was George W. Bush, who left the country divided, at war, and in recession. Barack Obama ran as a candidate of hope that could only come through change—through the repudiation of the previous administration.

After eight years of Obama, however, Americans sought hope in another great change, this time with the untried alternative to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump. Four years later, voters declared the Trump experiment a failure, voting him out without necessarily eagerly embracing Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

And after four years of Biden, the country is desperate again for change, maybe one that will bring “joy,” something that’s been in short supply these past 24 years. Informed voters who are not partisan Democrats know that Kamala Harris is not a force for change at all—she’s a continuation of the Biden administration, which is her administration too. She’s a slippery, cynical, standard-issue politician of the California liberal variety. The first and so far only major media interview of her campaign confirmed this—and also confirmed that Harris won’t be held back in the least by her record or political identity. 

She correctly perceives that voters still want change more than they want any program, whether left or right. So she is running on her strengths as a non-entity who hardly attracted the public’s notice in her four years as vice president. She’s running as the challenger and positioning Trump as the incumbent.

The tell-tale word that Harris kept returning to in her discussion with CNN’s Dana Bash was “decade”: “Turn the page on the last decade,” “I’m talking about an era that started about a decade ago….” Harris is running against the past, but not just against Trump—who was, after all, president for only four of the past ten years. The decade that Harris wants to leave behind includes two years under Obama and four under Biden and Harris herself. But Harris wasn’t the face of those years of disappointment, while Trump was and remains the face of his time. Political scientists say that presidential elections are referendums on the party in power. A referendum on Biden meant certain defeat for Democrats; normally a substitution wouldn’t do much good, merely pitting one non-incumbent against another in the opposing party, with the latter unencumbered by any ties to the recent political past. 

But this election, of course, sees a former president heading the challengers’ ticket, and his identification with a bygone time is stronger than the incumbent vice president’s identification with the present. In her CNN interview, Harris didn’t skip a beat when backtracking on her own record, insisting that her values have never changed even as Bash’s questions and Harris’s answers highlighted the Democrat’s inconsistency. Bash cited Harris’s 2019 support for a federal ban on fracking; Harris replied that experience has changed her mind, and she now sees that fracking need not impede the Green New Deal and the crusade against climate change. She even cast a tie-breaking Senate vote to allow more fracking. 

Republicans would like to say that Harris can’t be trusted. But are voters looking for trust or for change—or at least the illusion of change? Is ours a high-trust society, in which dishonesty is punished, or is our society one that has lost its old faith in leaders and institutions and will buy whatever pill is newly marketed for its afflictions? Harris is a political placebo for a nation whose sense of wellbeing and experience of joy increasingly depend on pharmaceutical hits.

She’s less capable than Joe Biden, which is why Harris is only vice president—even now, when Biden’s debilities have become a national scandal. She wasn’t better fit to be president in 2020, and the Biden who won that year’s election has proved over four agonizing years of inflation and humiliation on the international stage exactly how unfit he was from the beginning. Harris has a weaker grasp of policy than Biden ever did—though yet again, that’s an advantage in a foreshortened campaign where the objective is to commit to as little substance as possible. What she and her running mate did commit to, over and over, was a child tax credit higher than the one the Republican ticket is offering. Democrats are willing to spend more, on more kinds of recipients, than Republicans are. It’s a simple tactic, but it works.

Conservative pundits were wrong about Tim Walz’s role in the CNN interview. He wasn’t there to help Harris talk policy—quite the opposite. Walz was there to make her look trustworthy by contrast. Confronted with his misrepresentations of his military record and his lies about his wife’s receiving in vitro fertilization treatment, Walz hardly denied his wrongdoing but instead tried to short-circuit an examination of his chronic dishonesty by getting emotional: Yes, he gave the impression he had carried firearms in war, but it was only because he cares so much about children who have died because of gun violence! If he was untruthful about his wife’s fertility treatment—which he was—well, don’t you know fertility is a really personal matter (but not so personal that Walz won’t lie about it for political gain, apparently), and, by the way, Republicans are against reproductive rights? 

“I won’t apologize for speaking passionately,” Walz bluffed, when what he was being asked to do was to apologize, or at least account, for his lying. His cynicism and self-serving sentimentality was so brazen that Harris seemed almost forthright and frank by comparison. Mission accomplished. 

The interview showcased the Democratic ticket’s vulnerabilities. Harris comes across as non-threatening, which might be an important difference between her and Hillary Clinton, but it also might not be what Americans want in a commander-in-chief. Her nasally delivery isn’t appealing, and her vague, evasive answers are word salads not so different from those of Joe Bdien, just delivered less haltingly. She appears to recognize how much of a liability her liberal record from her time in the Senate and her abortive 2020 presidential campaign is, so she’s now presenting herself in the most indistinct terms as a moderate, someone who can be trusted on fracking and controlling the border. (Four years ago, as Bash noted, Harris put her hand up at a Democratic debate when the candidates were asked whether border infractions should be “decriminalized.”) 

If Americans knew Harris’s history, they wouldn’t elect her, especially since her history includes the Biden-Harris government’s record of failure. Walz, meanwhile, is a nasty emotional extortionist. But few voters know anything about him beyond the avuncular picture the media has promoted. Bash concluded the interview with feel-good questions about images of Walz’s son and Harris’s grandnieces, the right final note to help a feel-good campaign. 

“Vibes” might get the ticket elected, but they won’t make Harris a capable president. The interview showed her for the nonentity she is. Yet nonentities can become presidents, just not good ones. Harris is a candidate of change, but, if she wins, America is in for four more years like Biden’s.

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