Call it the Pee-wee Herman Strategy.
Kamala Harris opened her campaign by essentially telling her opponent: “I know who you are, but what am I?”
In a general sense, she pursues this on policy and personality. Specifically, she attacks her opponent on the two areas — immigration and a quirky personality — where she looks more vulnerable than a child falling out of a coconut tree. (RELATED: Kamala Harris, Conservative Statesman)
“On the border, the choice is simple,” one of her ubiquitous ads explains. “Kamala Harris supports increasing the number of border patrol agents. Donald Trump blocked a bill to increase the number of border patrol.”
The commercial boasts about Harris’s political position on immigration as it ignores her position within the administration largely responsible for the border crisis. In early 2021, Joe Biden placed Harris in charge of a “Root Causes Strategy” on immigration. Three million reasons, in the form of those illegally crossing the border in 2023, indicate she did not quite address the root causes. The migrant caravans, illegals taking over subsidized hotels and evicting kids from recreation centers, and other such images put an exclamation point on the failure.
The Harris advertisem*nt tells viewers, “There’s two choices in this election: the one who will fix our broken immigration system and the one who’s trying to stop her.”
The word for that is “chutzpah.”
Kamala Is Trying Not to Appear Inauthentic. She’s Failing.
The other lemon she seeks to turn into lemonade involves her personality. Harris strikes as weird, which is not necessarily a bad word even if it is in politics. Part of that weirdness involves projecting that quality upon Donald Trump and JD Vance.
Her announced fondness for Venn diagrams, her shrill, occasionally whiny manner of speaking, her repeated use of the line “the ability to see, unburdened by what has been” as though on par with “nothing to fear but fear itself” or “tear down this wall,” and especially her unprovoked laughter in a manner almost like that of one overmedicated all indicate a woman socially off. She adopts phony accents and infamously relied on child actors for a cringe conversation about outer space.
People who come off as inauthentic make others feel uncomfortable. It’s not that Harris partly grew up outside of the United States in Montreal and Berkeley, or that her parents came from India and Jamaica, or that she has no kids of her own. In 2024, all of this feels more normal and may even work to Harris’s electoral benefit. It’s that Harris is that person at the party who repeats the punchline after not eliciting a laugh and who speaks to adults as though toddlers. It’s hard to take someone seriously when they respond to serious issues with jokes and non sequitur laughter. (RELATED: Vance Is Right. Our Society Is Plagued by Childless Cat Ladies.)
To deal with her weirdness problem, Harris and her votaries invoke the “W” word to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, and Sen. Chris Murphy all applied “weird” to Trump in recent days.
“These guys are just weird,” Walz said on MSNBC of the Republican ticket. “They’re running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something. That’s what they’re doing. That’s just not what people are interested in.”
The talking orders came from the ventriloquists in the Harris campaign.
A press release recently asked, “Is Donald Trump ok?” and “Trump is old and quite weird?” (that question mark seems quite weird?).
Last week, the campaign tweeted: “JD Vance is weird and creepy.”
The candidate herself maintains that “some of what he and his running mate are saying, well, it’s just plain weird. I mean that’s the box you put that in.”
Blackjack players rarely double-down on twelves and rarely win the hand when they do. Politics isn’t cards. Sometimes political players turn a losing hand into a winning one.
The playground beats the casino as a venue more comparable to political campaigns. And there, an I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I response to insults, like “I’m rubber, your glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you,” works. Harris hopes this playground deflection results in her presidential election.
Daniel J. Flynn
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018),The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue CollarIntellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), AConservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (PrimaForum, 2002). His articles haveappeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.
