Kamala Harris brought the four-day Democratic National Convention in Chicago to a close Thursday night with a platitudinous speech accepting the Democrats’ nomination for the presidency of the United States. Harris admitted that her life had taken many “unexpected” paths, but none has been so strange as her replacement of President Joe Biden on the Democratic Party’s 2024 campaign ticket during his final months in office in what amounted to a palace coup. Biden’s declining mental and physical state, which attracted concerns from the time of his June debate against Republican nominee and former president Donald J. Trump, boiled over last month when leading Democrats and Biden’s own top advisers informed him that he had no realistic path to reelection and that continuing his campaign would harm party unity and the electoral prospects of other Democratic candidates for public office.
Harris took over with Biden’s support on July 21 and immediately benefited from the windfall of a mainstream media campaign that minimized her weaknesses and liabilities and maximized her appeal around a rallying cry that she was the heroine of a renewed prophecy: a secular angel and sanctified woman of color capable of defeating Trump and restoring America to what, paradoxically enough, she described in her speech as a ‘nanny-state’ kind of “freedom.” Despite the lack of any democratic selection process to ground Harris’s legitimacy as the presidential nominee, speaker after speaker rose before a roaring audience to praise her to the hilt while a crowd of partisan activists succumbed to an incontinent mawkishness.
Of course, not all Democrats are happy with this state of affairs. In a jarring contrapuntal code to the four nights of Democratic celebrations, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of the young 1960s president and now an independent, took to the media on Friday, August 24th to decry the lack of democratic action in his former party’s selection process. More dramatically still, he announced the suspension of his independent election campaign and endorsed Trump—at least in the battleground states. Kennedy cast the alliance with Trump as “a unity party,” an arrangement that would “allow us to disagree publicly and privately and seriously.”
Kennedy’s decision had been anticipated. Earlier in the week, his running mate Nicole Shanahan, a lifelong liberal Democrat whose positions have recently changed, stated that RFK Jr.’s ticket might “join forces” with Trump to spite the Democrats, who have pursued an aggressive legal strategy to disqualify third-party tickets that could siphon votes from Harris. The targets of these challenges have included Kennedy’s campaign, which has been by far the most popular among them. Kennedy’s campaign claims that the Democrats have devoted over $100 million to this purpose and thereby forced him to spend much of his time and money defending his ballot access in court. Kennedy has further alleged that the Democrats have conspired with mainstream media outlets to deny him coverage comparable to that received by earlier third-party candidates of similar popularity and limit his poll numbers so that he would not qualify for presidential debates.
As the story gained wings, Trump, whose campaign and supporters have reportedly been in contact with Kennedy’s camp for months, remarked that he was “open” to an agreement to gain Kennedy’s support, potentially including appointing him to a significant role in any new administration.
Statistical analyses suggest that Kennedy’s supporters will break for Trump by significant margins as opposed to Harris, a factor that could help the Republican nominee gather additional votes in contested states, where he and Harris are tied locally as well as nationally.
Besides, it is in all likelihood Trump who has the better chance, particularly given this fresh Kennedy endorsement, of winning over independents. After all, the room-service journalism and feigned joyousness fueling the Harris campaign have nothing whatsoever to do with her record. One could have watched the entire convention almost without even realizing that Harris has been serving as vice president for over three years and seven months. In her acceptance speech, she mentioned Biden only twice and left the distinct impression that in her grotesque attempts to look regal amid all the “joy,” she was running as a challenger to his unpopular incumbency. Why else would she have complained about home, gasoline, and supermarket prices, which rose precipitously under Biden while she was vice president and did nothing? The same could be said for the border, of which she was nominally “czar” from 2021 but likewise did nothing to reform, protect, or defend as millions of illegal immigrants swarmed into America. Or the environment, or health care, or guns. No tough questions emerged, and Harris appears intent to continue in her candidacy without either granting interviews or taking unscripted questions.
Likely for these reasons, neither Harris nor anyone else discussed her vice-presidential work beyond vague references to policies she mentioned but failed to articulate. She promised unity, prosperity, and peace on no discernible basis and without any accounting for either the costs or the actual work that would have to be done. She even hinted at her purported ability to bring peace in the Middle East, even as the Biden foreign policy team, which Harris says she will replace should she be elected, comes back yet again with no agreement in place.
As damning as all this is, it rests beside the point. The true purpose of the convention and Harris’s speech was to develop a campaign narrative smearing Trump as the de facto incumbent and the man to blame for all national divisions and international weakness—as though the former president of the United States were nothing but a bumbling fool in the Oval Office, instead of a dynamic defender of his country’s borders and the architect of the first real Middle East peace plan since the 1990s. And of course, whether Americans want to admit it or not, Harris was chosen for her race and gender far above any appreciation of her experience or ability.
As the polls tighten, election day looms nearly ten weeks in the distance. All that has happened in the past ten weeks has the feel of an odd but dreamy prologue. What follows up to November and beyond could be a frightening and violent future, or at least one characterized by more disorienting twists and turns than the world’s leading democracy needs or, increasingly, can afford to bear. America’s major political parties, however, know how to play the game to get what they want and should not be discounted to take major risks in the pursuit of power.
