Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Kamala Harris is both a mediocrity and a phony, but you have to give her credit: unlike Donald Trump, who botched the task at the GOP convention, Harris nailed the mission she had for her Democratic nomination speech. That is, the vice president—one of the most unpopular in U.S. history—did an impressive job of re-introducing herself to the American people, and attempting to shake off her reputation as a national joke.

“There are no second acts in American lives,” the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said. But it’s not true. America is the land of re-invention—and since an ailing Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race on July 21, we have seen the gleaming machinery of the American dream factory transform Harris from a wine-slurping progressive dimwit from San Francisco into Obama 2.0.

Europeans should not be fooled. But they will likely be, because they want to be delivered from the world-historical catastrophe that they hold Donald Trump to be. Remember, a Norwegian jury in 2009 awarded Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for the achievement of (checks notes) … not being George W. Bush. That’s how gullible Europeans can be—so eager to project their hopes and fears onto America.

It is also the case that Europeans are captive to what their news media tell them about American life. Journalist Malin Ekman explains why she quit her plum position as the America correspondent for a major Swedish daily, saying that her editors came to see her job as not reporting the news, but curating a progressive narrative about American life and politics.

“Swedish reporting about the U.S. is, like in many other parts of the Western world, saturated with the narrative that Donald Trump is the enemy of American democracy,” Ekman writes. “Journalists embrace this view, believing they will be on the right side of history.”

Ekman says European journalists routinely suppress news unfavorable to the Left, such as how Democrats in power have used the legal system to persecute Republican opponents, and how tech giants colluded with the Biden administration to manage the news in a left-wing direction. And they have suppressed or ignored news judged helpful to the Right, like the Biden Administration’s failure to control the U.S.-Mexico border, and the explosion of antisemitism among American progressives.

This is hardly surprising. Mainstream American journalists do it all the time; in fact, the downright sycophantic coverage of Kamala Harris since she became the Democrats’ choice a month ago would make old Pravda and Izvestia hands blush. But in the United States, people who suspect they aren’t being told the truth by the media have plenty of online outlets they can consult for alternative views.

First, though, you have to mistrust the reporting. Living in Budapest, I see all the time how skewed American reporting on the European Right is, in a way I didn’t when I lived in the U.S. If the only sources of information one has about politics in a foreign land have achieved what you might call ‘narrative harmony,’ then ordinary people have no way of knowing what they don’t know.

So, let’s talk about what Europeans may not know about Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz. Most Europeans certainly will not be told these things amid the propaganda blitzkrieg between now and Election Day in November. And let’s face it, even some European conservatives find Trump so distasteful that they are eager to believe the best about Harris—especially the idea that she really might be Obama in a pants suit.

The ‘Vibe’ Thing

After Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the race, Harris’s handlers withdrew her from press availability. The vice president who would now bear the presidential standard for the Democratic Party was suddenly unavailable to answer reporters’ questions. Harris can give a good speech, but she’s pretty bad speaking extemporaneously. The many memes and jokes about her come from the moronic statements she has made in public appearances over the years. Campaign strategists sensibly wanted to keep candidate Harris under wraps until she could re-present herself to the American people in her convention speech.

If you knew little or nothing about Kamala Harris prior to that speech, you would think that she is a vivacious, attractive center-left politician who embodies kindness and joy (a word her campaign loves to use) and sensible, all-American beliefs.

The “kindness and joy” point should be a small one, but we are told that this will be a “vibe” election, meaning that many voters will choose based on how Harris and Trump make them feel. The Harris-Walz messaging indeed projects a pair of lovable scamps out to defend old-fashioned American decency against two mean, corrupt weirdos, Trump and J.D. Vance. Harris’s bubbly likability is a façade. In fact, Harris has a behind-the-scenes reputation as a high-maintenance diva. As vice president, she has had an unusually high staff turnover, with burned-out aides leaving feeling chewed up and spit out.

“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” a person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run told Politico, in a 2021 report. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”

To be sure, Donald Trump is famously a difficult boss. And yes, the presidency is not a therapy session. Still, when Kamala Harris gasses on, as she did in her convention speech, about the need for charity, and about the mandate to treat others as you want to be treated, it is all an act to create, well, a trippy California vibe that contrasts with Trump’s meanness.

Similarly with Tim Walz, the campaign wants people to believe that he’s a likable ‘everyman’ from the American Midwest. They are casting him as a familiar American figure: the small-town high school coach who shines most brightly under the lights of the Friday night football game. Harris referred to her running mate Thursday night as “Coach Walz.” In his convention address, Walz said:

Team, it’s the fourth quarter, we’re down a field goal, but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And, boy, do we have the right team.

In fact, Walz was an assistant coach, not the mastermind who turned a losing team into state champions. Europeans might wonder what this has to do with the man’s qualifications for the presidency. Again, this is about engineering a vibe. Garrison Keillor, a Minnesotan who, before his fall from grace in the #MeToo moment, built an entire career as an avuncular storyteller of small-town life, and an avatar of ‘Minnesota Nice.’ However, to read Keillor’s 2004 political testimony, “Homegrown Democrat,” is to encounter a moralistic ideologue who overflows with bitterness toward conservatives.

That’s Tim Walz too. Despite his folk-libertarian “Mind your own damn business” line, as Minnesota governor, Coach set up a so-called “snitch line” with which citizens could secretly report to the state on neighbors who weren’t following COVID protocol. He snapped viciously in his convention speech at opponent J.D. Vance for going to Yale Law school—as if a hillbilly kid from a badly broken home who overcame immense obstacles and landed in America’s top law school is a sellout for achieving the American dream. Enforcing conformity by social shaming those who don’t accept their assigned social roles is the ugly shadow side of small-town life.

The Past Four Years

A new poll shows that the economy and immigration are the top issues for American voters this fall. That’s bad news for Kamala Harris, who is pretending that she has not been the No. 2 figure in the administration that has been running things for the past four years.

In her convention address, Harris promised vaguely to expand economic opportunities for the American people, an called strengthening the middle class “a defining goal of my presidency.” No wonder she wants to distance herself from Bidenomics. A May 2024 Gallup poll revealed that Americans, straining against years of Biden-era inflation, have historically low levels of confidence in this administration’s handling of the economy.

Harris also breezed past her greatest weakness: the dismal situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. She said on Thursday, “Let me be clear, after decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border.”

Oh? Two months into his presidency, Joe Biden tasked Kamala Harris with fixing the shambolic situation on the border. She failed miserably, with waves of migrants rolling across the border in numbers not seen in decades.

The U.S. news media have been trying to cover for Harris’s catastrophic failure in the one specific portfolio Biden gave her (for example in this Time article), but it’s going to be a hard sell to American voters. Europeans who may not be well informed by their media should imagine what it would have been like had Angela Merkel, post-2015, tried to sell herself to German voters as solid and reliable on migration.

Law and Order Prosecutor

Before entering the U.S. Senate in 2017, Harris was the California attorney general, and before that, a San Francisco prosecutor. On Thursday night, she characterized her tenure in those offices as fighting for the little guy. The record does not support this. Indeed, liberal law professor Lara Bazelon highlighted Harris’s sorry record of fighting “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

The rap against Harris is that she sees the law as a tool to reward friends and punish enemies. As state attorney general, Harris said she would not enforce Proposition 8, a voter-approved law that outlawed same-sex marriage. It is true that the American system grants prosecutors a certain amount of discretion, but it is also troubling that Harris sometimes views that law as something that should be judged by political considerations.

In her convention speech, Harris railed against Trump’s “explicit intent to set free violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol.” She’s talking about the possibility that Trump might commute the sentences of some who received harsh penalties for participating in the January 6th riots. Yet Kamala Harris herself actually contributed to freeing violent extremists—that is, violent extremists arrested as part of the mass protests against ‘racial injustice.’

During the ‘emotional catharsis’ following the George Floyd killing, Harris, then a candidate for the presidency, publicly called on the public to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which provided bail money to those arrested in the protests and riots.

It later emerged that some of these criminals Harris’s fundraising helped spring from jail went on to commit more serious crimes.

What’s more, as the newly elected progressive governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz dithered as Minneapolis burned in the Floyd riots, waiting a day to deploy the National Guard, despite pleas from the city’s mayor. A subsequent state investigation estimated property losses at $500 million.

This is why Harris is focusing with laser-like intensity on Donald Trump’s criminal record. On Thursday, she told convention-goers that Trump “was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans, and separately found liable for committing sexual abuse.”

She’s talking about Trump’s civil and criminal convictions in New York state. Both have been widely denounced as an example of ‘lawfare’—that is, of Democrats finding progressive-friendly legal venues to wage highly dubious prosecutions of political opponents. Law professor Jonathan Turley was one of many high-profile legal commentator expressing shock and dismay at the highly-politicized Trump trial on fraud charges.

European conservatives who have been appalled by the two-tier justice system that Keir Starmer’s Labour government has implemented in the United Kingdom should reflect on something European media will probably hide from them: that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party have exactly the same instincts.

Abortion Extremism

Europeans are frequently shocked to learn how permissive American abortion laws are. Even though Europeans are traditionally more liberal about sexual morality than Americans, most European abortion laws have been more restrictive than American ones. That was the case until the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. Roe had which, in effect, guaranteed virtually unrestricted abortion access from coast to coast.

It is important to understand what the 2022 Dobbs ruling did, and did not do. The High Court found that there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution granting a right to abortion. This ruling implies too that there is nothing in the Constitution banning abortion either. Dobbs simply returned the issue to each state to set its own laws. Despite Kamala Harris’s claim Thursday that Dobbs served to “take away reproductive freedom,” in fact the ruling only shifted responsibility to state legislatures.

As a result, progressive states have passed laws restoring the pre-Dobbs status quo. More conservative states have put into place restrictions on abortion access. In no state is abortion banned. In all states, voters can set abortion policy through their elected officials. What Dobbs did was simply to return the abortion issue to democratic accountability.

Donald Trump has moderated his abortion view somewhat, to the dismay of pro-life campaigners. But the Democrats have maintained their abortion extremism, promising in their 2024 platform to codify Roe’s permissive regime into federal law. As gruesome as it is, the party’s view is that abortion should be legal up until the very moment of birth. Even more extreme, Gov. Walz vetoed a Minnesota bill that required physicians to try to save the lives of babies born during failed abortion procedures.

Further evidence of the party’s mania for abortion: during the Chicago convention, a Planned Parenthood medical van sat parked outside the arena, offering free abortion pills (and vasectomies) to anyone who asked. Later, a “Hotties For Harris” party handed out abortion pills (or more likely, facsimiles) like candy.

Speaking about abortion, Harris said Thursday, “Friends, I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives, especially on matters of heart and home.”

Wokeness? What’s That?

It was striking to hear what Harris did not say in her convention address. She downplayed the more neuralgic policies we call ‘wokeness.’ Nobody doubts that Harris fully supports extreme policies to advance LGBT rights and minority privileges, defined as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But she didn’t talk much about them, and probably won’t between now and November.

Europeans should know, though, that the Biden-Harris administration went as far as it could to promote transgenderism. It rewrote federal civil rights law governing women in educational institutions to require schools to treat transgendered people according to their self-identified sex – even in women’s athletic competitions. It supports overturning state bans on sex-change surgeries for minors. As governor, Tim Walz enthusiastically signed into law a bill making Minnesota a “sanctuary state” for those seeking transgender treatment—including minors. Even as European countries are backing away from progressive gender-transition policies for children and minors, the Democrat-led United States is still on the march. After all, Joe Biden has declared the transgender cause “the civil rights issue of our time”—and there is every indication that his would-be successor will continue the crusade.

‘Vibing’ with Europe

“America,” Harris told her convention and home audience, “let us show each other and the world who we are, and what we stand for: freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness, and endless possibilities.”

Sure, it’s boilerplate campaign jabber, but you get the vibe. The Harris For President campaign must be understood as almost entirely a response to the issues raised in this late 2023 Atlantic magazine article titled “The Kamala Harris Problem.” In brief, it explores the widely-held view that the vice-president is a tongue-tied lightweight who is in way over her head. Harris’s verbal word salads have even been mocked on liberal programs like the Daily Show, which in this montage compared them to the ditzy locutions of the title character in Veep:

The Harris campaign hope is that they will be able to ‘vibe’ so intensely from now till Election Day that voters will be jarred out of focusing on substantive issues, and on the candidate’s considerable liabilities. With the media’s unfailing support, and the backing of the same establishment that brought us the Russiagate hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop denial, and tech giants manipulating the algorithms—they just might succeed in memory-holing the hapless realities of the giggly Golden Girl.

Don’t fall for it, and don’t let the European press intoxicate you with giddy California dreamin’ to chase the MAGA nightmare away. The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is a great surf anthem, but a pathetic excuse for a presidential campaign.