I had already decided to open this Saturday’s Ethics Games with a post on this topic when I read this section in NYT left-wing columnist Nate Cohn’s (gleeful?) column this morning about a Times-Sienna poll that has Kamala Harris suddenly topping Trump in several “battleground states” where he has been leading Biden. Cohn wrote,
…One way to think about her position is that she has become something like a “generic” Democrat. This might sound like an insult, but it’s really not. In fact, nothing is more coveted. An unnamed generic candidate — whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican — almost always fares better in the polls than named candidates, who are inevitably burdened by all the imperfections voters learn about in the process of a campaign.
Isn’t that wonderful? Cohn clearly thinks so. He also explains that in earlier polls an “anyone but Trump” hypothetical generic candidate beat the former President by 10 points in these same states. Harris now leads Trump by five, meaning only half of the “anyone but Trump” voters have no clue who Kamala Harris is….but hey, that might just be enough! So the Democratic Party, in its fervor to save democracy, are going to try to keep it that way.
Can you guess why Abe is at the top of this post? I bet you can!
I resolved to discuss this early yesterday, when the same Kamala surrogate—I had never seen him before, but he was a youngish black man and appropriately glib—was making the rounds of the news networks (even Fox News) arguing that Harris never has to agree to be interviewed and answer questions without a script or a teleprompter, and there isn’t anything wrong with that. After all, he argued while several talking heads expressed exasperation (notably Harris Faulkner on Fox and S.E. Cupp on CNN), the public doesn’t need spontaneous answers to learn what they need to know. Kamala Harris doesn’t do as well off script (Ya think?), so why should she agree to present herself in less than the best light?
“So they really are going to try it!” I thought. They won one election by hiding a demented fool in the basement with the Wuhan virus as an ally, and now the Democrats think that they can do the same thing with Kamala, with the Axis news media’s assistance, of course. The Times’ latest poll and Cohn’s cynical analysis will only encourage them.
Observations:
1. The theory depends on a rather precarious balance. Things are rotten, but Joe Biden still carries the mantle of President and also the voters’ ire for the awful mess virtually everywhere. The idea is that Harris can plausibly say, “Hey, I didn’t do it! I’ll do better!” and duck all responsibility for the administration she was part of and supported and the President she kept claiming was sharp as a metaphorical tack and doing wonderful things. Of course it’s flagrant hypocrisy and dishonesty. But Democrats are counting on the large group of voters beneath the 100 IQ mark who never were taught critical thinking in our failing public schools.
2. The reason the blatantly dishonest strategy seems promising is that, as always, most of the public doesn’t pay any attention to Vice-Presidents—they never have, and they never will. Oh, we noticed that Harris was a babbling, socialist, radical fool long ago, but we are not the majority, not even close. Biden and the Democrats counted on public ignorance and apathy when they nominated Harris as the DEI Vice-President. She was sort-of black, obviously female and younger than dirt, and that was enough. Suddenly, President Biden’s forced withdrawal made Harris the candidate, and again, all that most of the non-Trumpy public focused on was that she was sort-of black, female, younger than the senile President and his also too-ancient opponent, and, most importantly, a Democrat. Sold!
3. Harris’s speeches so far have been almost parodies of generic campaign generalizations. She’s going to fix the economy! Make housing affordable! Get guns off the street! Save the world from cliamte change! Protect women’s right to “reproductive health”! Bring Americans together! A chatbot would say the same things; so did Obama, whose entire first campaign consisted of promising rainbows, lollipops and unicorns.As the late Harry Reid reminds us from Hell, “It works!”
4. This is signature significance of many things, all of them ominous and sinister. The Democratic Party of today cheats; “by any means necessary” and “the ends justify the means” are its operating principles. Ten years ago they passed a massive, misleading, over-hyped health care bill that almost nobody read, President Obama lied about, and that the Democratic Speaker fatuously argued had to be passed so everyone could learn what was in it. Now that same strategy is being applied to Democratic Presidential candidates. It is a purely totalitarian technique, because, as Ethics Alarms has been pointing out relentlessly, this is a party that aspires to single party rule, an abject compliant population, and Politburo-style leadership. It uses the tactics of Big Brother and Goebbels, particularly in its distortion of language. It has corrupted the legal system to make dissent and opposition literally dangerous. It presumes that most Americans are lazy, inattentive, uncritical, ignorant and stupid. The Party also relies on its allies in the media and Big Tech to distort, manipulate and censor news and information. Harris’s current campaign strategy relies on all of this.
5. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, he has never been a stealth candidate. Despite the Big Lie (Goebbels) that Trump lies all the time and about everything, he has been more direct and open about his principles and beliefs than any Presidential candidate of either party since Ronald Reagan. Unlike Harris (and Biden. And Obama. And Hillary…), Trump has never tried to hide his character and personality either: he’s openly obnoxious, misogynist, narcissistic, intemperate, imprudent—well, you presumably know the list. The point is that voters who vote for him know what they are voting for. That’s the way democracy works: voting for mystery candidates who only show their real motives and objectives after they are in power is how you get the Third Reich.
6. I have to say, Democrats deserve some kind of admiration if they can pull this off. They are using fascist, Orwellian, Soviet methods all while they claim to be protecting democracy. Wow. Of course, it only can work if the nation is dominated by historically, civically, ignorant boobs. But so far…
7. Back to Lincoln. I do not think this audacious strategy can work, not any more. It has worked so far because Harris has only been the Democratic candidate for a little more than a week, and the Trump-hating Axis along with the Trump-wishing-the-Republicans-had-someone-less-repulsive-but-Biden-is-hopeless segment of the public have been taking a long sigh of relief. Hiding what and who candidates really were was once easy, before mass media, the internet and social media. The Whigs ran an obscure War of 1812 general who was a wealthy, college-educated planter whose family was politically and historically prominent, and presented him to voters as a humble everyman born in a log cabin in the wilderness—and it worked! William Henry Harrison soundly defeated Van Buren (and promptly died a month after taking office).
Harris can’t hide much longer. The convention is likely to be a chaotic spectacle with anti-Israel protesters running amuck in the streets. Conventions always expose the best and worst of the nominees, who are lulled into carelessness by all the fake love. (Remember John Kerry’s cringy salute?). There is a lot more worst of Harris than best.
8. Unlike Obama, and unlike Trump, Harris is incapable of not alienating her audience when she is off script. First of all, she just isn’t very bright. She is insecure, and that infamous laugh is the tell: women and girls who use laughter and giggles like that are signalling that they feel uncomfortable, and seek to cheat by encouraging a positive reaction to laughter as an alternative to disagreement. Harris always asks “Right?” when she is making some assertion. She’s hopeless, a walking Peter Principle. Her career has been spent in jobs, roles and positions she achieved by means unrelated to merit, she knows it, and relies on the old tricks that got her this far. Trying to hide is an admission that the tricks won’t work this time, and she’s right about that. But it’s her only chance (other than Trump doing or saying something spectacularly stupid, which is always a possibility).
Otherwise, Abe’s got this.
Ethics Alarms 
Let Van from his coolers of silver drink wine, and lounge on his cushioned settee. Our man on his buckeye bench can recline, content with hard cider is he.
Bingo. Thanks for that: I was tempted to get into the details of that dishonest campaign, but resisted.
I’ve concluded the Democrats are simply the bureaucratic state writ large. In the current model, a president is simply a ventriloquist’s dummy operated by all the Harvard educated experts from behind the scenes. Nothing to see here. Harris is the perfect “leader” for a bureaucracy: she’ll only do as she’s told because she’s too dumb to do anything else, much as Joe was too demented to go off script. Personality and individuality and original ideas are not good for business. I blame this on the people who got Obama elected. They are the ones who’ve run the Biden administration and will run the Harris administration.
Exactly. Trump’s biggest sin is that he tried to be president. Biden was elected because the Democrats want government by the unelected governing class. Harris is the perfect puppet. There is no illusion that she would be president.
“It presumes that most Americans are lazy, inattentive, uncritical, ignorant and stupid. The Party also relies on its allies in the media and Big Tech to distort, manipulate and censor news and information. Harris’s current campaign strategy relies on all of this.”
Let me offer a slightly different perspective. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently given social media traffic I’ve seen from progressive friends (and yes, I do have friends who happen to be progressive).
Consider the performance of a skilled magician. The magician’s act works because it’s based on certain physical skills and, essentially, the recognition of a human tendency.
One of the physical skills is the art of misdirection. Good magicians make us focus our attention on something that distracts us from seeing another physical skill that might give away the game.
Moved to the political sphere, misdirection is a piece of cake when you’ve got CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the NYT, the WaPo and plenty of others – including campaign surrogates – at your beck and call to do the misdirecting. You don’t need a buxom lass in a skimpy dress.
But the human tendency: that’s something altogether different. The bottom line is that we WANT to be fooled. We WANT to believe we’re seeing something that appears impossible. In the realm of a magic performance, this delights us. In the realm of politics, it’s dangerous. Our hypothetical magician – and the cabal leading the Democratic Party – are both well aware of this. The difference is that the magician uses these tactics to entertain a crowd and make a buck. Politicians do it to grab and maintain power.
It isn’t simply the case that the audience – for the performance, or the politics – is necessarily stupid (though it’s a safe bet that exactly half of the potential audience is of below-average intelligence). It’s because they WANT TO BELIEVE. I have seen, over the past few years, ample outcries from good and decent people that Joe Biden is a good dude, that Donald Trump is Evil Incarnate, that Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation, that January 6 was an actual insurrection instead of being an incredibly stupid riot. Millions of Americans believe these things because they want to.
Now, they really want to believe that Kamala Harris is the saintly figure she’s currently being portrayed as, that Tim Walz is a kindly caring guy (instead of a ditherer who let his state’s biggest city burn), and that Trump is still Evil Incarnate. Quite a turnaround in roughly a month! But it’s working because they WANT to believe. Unfortunately, much of the media wants to believe exactly the same things. There are others who know better but don’t want to render their social calendars blank, which puts them in league with the political structure selling the lie in the first place.
What’s happening is disheartening and frightening – but I don’t agree that stupidity is entirely at fault. Avarice and lust for power is certainly calling the shots, and yes, there are people too indoctrinated or ignorant to perform any amount of critical thinking. But in between those two groups is where the real danger lies: in those who desperately want to believe, even when there’s ample evidence that they shouldn’t.
As a former practitioner, however, I assure you that while the audience wants to be fooled, poor magicians get exposed, and their audiences are not forgiving. At all.
Aye, of course they do. And as you know, those who are exposed are unskilled with misdirection. The good ones have it down to a science. So do the Dems.
All the misdirection in the world can’t make a good illusion out of a dud. And Kamala is a dud.
Wow, every time the Times is mentioned here in an appropriately negative light, A Friend shows up. It’s like clockwork, or saying “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary” three times in the dark in front of a mirror. It’s both boring and funny, since denying the NYT bias is like denying that the Earth goes around the Sun.
Oh, I completely agree! And with any luck, the misdirection will be effective for only so long. As you noted, the Convention could very well be make-or-break. If it’s well stage-managed and the Party leadership manages to quell the fractious factions in its midst (to say nothing of the brainless myrmidons protesting outside), it could set her up just long enough to coast to November. Or, it could expose her (and the entire scam) much as the debate exposed Biden.
Here’s hoping for the latter.
They did it with Biden and it worked. Why not do it again?
Jack, Obama never “lied” about Obamacare….he just “misspoke”.
Walz never “lied” when he said, ““We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at,”
A campaign spokesman said “In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the Governor misspoke. He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them, unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance who prioritize the gun lobby over our children,” the spokesperson added.
And, the gullible will gobble up whatever they are fed, because words don’t matter.
Not knowing enough about Kamala is a problem for me. This clip is what she actually said last July. It sounds…bad.
https://x.com/KamVTV/status/1821692731975962667?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1821692731975962667%7Ctwgr%5E14d851bbf301e0946741b2339a8c5d19e5d055cb%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcatholicvote.org%2Fkamala-harris-talks-about-reducing-population-in-resurfaced-clip%2F
Now, she obviously says, “reduce population”, and Conservatives are pouncing. The White House has issued a retraction, saying that she meant “reduce pollution” and population is just a misspoken word.
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1679997646197469184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1679997646197469184%7Ctwgr%5E14d851bbf301e0946741b2339a8c5d19e5d055cb%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcatholicvote.org%2Fkamala-harris-talks-about-reducing-population-in-resurfaced-clip%2F
Now, knowing very little about Kamala, I have decide what really happens to be the case. First, as our host loves to say, it is very possible, even likely for a person speaking extemporaneously, to say a similar word and population and pollution are close enough, maybe. However, Kamala was VERY clear for her usual self, which suggests to me that she was not speaking extemporaneously. Even then, you can read one word and speak another. I certainly do that, as I act as my husband’s audio book. So did she really mean pollution?
However, Kamala has also shown that she is part of the extreme “environmentalist” crowd. She supported the Green New Deal. The anti-global warming cult has been suggesting measures that have the need for a greatly reduced population to have a snowball’s chance in hell of even remotely working, as well as openly promoting activities that will have the effect of dramatically reducing population. Many people who are on the slightly more radical side of this movement have been suggesting quietly that reducing population is a desired goal. She may have just said the quiet part out loud.
So where does she really stand? If it were Trump, I would have seen enough of him to tell that he likely mispoke or is exaggerating when he makes some very grand and stupid statements. Kamala, on the other hand, is somewhat of an unknown. I will be going with my bias, that is that she is stupid and evil enough to actually want to reduce the population, due to what little I know of her words and actions.
So while bias makes people stupid, it may also be the only way to interpret her crazy statements when she deigns to make them.
I’d guess she meant to say “pollution” but she said “reduce population” because she believes in that too. All that “reproductive health.”
As for the polls, I noticed that the first poll after the Harris announcement had about 5% too many Democrats in it. I am guessing that is how many they needed to get her to just edge out Trump in the polls. I noticed that the one earlier this week had 49% Democrats. The electorate is 28% Democrat, 30% Republican, and 41% independent (rounding and 3rd parties). They have to keep increasing the share of Democrat responses to get the result they want.