OPINION
ROSS DOUTHAT
Kamala
Harris and the Audacity of Desperation
July 27,
2024
Ross Douthat
By Ross
Douthat
Opinion
Columnist
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/27/opinion/kamala-harris-democrats.html
Across
Donald Trump’s presidency, the American establishment achieved an unprecedented
level of ideological unity and conformity — first in opposition to Trump
himself, and then in the embrace of progressive ideology, in the “Great
Awokening” that reached a crescendo in the hotter months of 2020.
Since then
we’ve watched cracks spread throughout this edifice, dividing groups and
institutions that once seemed to move in lock step. These fault lines include
the split between a more ideological academic culture, where wokeness seems
entrenched, and corporate and media realms, where its hold has somewhat
weakened. They include the divisions between donors, university administrators
and activists exposed and heightened by the Hamas attacks and the Israel-Gaza
war. They include the struggle over Joe Biden’s fitness to run again, in which
the liberal intelligentsia and the Democratic Party were temporarily at war,
and the emergence of new right-leaning factions within the American elite.
But now,
with the surge of support for Kamala Harris’s candidacy, you can sense an
effort to overcome these divisions, to reassert the establishment’s anti-Trump
consensus, to recover the unity of 2020 and put the full power of what Nate
Silver once called the “indigo blob” at the presumptive Democratic nominee’s
disposal.
This means
money: a surge of tens of millions of dollars into Democratic coffers. It means
star power, whether through endorsements or just associations: Olivia Rodrigo
and George Clooney, Charli XCX and Beyoncé. It means soft-focus media
treatments and even the updating of inconvenient language, as Axios did when it
corrected a past reference to Harris as the Biden administration “border czar”
amid conservative criticism of her role in immigration policy. It means
squelching any chance of an intra-Democratic conflict or a convention fight,
while delivering hype from every corner, from liberals to ex-Republicans to
TikTok users, in an attempt to gild the Harris candidacy with the magic of
Obamamania.
What the
Kamalamentum effort shares with that 2008 phenomenon is one of Barack Obama’s
favorite words: “audacity.” But not the audacity of hope this time, so much as
the audacity of desperation — a sense that in this late hour the only hope for
stopping Trump is to set aside all differences, bury all doubts and present
Harris to the world not as an unhappy default but as a potentially
transformative candidate, the kind that any Trump opponent should have wanted
all along.
This is
especially audacious because the agony that the Democrats only just escaped,
the disgraceful attempt by Biden’s inner circle to prop him up through one more
campaign cycle, was itself a direct response to a consensus among savvy
political observers that Harris was an exceptionally poor candidate, exactly
the wrong person to set against Trump, not another Obama but a liberal answer
to Dan Quayle.
The speed at
which this consensus shifted should not exactly be surprising; we just watched,
after all, the rapid dissolution of a shared liberal reality in which Biden’s
aging was at most a minor problem magnified by Fox News and Republican
disinformation efforts. Just as that consensus turned out to be a fond
delusion, perhaps the underestimation of Harris will look unmoored from reality
in hindsight. Even poor Quayle might have outperformed his reputation if
someone had only given him a chance.
But the
basic facts that made Harris seem like a dubious choice remain. She is a
politician who built her career inside a liberal state where what matters is
winning over Democratic Party elites and liberal-leaning voters, not the
conservative-leaning independent voters she needs to persuade now. She flopped
completely in her bid for national office in 2020 and was rescued and elevated
only by the exigencies of George Floyd-era progressive politics. As vice
president she has no notable successes, no impressive portfolio, and her
struggles and miscues have inspired comparisons to HBO’s “Veep” for a reason.
Today she
occupies an odd position as presumptive nominee, having succeeded in neither of
the traditional means of ascent: She won no primaries or caucuses, and no
smoke-filled room of Democratic grandees agreed on her electability. Democrats
have made their peace with her nomination, but they are making a virtue of
necessity, not crowning a victor or rewarding a great success.
That
necessity has brought us to a double test. For Harris herself, the question is
whether she can rise to the occasion, conduct outreach more effectively than
the current president has, shed her Quaylian baggage and show skills that even
her allies have worried that she lacks.
For the
establishment rallying around her, the question is whether the united front
that’s contained Trump but failed to bury him has enough remaining juice,
enough potency in spite of its divisions, to achieve a great and heretofore
unlikely seeming feat: making Kamala Harris happen.
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