I believe that after the election Tuesday, the Wednesday morning episode of The View may have been its highest-rated one ever. I know my Best Girl and I watched it, the only time we ever have, out of the sheer entertainment value of watching the "ladies" of The View melt down on national television.
They said a lot of things. Most of it, of course, was to assign blame for the loss of Kamala Harris in the election, a terrible defeat for her that included losing, as it appears now, every single one of the so-called swing states that were going to decide the election.
Blame. Blame given to racism. Blame to sexism and misogyny. Blame to "not getting the message out." Blame to Trump, oh, Lord, so much blame to Trump and his awful supporters . Blame -- and this is hysterical -- on the timing, that Kamala simply didn't have enough time to mount an effective campaign because she was "put in the race" so late, after Joe Biden stepped away from the campaign.
Ah, so much to say. First, let us not put all this on The View; it is the Friday after the election as I write this, and the airwaves are redolent of Democrats all blaming all manner of reasons for the outcome, mostly blaming the electorate as being too stupid to vote the way they wanted them to vote, but with plenty of attacks on each other.
Then, let us not let them get away with the "she was put in too late" argument. It assumes that she was "put in" by some third party, totally ignoring the fact that (A) she was an active participant in pushing Biden out; (B) Joe Biden endorsed her almost as soon as he announced he was stepping down; and (C) she was the only potential candidate who would have been allowed to use the $200 million or more that was in the Biden campaign's accounts.
It was none of that.
I've listened to a lot of the hand-wringing and internecine warfare among Democrats the past few days, and heard about all their arguments for why she lost. Blame this, blame that. All of it was wrong. The answer is very simple:
Kamala Harris was probably the worst major-party presidential candidate in the history of the country.
What do we want and need in a presidential candidate? That's actually a pretty easy question, and it applies no matter whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, no matter your race, creed, religion or planetary origin.
An excellent candidate, very simply, would have a set of principles that covered all of the issues of the day in a cohesive manner (that is, the moral foundation for the principle in one area would be consistent with the moral foundation of any other principle). The candidate would have a plan to implement the solutions to those issues in a way that is likely to work because the solutions had worked before. And such a candidate would have the ability to communicate those solutions, fluidly and in a compelling manner.
That's not hard, to understand, right? The candidate simply needs to have a moral compass, an understanding of the issues, a good handle on successful solutions, and, most critically, the ability to explain to the public all of those things.
I need to tell you that I wrote those last three paragraphs without thinking about Kamala Harris. Yes, I planned to explain why she was a putrid candidate, but I wanted to clear my head and think only about what I wanted in a candidate first, so my further argument would be compelling and, frankly, if it hadn't worked I'd have deleted this column.
So I'm thinking about Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and Kamala Harris.
Ronald Reagan, aka "The Great Communicator", was a splendid candidate by those criteria. He was an extremely principled man, famous for appointing people, letting them know his guidance, and then letting them do their job with little interference. He had an unparalleled ability to get his points across with intelligence, persuasion and humor. And he won big when he ran.
Donald Trump is a unicorn among unicorns. Yes, he has principles -- small government, peace through strength, individual freedom, sure. One very unusual thing about him is that, when considering what has worked before (to address an issue), he reaches back not into a government solution, but into his long business career.
Of course, that is his medium, business, but on top of that, he believes from his background that solutions which leverage logic and people's basic financial motivations are likely to work best, and those are almost never government solutions. He is an entertainer, so he can certainly communicate, although it is the M.O. of an entertainer vs. that of a politician. But you know what he's saying, and on top of that, he will answer any question, anytime, with a very facile ability to answer those questions. He loves sparring with the media.
And then, ah, Kamala.
Thinking on why she was a terrible candidate, I go straight back to my criteria for what makes a good one -- there are foundational principles for why you do things, those principles underpin your proposed solutions, and you can explain that to the public.
None of those apply to her.
We are three days past the election, and still none of us knows what she believes. She believes ... let's see ... "Trump is a threat to democracy." Pretty sure of that. Should we be a strong world policeman or not? Don't really know. Do tax cuts stimulate the economy in her view? Nope, no idea. Should the border be -- oh, never mind, she ran the border for three years and pretty much never went there.
With no principles articulated, nothing she proposed could be defended. It should be easy -- "We'll do X, Y, and Z because doing so will accomplish A, B and C, all of which are worth doing and, by the way, X, Y, and Z worked when it was done over here." But with no principles, she couldn't come up with solutions that reflected them. Instead, she tossed out pap -- the "opportunity economy", for example -- that no one could wrap their head around, since they lacked either an underlying principle or any substantive description.
And finally, she could not communicate, well, anything. It was patently obvious throughout the campaign, if not throughout her tenure at VP, that she and the English language were not the closest of friends.
She held exactly zero press conferences during the entire campaign. With three months' worth of opportunities to explain to the nation who she was and what she would do, by answering unscripted questions from the assembled press, she declined all of them. She held exactly one interview that was not "friendly media", that being with Fox News's Bret Baier, and answered every question by bringing Donald Trump into the answer and explaining that he was a threat to democracy.
Bret Baier: "How are you feeling today?"
Kamala Harris: "Donald Trump is a threat to democracy!"
She had an opportunity to go on the Joe Rogan podcast -- listened to by tens of millions of people and not necessarily a hostile situation -- but she insisted on limiting the 3-hour standard session that Trump had already done and done well -- and that Rogan come to her (Trump had gone to him in Texas, knowing what a huge exposure opportunity it was). Rogan, who needed her far less than she needed him, said "no thanks", and she lost that massive opportunity to reach voters.
We all asked ourselves why she would insist on only one hour rather than three, when the opportunity was so great, and didn't like the obvious answer -- that she simply was incapable of a three-hour conversation; she didn't know the issues well enough to talk about them for any length of time. Moreover, she couldn't seemingly carry on a conversation for any length of time, let alone three hours.
She couldn't convey her views, partly because she was unable to convey views on anything for any length of time, and partly because she seemingly had no views on anything, only politically-based positions that she may or may not have even believed.
Had she been able to communicate, she would never have offended millions of Catholics by skipping the Al Smith Dinner during the campaign, and certainly not letting it come out that skipping it was because she was afraid of seeming to support the faith with a strict doctrine opposing abortion on demand.
No, Kamala Harris was as bad a presidential candidate as we've ever seen.
It is telling that the Democrats in the chattering class are saying all manner of things about why they lost the election. It was Biden's fault, or racism, or xenophobia, or the stupidity of the electorate. It was everything except the actual reason.
Kamala Harris. She was the reason the Democrats lost.
And as long as they refuse to acknowledge that, they will continue to lose elections.
Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton.
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