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Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson
The Scent of a Harris Panic in the Air
The 2024 race is still close.
But then so was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race at this same juncture.
Indeed, incumbent president Carter was then comfortably up in the last two October Gallup polls—before utterly and suddenly evaporating on Election Day.
But in the last seven days, there seems a sense of panic in the Harris campaign.
How do we know that?
Why are Democratic pundits—from Axelrod to Carville—blasting the Harris campaign and otherwise warning of bad things to come?
Why are some of the once Democrat sure-thing senate races—e.g., in Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Michigan—tightening up?
Pundit poll-watchers are suggesting that Trump is close, even, or slightly ahead in the swing-state polls, suggesting that he is nearing a margin that could cancel out anticipated “ballot irregularities”.
The expected October Harris-Biden surprises—the opportune Fed interest rate cut, the transparently desperate Jack Smith beefed-up re-indictment, the current new Hollywood Trump-hit movie, the desperate Zelensky fly-in to Pennsylvania, the election-cycle customary Bob Woodward unsourced gossip book—seemed so far to have had no effect.
Why would any campaign send out the bumbling Tim Walz to a Fox Sunday interview after his disastrous debate?
Why is a suddenly smiling Biden so eager to claim candidate and VP Harris as a co-conspirator to his disastrous four years?
Why would Harris pivot and now agree to (admittedly mostly softball) interviews, thus confirming to the voting public why she wisely had previously avoided all press conferences, interviews, and town halls?
Why—after the last two moderator-rigged ABC and CBS debates—would Harris desperately want another and possibly believe that Trump would ever agree to any such warped forum?
The last 4-5 Harris scripted interviews, but especially on CBS’s 60 Minutes, have been train wrecks.
Everyone expected (and was not disappointed) the on-spec word salads, predictable sappy retreats to her misleading bio, the now accustomed deer-in-the-headlights confusion about her prior three years with Biden, and the general mush in lieu of any policy prescriptions.
Why would CBS think it worth ruining its already debased reputation by doctoring the transcript of the Harris disastrous interview in a vain attempt at Orwellian repair?
Why is a rusty but still narcissistic Barack Obama at last hitting the campaign trail?
And is he still effective—or reduced to becoming an Oprah-like caricature?
After all, is it wise for the elite Obama (in his now accustomed snarky “clingers” style) to venture out of his mansions (Kalorama? the Hawaii beachfront? or the Martha Vineyard estate?) to talk down to black males struggling under years of a hyperinflationary economy, a flood of illegal immigrants from an open border, and a four-year-spiking crime rate?
Does the Netflix grandee berating black men as victims of false consciousness, misled, and brainwashed into voting for the Trump agenda really win them over to Harris?
Does the hundred-million-dollar-plus man Obama persuade anyone by reverting for a few moments to his old community-organizing, fake black patois and his pseudo-racial intimacy of “brothers”?
And does it work for Obama (remember “when they go low, we go high”) to blast Trump as racist and crude, when Obama jokes that Trump wears diapers— this after previously suggesting at the Democratic convention that Trump suffered from small genitalia?
If this should continue, soon the July 21st coup that removed Biden, along with the Harris pick of Tim Walz, will go down as days of Democrat infamy.
Anything can happen in the next three weeks. But so far, the cures for the Harris slide are far worse than the malady itself.
Harmeet Dhillon is a San Francisco lawyer who’s known Kamala Harris for more than 20 years. Her verdict: Kamala Harris is a criminal. Here are the details.
Huh, Kamala has never had a private sector job, but has lived off on taxpayers her whole career.
Kamala Harris proposes forgivable loans of up to $20,000 for black entrepreneurs.
Oct 14, 2024
A story in three headlines! First, anti-DEI warrior Chris Rufo, who took down Harvard’s gay black president for plagiarism, published this Substack article two short days ago:
Kamala Harris's Plagiarism Problem
The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.
CHRISTOPHER F. RUFO
OCT 14, 2024
On the same day, the New York Times, leaping to the plagiarizing vice president’s defense, ran a classic “Republicans pounce!” story. Admitting that Kamala cut-and-pasted parts of her 2009 book, ironically titled “Smart on Crime,” the Times framed the scandal as conservatives taking advantage of a poor, misunderstood — but joyful — Vice President who merely lapsed.
Conservative Activist Seizes on
Passages From Harris Book
A report by Christopher Rufo says the Democratic presidential
nominee copied five short passages for her 2009 book on crime.
A plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious.
It was just a lapse. It can happen to the best of us! Kamala lapsed into something all right. Amusingly, the increasingly poorly written New York Times overlooked the fact that “lapse” means something someone did before but stopped.
So ironically, the Times accidentally accused Kamala of being a serial plagiarist. In other words, friendly fire.
Finally and third, this morning’s (not paywalled!) Washington Post headline:
Harris campaign rejects claims of plagiarism
Some experts say the incidents cited by a conservative critic are modest and may not reflect an intentional effort to take
credit.
In other words, Kamala might have done it on accident. The Washington Post’s attempt to cover for Kamala was even more accidentally destructive than the Times’ “lapses” argument. According to WaPo, Kamala’s not a plagiarist, she’s just stupid:
Accusations of plagiarism can become politically damaging they
helped derail President Joe Biden's presidential campaign in 1987
and potentially invite questions about a candidate's honesty. But in this
instance, according to several experts, the passages appear the result of
sloppy work rather than a malicious attempt to steal someone's ideas.
More friendly fire! The WaPo’s quoted “plagiarism experts” did their best to soft-pedal the scandal — it’s nuanced — but were forced to admit that, technically speaking, Kamala did in fact plagiarize several parts of her awful book:
"It's nuanced," said Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism
consultant who has examined the claims about Harris's work. "It's not
nearly as serious as accusers want it to be and it's not the
nothingburger that the Harris campaign wants it to be, either."
All in all, with all that friendly fire, Kamala probably felt like she was being attacked by a swarm of indignant bees. And this is how desperate the Kamala campaign is getting: behold yesterday’s headline from Bloomberg:
Kamala Harris Says Reparations for Black Americans Deserve Review
Vice president touts agenda in Charlamagne tha God interview
Harris seeking to ramp up outreach to Black male voters
Reviewing Reparations! So.
Apparently this comes from the 'hope springs eternal' that his Rockefeller cousin IHLlary can still be maneuvered by sleight of hand into the bankrupt office and complete the task of starting WWIII.
Patrick says
With the wealth and do nothing job, you'd think he'd age better. He has AIDS.
Kamala's interview on Fox such a disaster,
blaming everything on Trump.
Halfway through and Kamala has yet to answer a question, blaming everything on Trump.
CNN ran a revealing story yesterday headlined, “Kamala Harris spars with Fox News anchor in testy interview.” Almost every mockingbird media headline about yesterday’s interview with Fox News’ Brett Baier included the word, “testy.” So now we know! Testy means when the reporter insists that the interviewee answer the question, a rare strain of media treatment Kamala has never before encountered, but which used to be the default back before the government acquired corporate media.
https://x.com/ClayTravis/status/1846680688189161605
During her ‘testy’ interview with Brett, Kamala tried to execute the same oleaginous maneuver as during her debate with Trump, which was to recite a little memorized speech whenever Brett asked her a question, even if the little speech had nothing whatever to do with the question Brett asked except for the topic area.
For instance:
BRET: “How many illegal immigrants would you estimate your administration has released into the country over the last three and a half years?”
KAMALA: “Bret, let's just get to the point. Okay? The point is that we have a broken immigration system that needs to be repaired.”
(Am I the only one who finds totally infuriating Kamala’s verbal tic of punctuating her speeches with “Okay?”)
She also claimed, possibly for the very first time, that her presidency would not in fact just continue Joe Biden’s regime. But, when Brett asked her to name something she’d do differently than Joe, she couldn’t even come up with a single example. She just rambled away sixty seconds of precious airtime.
Based on corporate media’s desperate efforts to rescue her from herself, and based on social media’s crowd reaction, it was the worst interview performance Kamala has ever given. My guess is she won’t be sitting for any more unscripted interviews. Back to the basement.
505badgolfer
I was listening to Glen Beck this morning. Here is some more info about the Kamala interview. The interview was originally scheduled for 1 hour but Kamala's people advised Bret late in the day that she would only agree to do 30 minutes. She then showed up 15 minutes late for the 30 minute interview. All this was done to try to throw Bret off his game. He had prepared questions for a 60 minute time period, and he had to reduce his questions to 30 minutes. The late arrival for the 30 minute interview was also obviously done on purpose.
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