Kamala Harris has a ruthless plan for seeking the presidency. Ruthlessly, she avoids press questioning. Ruthlessly, she has been subtracting from her policy positions, off-loading items to which she was philosophically and politically committed when seeking the presidency in 2020. To avoid having to criticize Donald Trump’s plan to stop taxing tips, she ruthlessly adopted it herself.
If she prevails through ruthlessness, she’ll have demonstrated at least one quality useful in a president.
Mr. Trump has said millions of unscripted public words, whereas Ms. Harris in her public life has said alarmingly few. In his spew, which continued Monday in a two-hour gabfest with Elon Musk on X, Mr. Trump at least allows glimpses of what retired Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, not a conspicuous fan, describes in his new memoir as a “rational,” “focused” and “measured” evaluator of evidence and advice.
Yes, I’m aware the list I’m about to give consists of examples the press has deliberately chosen to lie about. Mr. Trump was actually quick to understand the “fine people” of overwhelmingly liberal Charlottesville mostly favored keeping their Robert E. Lee statue. He recently sussed out that the low participation rate of Christian voters was a challenge to his coalition, which he might “fix” by restoring same-day, in-person voting. The “bloodbath” he accurately predicted after the election is a financial one for the auto sector without some change in U.S. electric vehicle policies.
This is what you don’t hear from Ms. Harris: any nuanced sense of concrete realities. If she has it, her campaign deliberately hides it from you.
This is a wilder experiment than it seems. While they may not be a strict majority, millions of American voters have an eye on the wider world. They know that events, not presidents, are ultimately in charge. They know that the ineffable quality of presidential judgment is a know-it-when-you-see-it quality.
Ms. Harris, with her low-profile career and now avoidant campaign, is forcing these voters to vote in the dark. If there’s an unseen vulnerability to her steamroller of a strategy, largely ginned up by the media, this is it.
In a madcap moment in February, amid Joe Biden’s obvious ailing, I tried out a theory that Ms. Harris was a hidden and late-blooming talent. After the glamourfest of the last three weeks, though, the evidence is still missing.
The Kamala “bubble” hasn’t translated into belief in her leadership. Her job-approval rating in her actual day job is still only 44%, albeit 5 points better than Mr. Biden’s.
New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn says that the Harris campaign “will want to give voters something to hang onto once the political winds eventually start to blow the other way.”
But maybe not. A campaign of one-liners and scripted banter might last till Nov. 5. An especially gruesome specimen lately has been seen on TV: the Democratic campaign consultant self-pleasuring over a Kamala wave completely devoid of substance.
As for Mr. Trump, the media constantly calls him a liar as if lying wasn’t the reputation of all politicians since the start of time. His vulnerability on this front, ironically, comes down partly to the sheer, unprecedented volume of his verbiage. This has the democratic virtue of allowing voters nearly unlimited access to the head of someone proposing to lead them.
When Mr. Trump chirps about stopping wars with a phone call, at least he’s chirping about something important that voters can hold him to: deterrence. When he says the Ukraine war can’t continue forever, he’s accepting a challenge that the Biden administration recognizes but refuses to own.
Mr. Trump is shushed and called a sellout whenever he refers to Taiwan’s militarily unfavorable geography. In fact, he’s letting voters know a secret our friends and adversaries already know: The U.S. won’t be putting its surface fleet within range of China’s shore-based missiles, where thousands of our service personnel could be sent to the bottom in minutes. A war over Taiwan won’t be settled in the Taiwan Strait. It won’t be limited. It won’t be over soon.
Presidential campaigns, after all, have a twofold purpose: They help to acquaint voters with realities too.
Using a Biden proxy to gauge Ms. Harris’s potential leadership may not even be helpful. Her California roots and identity box-checking could allow her to co-opt progressives for more running room than the weak and manipulable Mr. Biden ever managed. This could be a real selling point but how would voters know given the campaign she and her handlers have chosen to run?
In no recent election have global peace and prosperity been more at risk or less discussed. Ruthlessly, Ms. Harris will try to talk about nothing but abortion between now and the election. Mr. Trump would be doing the country and the world a favor if he tried to change that in the next 83 days.
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