One narrative holds that Vice President Kamala Harris has created the most joyous, transcendent election campaign since President Barack Obama in less than three weeks. Another is that she has done absolutely nothing except garner larger crowds, read someone else’s scripts, and pose for the cameras.
Like magic, the media has settled on a new term of art to describe newly minted Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz’s campaign for the presidency: Joy. If anyone previously doubted that mainstream media outlets coordinate and copy on another with abandon to advance their preferred narratives, an explosion of headlines over the past week should convert even the most hardened skeptic. The New York Times insisted, “Harris Used to Worry About Laughing. Now Joy is Fueling Her Campaign.” The Associated Press claimed “Harris is pushing joy. Trump paints a darker picture. Will mismatched moods matter?” The Guardian described Democrats’ “joy” as “unconfined.” “At the top of his first speech as her running mate,” the Associated Press described how the term was, in fact, dictated to them by the candidates themselves, “Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz turned to Vice President Kamala Harris and declared, ‘Thank you for bringing back the joy.’ The next day, Harris took the theme a step further, branding the Democratic ticket ‘joyful warriors.’” “Democrats are playing up their sunnier outlook, promoting the idea that voters can be inspired to support someone and not just cast their ballot against the other side,” they continued. Meanwhile, “The Trump campaign argues their candidate is reflecting the dour mood of the country and dismisses the idea that a growing contrast in tone and upbeat attitude will decide the presidency.” “All of a sudden, an election that felt like it was slipping away from us, we are now in command,” explained Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist The Guardian described as the “relentlessly optimistic” author of the Hopium Chronicles. “In every way imaginable I would much rather be us than them,” he concluded. Before considering the substance of these claims, one has to wonder what warped worldview leads anyone to associate politicians with “joy.” To most normal people, joy is reserved for family, friends, loved ones, and perhaps Santa Claus. Those special moments in life where you feel free and buoyant, somehow beyond yourself, either a part of something larger or at least when the little naysaying voice inside your head stops yammering for a few seconds. I had some experience with this myself this weekend, meeting our second granddaughter for the first time, feeling the circle of life as corny as it sounds. I have also been an ardent Trump supporter since 2016, but “joy” is not the word I would use to describe my belief that he’s the optimal candidate for our times or even my personal affection for him. He’s too remote, too elevated, too powerful, to not me or my family. Perhaps Ronald Reagan said it best, the ten most frightening words in the English language are “I’m with the government and I’m here to help,” suggesting that the Gipper understood that our relationship with our leaders was one of necessity, not joy.
Of course, we cannot avoid the inherent vagueness of the term either. There is an obvious corollary to former President Barack Obama’s “hope” and “change” campaign of 2008, but as subjective as both of those terms surely were, we can understand how a politician can bring hope to a beleaguered nation and change, whether needed or unneeded, to our domestic and international affairs. These are the sort of things politicians are said to do from time to time since time began, but who, precisely, is Vice President Harris and Governor Walz bringing joy to in this framing? The world? The American people? The American voter? Hardcore Democrats and activists who would have voted for anyone, dead or alive, over former President Donald Trump? The mainstream media would like you to believe it was some collection of the former, but the reality appears to be the latter whatever they claim. Despite the protestations of universal joy, the articles in question almost exclusively quote Democrat partisans like Mr. Rosenberg who clearly has a vested interest in the outcome. The people spreading this message aren’t ordinary citizens, much less those who have switched their vote from the former President to Kamala Harris. Instead, we’re being asked to accept the framing provided by the campaign as if political campaigns had a well-earned reputation for the truth. Thus, The Guardian tells us that it was in fact Vice President Harris and Governor Walz who are casting themselves as “joyful warriors,” the Vice President herself who “has sought to present the race as a choice between her vision for a ‘brighter future’ and Trump’s ‘backward agenda.’” The “crowds,” complete with sizes provided by the campaign alone, who “chant the campaign’s rallying cry: ‘We’re not going back!’” The speakers the campaign has chosen to promote their tailored message, including Democrat Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who insisted “We need a strong woman in the White House. It’s about damn time,” and Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, who claimed Americans faced a “‘which side are you on’ moment” and, needless to say, he was siding with the “badass woman who stood with us on the picket line.” Crowd sizes are suddenly of out-sized importance as well, and after ignoring President Biden’s inability to draw large numbers to his events for the past four years, the mainstream media has now convinced itself that Vice President Harris’ more substantial following is a sign of everything from her momentum to her appeal to younger voters and minorities to her general transcendence. In fact, you cannot find an article anywhere about her campaign that doesn’t tout these crowds, presumably participating in the joy, from “packed basketball arenas in Philadelphia” to airport hangers in Arizona, but needless to say, if crowd size translated into electoral success Donald Trump, who still draws even larger numbers, would be President right now and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Alas, the media needs something to hang its joy on, and in this case that something certainly isn’t substance. To date, the budding Harris campaign has identified only a single policy proposal, a copy of her opponent’s no tax on tips which, sadly, continues her trend of repudiating her own prior positions given she passed the tie breaking vote in favor of allowing the IRS to audit tips as Vice President. This brings the number of her reversals near the size of her crowds, figuratively speaking: She was against fracking and wanted to end fossil fuels, but now she’s not. She was for defunding the police; now she’s not. She wanted open borders; now she doesn’t. She even wanted to ban plastic straws at some point, but the status of that opinion currently appears to be unknown. Regardless, Vice President Harris has somehow managed to transform herself through the power of joy from the most liberal member of the Senate, to the left of even Bernie Sanders, to a self-identified progressive Presidential candidate in 2020 that fully braced equity of outcomes to a complete unknown in any and all things, and she has managed to do so without making a single actual statement or answering a question on the matter. Instead, her surrogates, her campaign team, and their willing tools in the media insist she’s more moderate now, based on little more than their own wishful thinking while completely ignoring her role in the Biden Administration. Ms. Harris is not some fresh face that, to paraphrase her, just fell off a coconut tree. She’s the sitting Vice President of the United States who until recently was the least popular in American history, the number two figure in an Administration that is also among the least popular. In other words, every criticism that has been leveled at her absentee boss, President Joe Biden, can fairly be leveled at her. Are you upset with high inflation? High interest rates? Gas prices? Food prices? Multiple wars around the world? A completely broken border? Increases in violent crime? A ridiculous spike in government spending? An exploding debt? A moribund economy? Do these things take away the joy in your life at all? Blame Vice President Harris because joy is not a policy and she has none, only the failures of her boss at this point. Conceivably, she could explain what she would’ve done differently if she were in charge, but that would require her to actually answer questions and propose ideas, something she has only vaguely committed to by the end of the month, if ever.
In the interim, even normally friendly outlets attempting to provide some level of analysis and objectivity amid all the joy have been unable to say who Vice President Harris is and what she would do. Writing for The Atlantic, David Graham, noted that “The Trump campaign says that Kamala Harris is a radical leftist. The far left fears that she’s a neoliberal cop. They can’t both be right. But pinning down exactly where the vice president and Democratic nominee for president sits on the political spectrum is not so easy. She has gone from her first state-level election to the top of the presidential ticket in 14 years, far faster than Joe Biden, and she spent much of that time in positions that don’t provide an extensive record on a wide range of policy issues. During her 2020 presidential bid, she took some positions to the left of her prior record—several of which she’s now walked back in her current bid for president.” “What she hasn’t had to do, and what she failed to do in 2020, was define a coherent, compelling message about where she wanted to take the country and how that was authentic to her,” explained Robert L. Borosage, a progressive strategist and writer. “That’s a big deal. And that remains to be seen,” he added in what is an early candidate for understatement of the campaign so far. The Washington Post recently wrote something similar, “If she hopes to prevail, Ms. Harris needs to present her ideas. The media and public have legitimate questions, and she should face them. This is a political necessity — Mr. Trump is already turning her avoidance of the media into an attack line. And elections aren’t just about winning. They’re about accumulating political capital for a particular agenda, which Ms. Harris can’t do unless she articulates one.” Objectively, we’re talking a politician who failed to earn a single vote from primary voters in 2020, one who then went on to be a rather unpopular Vice President in a generally unpopular administration, and yet we’re supposed to believe she has achieved joy and transcendence in less than three weeks without doing a single actual thing? We would all do remember that the very same people pushing this narrative are those who insisted for years, either through lies or their own stupidity, that President Biden was mentally fit to continue to serve as President. Now that one set of falsehoods has collapsed, they have immediately, without question, introspection, or anything of the sort moved onto another. The evidence of underpinning this new narrative, however, is rather thin: Larger crowds, statements from the campaign itself, and some tough to measure tightening of the polls. I say “tough to measure” because it seems reasonable enough to assume that Democrats are more enthused about Vice President Harris than President Biden, and I would expect her to perform better in the abstract. At the same time, methodologies vary and polls are easily manipulated. The recent NPR/PBS poll, for example, generated headlines by showing the Vice President with a three point lead, 51 to 48 over Donald Trump, an increase of two points from their previous finding a week earlier. A look beneath the surface, however, reveals that they increased the Democrat sample size by 1% and reduced the Republican sample size by the same amount. Does this reflect reality or more wishful thinking?
We cannot say for sure, but overall, one is left with the unmistakable feeling that we are witnessing one of the most obvious and overt, massively coordinated political manipulation efforts in our lifetimes, if not ever. If we were truly seeing the kind of radical shift in the race the media is describing rather than simply joy and “vibes,” another term that is being bandied about to reflect Democrat euphoria, there would be millions of voters available to explain why they switched their preference from President Trump to Vice President Trump. Instead, on the few occasions the media has deigned to speak with voters, they’re surprised to learn reality doesn’t match their fantasies. CNN has profiled Never Trumpers who still might vote for Trump, “Carol Carty misses something in today’s Republican Party and searches for it in her music choices…That Carty isn’t ready to commit to Harris despite her profound disagreements with Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is a snapshot of the vice president’s suburban challenge: her path to victory is clearer if she can win over a good share of moderate Republicans who voted for Biden because they viewed him as a centrist or disagreed with Trump’s reaction to the Covid pandemic or were exhausted by his tweets and other chaos – or all of that.” CNN also visited a black barbershop in Harrisburg, PA is full of black men who, like President Trump, thinks Vice President Harris isn’t really black, and then there were the women in Wisconsin who remain steadfast in their support for the former President. Outside of Democrat activists and partisans, along with a few Never Trumpers that, as usual, receive more attention than necessary even when they are considering changing their minds, where are all the Harris voters? Social media has frequently been cited as some kind of evidence of her joyousness, but among your own personal network, have you seen a single post from a former Trump voter or are the same people talking up Harris those who talked up Biden before her, to the point where many didn’t want him to drop out of the race in the first place? The narrative is king, but as we have seen narratives are simply stories we tell ourselves to explain underlying facts. One narrative is that Vice President Harris has created the most joyous, transcendent election campaign since President Obama in less than three weeks. Another is that she has done absolutely nothing except garner larger crowds, read someone else’s scripts, and pose for the cameras. She hasn’t earned a single vote, has not made a single policy proposal that wasn’t lifted from her opponent, has instead repudiated by proxy all her previous positions, and refuses to answer a single question. Time will tell which narrative is right, but I strongly suspect the joy will have faded long before then. After all, it’s not something you can live on.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 