Today, many cigars, many thoughts…
And I’ll start with this: These may be Kamala Harris’s “salad days,” a phrase coined long ago in a star-crossed, Shakespearean tragedy. These are her moments of innocence, idealism and possibility.
I suspect they are the best days her campaign will know.
To her credit, Harris is not only riding a wave of relief that the Democratic nominee is not Joe Biden; she is surprising doubters. Harris inspires crowds with disciplined teleprompter speeches in which she exceeds the demands of her introduction. She brings excitement to young voters ravenous for generational change that neither Biden nor Donald Trump can offer. She’s compared to Barack Obama. Republicans are nervous: Her numbers in some public polls have soared.
Unfortunately for her campaign, the election is not tomorrow, and Harris is not an empty vessel for the incumbent party’s hopes.
There is an existing Kamala Harris. She has a record. And when America votes in a hundred days, the entire package, policy and persona, will be known.
Certainly, her campaign will spend hundreds of millions of dollars presenting her as the embodiment of “hope and change” and the leader of a “new and improved” generation of centrist Democrats. She will also receive billions of dollars of laudatory coverage from a fawning media establishment that will multiply her fishes and loaves.
A smart, disciplined and focused Trump campaign will push back, painting Harris as both more “dangerously liberal” than Joe Biden and naively incompetent.
Yet, in the end, Harris’s failure or success won’t be determined by these old forces.
If she falls, it will be to the new Third Force in politics: her lifetime of video on social media. It’s monstrously powerful and more muscular than politics could hope.
Harris is the job applicant who shouldn’t have uploaded everything to Facebook. She is America’s first near-Gen X candidate. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram have carved everything Harris has ever said and supported into ageless, digital stone.
As she runs against Donald Trump, the New Kamala Harris must also run against the Old Kamala Harris, preserved forever on our devices.
Unfortunately for her campaign, she can add to her social media identity but not subtract from it — because the Internet, unlike some politicians, forgets nothing.
In the political world, many Democrats know the Kamala Harris captured so vividly on social media. They have said behind closed doors and even, in some instances, in public that she is their party’s weakest alternative to Joe Biden. They know Harris in full.
Soon, we will, too.
Click once and Harris says crossing the border illegally should not be illegal. Click again and she raises her hand to offer illegal immigrants free health care. Click once more, and she is the Border Czar on whose watch 8 million crossed the border illegally. Click again and she claims she wasn’t the Border Czar? The memes explode.
Maybe she wasn’t vice president? Maybe she doesn’t know Joe Biden? Click. Harris advocates bailing out radicals who have burned cities and attacked policemen. She has created a rich digital stream supporting every woke policy that makes the heartland fear for its country.
In a social media world beyond her control, Kamala Harris is already defined as a woman of the extreme left whose capacity to deal with the world’s problems is doubtful.
Proof? In less than four years, without negative ads running against her, Harris has already become the most unpopular vice president in recent history, thanks to her remarkable ability to generate extraordinary, leftist social media content. Her opponents don’t need AI to generate negative material. Harris excels at the job.
Harris will excite the academic left, thrill the dominant media, gain support from those under 35, and deliver the reproductive rights vote — but in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, her social media identity has already alienated working-class, blue-collar voters.
Her path to 270 is smoke.
Her unpopularity is not due to her race, giggles or gender. It’s the product of her party’s failure. The beliefs in which she persists have made our streets unsafe, our rent too expensive and our groceries too costly. She is the emblem of an administration whose weakness has exposed us to wars with Russia, China and radical Islam. She is the internet poster child for unthinking liberalism and its abundance of disastrous results.
Newt Gingrich is right: This race is Nixon vs. McGovern. If Harris loses, she will become the face of the Democratic Party’s liberalism and irresponsibility for decades. She’ll be remembered as the hood ornament of an old, failed, liberal ideology so out of touch with the American mainstream that it was beyond a fresh face’s ability to restore.
Can she evolve? Can she respond to public demand for a Democratic Party of the center with a last-moment, deathbed conversion? It is not impossible. She would have to demonstrate both the talent and gravitas of Barack Obama. She would need to reject everything she has been and believed — in the face of a mountain of social media that already labels her inauthentic.
Like holding up flowers in a hurricane, reinventing Harris will be a tough trick to pull off.
Could this still be a close race? Of course. Harris will have brilliant moments. A centrist vice presidential pick and two Obama speeches at her convention will extend the glow of her announcement. And any race against Trump is a toss-up. The former president is always his own, most effective adversary. He may be the only presidential candidate in history who could lose without an opponent.
Today, in the spring of her campaign, Kamala Harris is hope without the inconvenience of her leftist history. She is “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” the embodiment of her favorite cliché, and there is no doubt she’s a talented candidate on a roll.
We’ve been here before. Gen. George Patton wrote that for a thousand years, victorious Roman conquerors returned home to celebratory parades. Palm fronds were laid where they would step so their feet would not touch the ground, and adulatory crowds would roar. But behind the conqueror, there always stood a centurion, whispering in his ear this warning: “All glory is fleeting.”
In November, it will be colder, and we will all know Kamala Harris in full.
Alex Castellanos is a GOP consultant and native of North Carolina.
