Kamala Harris, Candidate of Myth
Apparently, Harris was the candidate America needed all along. As in a bad romcom, all we needed to do was remove her glasses, brush out her hair, and put her in a better outfit—and she would transform from high school weirdo nerd into prom queen.
The media’s shift in position regarding Harris has been whiplash-inducing. After all, we were told in 2020 that she had run one of the worst campaigns in modern presidential history—mechanical, off-putting, unpleasant, incompetent, and arrogant. Then we were told that she was one of the worst vice presidents in modern history—free of accomplishment, running a completely dysfunctional office with extraordinary rates of staff turnover, so wildly unpopular that even a senile Joe Biden worried about whether Harris could compete with Donald Trump.
But now all is forgiven. All her oddities—coconut trees and electric school buses, Venn diagrams, and the significance of the passage of time—are delightful TikTok memes. Her strangely incoherent word salads, topped off with a heavy helping of smugness, are now evidence of her rhetorical brilliance. Her wild hand motions, so reminiscent of a drunken tarmac operator attempting unsuccessfully to usher a jumbo jet toward the gateway, are actually enchanting symptoms of her enthusiasm. And her positional dishonesty—the fact that she has now shifted virtually every position she ever held—is not evidence that she is a liar, but that she is astute and clever.
So, precisely what happened to turn Kamala Harris from a deeply disliked politician (35% approval rating) into an Obama-esque talent (44% approval rating)?