When Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate four years ago, he said he did so because she could assume the office “on day one.” More than 30 days after becoming the presumptive nominee, Harris still does not seem ready to be the Democratic Party’s nominee, let alone president. She is an empty pantsuit, basking in the glow of positive media coverage and unburdened by accountability.
Her acceptance speech confirmed that.
Harris has now officially accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination. Her nomination was “historic,” as liberals like to say, but not because of her ethnicity. Rather, she is the first nominee of either party who did not have to secure a single delegate or a single vote in the primaries. She is “historic” in that it is highly unlikely that she could have secured that nomination had there been any sort of competition for the job.
In keeping with how she got the nomination, her acceptance speech was all sizzle and no steak. It will be billed as containing her “vision” for America, but it contained no such thing. It wasn’t much different from the stump speech she’s been reading off the teleprompter since Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party power elite knifed Biden last month and tossed his body into the dumpster earlier this week.
Kamala came from humble beginnings; she repeated them, as if the circumstances of anyone’s birth could be an accomplishment. She was born in Oakland, Calif., which sounds pretty rough nowadays thanks to its misgovernment, but she was actually the child of two college professors, not manual laborers or blue-collar workers. Raised on the “mean streets” of Berkeley, and Montreal, Canada, she was not some underprivileged child or hard-luck story.
The biographical part of her speech was spent reshaping standard information into applause lines. Her introductory video talked about her time on various Senate Committees, questioning witnesses about issues near and dear to the left. What it didn’t contain was any accomplishments.
In her brief time in the Senate, Harris authored zero bills that became law. The crowd didn’t care. Its sustained standing ovation took the place of a resume. Existence as accomplishment is something speakers do only when they lack actual accomplishments. This was why Harris’s speech ran flat.
The night was more about vibes than anything else. The crowd cheered like it was their job, because it was their job. They’re partisans bent on selling her candidacy. That’s what they did.
As for what Harris would do as president, your guess remains as good as mine. She has given us no vision to talk about. There was nothing new in the speech, and nothing specific. It’s difficult to fight a cloud. You can see it coming, but there’s really nothing to it.
When it came to policy, the speech consisted of multiple word salads. She’s against this, in favor of that and will make everything better somehow, the “somehow” part being key. How she will pay for her laundry list of promises is unknown. For example, she just promised to make everything more affordable and to fight inflation through price controls that almost certainly cannot be executed and won’t work in any case. Say what you will about Trump’s wall or Obama’s health care plan, but they were both actual proposals. Neither of their promises were so inane or inconsequential.
For a big speech, this one was also devoid of urgency or earnestness. Her price controls discussion began and ended with her denunciation of “corporate greed.” She never even bothered to define what that means.
The only things for certain is she loves abortion and hates Donald Trump, whom she falsely claimed wants to jail political opponents and journalists.
She said she “grew up immersed in the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement.” She didn’t explain what this word salad meant, but the truth is that she was born in 1964. She almost certainly has no memories before 1970.
It was just one empty line in a very empty speech. “We are all in this together” is a great bumper sticker, but it’s meaningless when you view people as parts of separate groups based on their skin color, sexual orientation or whatever other ways you can divide and conquer voters based on irrelevant demographic characteristics.
After four days of speeches, I have no clearer an idea of what Harris would do as president than I did beforehand. I have no idea why, if she has all these wonderful ideas to “fix” the nation’s problems, she has sat by as vice president and let things get so bad during the last three years and seven months.
Kamala Harris’s resume is a mostly blank page. Her time in the Senate was mostly spent grandstanding for the cameras in committee hearings with meaningless lines of questioning from which nothing substantial resulted. Her tenure as vice president might as well not have happened, if you just listened to the speeches at the Democratic convention. In fact, her participation in Biden’s hugely unpopular administration was quite deliberately buried in the midnight time slot on Monday along with Biden. And she treated your desire to change the nation’s direction as if it were a character flaw on your part.
The many fawning speakers, the positively glowing press coverage and so many unquestioned assertions; At the end of it all, the only thing you can say for sure about what Harris believes is that she should be president, and she’ll say literally anything to get there. She will renounce all of her past positions if that’s what it will take.
What she’d do on that job is entirely a matter of speculation. Her unwillingness to tell people either means that she doesn’t know or she doesn’t want us to know. Neither option is good.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).