With Kamala Harris, The Media Tries to Hide The Obvious
Harris is uniquely unpopular, but still a media darling.
Perhaps nothing shows the blind spots of the media — the liberal and mainstream kind of media — like its treatment of sainted figures. The hagiography lays bare a stunning lack of self-awareness. And it is doubly insufferable because it doesn’t help voters, and the parties they support, even in its most effective form.
A story that shows this perfectly is a recent one about Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris is very likely the least popular vice president in the last 50 years. But one wouldn’t have learned this fact from any of the biggest liberal outlets.
Some of these outlets chose to ignore the story: readers who exclusively consume The New York Times, The Atlantic, and NPR, in print at least, would have missed it entirely. Most bizarrely, the two liberal sites that did take on the story engaged in a pitiful pseudo-denialism, displaying many of the most intolerable pathologies in liberal discourse today.
These outlets framed their stories as petulant questions — is Harris really so unpopular? — and then launched into arguments that, in fact, she wasn’t. They appealed to the most annoying aspects of data science, fretting over error bars and the quantity of polls being referenced, along with painfully obvious and stultifying historical analysis (including: the country has become more partisan). All of this might be tolerable if it weren’t trying to paper over something obvious even to a casual observer: people don’t really like Kamala Harris.
Calling this fact into question requires an incredible, even willful amnesia. Why bother with margins of error when the polls for 2020’s general election oversold support for Democrats by 3.9 points (for Biden nationally), 4.1 points (for Biden in state polls), and even 6 points (for Senate and governors’ races)?
It seems that the media forgot, too, that Harris had to drop out of the presidential primaries before the very first elections were held — this was in spite of glowing press coverage and support from more billionaires than any other candidate before the field sharply narrowed. Harris wasn’t well liked before becoming VP; that the dislike continues should not be shocking.
Accepting that Harris is unpopular, which really isn’t hard to do, one might think that the most helpful thing for Harris and the Democrats would be to air an honest assessment of her weaknesses, along with some suggestions for how she can improve. But this appears to be beyond the scope of the press. Instead the liberal news, when it can admit her unpopularity at all, slips into the “What Happened” defense: it blames bad poll numbers on America’s supposedly rabid misogyny and racism.
To be sure, politicians may suffer penalties for race and gender. But this is far from guaranteed, judging by how beloved both Barack and Michelle Obama have remained to the Democratic base. It may surprise liberal pundits, but policy seems to have a fair bit of impact on polling numbers. The most popular politician in the country has often been Bernie Sanders, the least popular Mitch McConnell.
Harris, of course, bungled the policy question in the primaries. Her backtracking from Medicare for All (thanks, billionaires) caused her polling numbers to nosedive, and she never quite recovered. To cover herself, Harris tried to fill the rest of her campaign with pleas to ban Donald Trump from Twitter. It fell flat.
The biggest flaws for Harris might be psychological. She is thoroughly inauthentic, but more importantly, she reads that way. Her flipping on policy is one thing — something many politicians do — but she also tries to hide her moral emptiness behind a veneer of earnest and moral authenticity, which is simply infuriating. Harris really wants you to think she is authentic, after everything. This fact helps explain why the popularity gap between her and President Biden has tended to look more like a chasm.
Joe Biden, and Donald Trump for that matter, have access to a deeper mode of authenticity, one that Harris can’t quite seem to grasp. Biden is also a shape-shifting sellout, but he’s one who owns that fact. Biden will tell you straight to your face that he marched with Nelson Mandela — and he really doesn’t give a damn whether you believe him or not. You can trust that he will lie to you, in the exact same way, the very next time he sees you. He won’t even hesitate. He uses mutually exclusive descriptors for himself. He knows you know what he is, and he does not care.
This utter lack of scruples is what many people associate with leadership. It is the psychopathy of Wall Street — the callousness of energy traders who want to steal from “Grandma Millie.” People have bought into this capitalistic, even Hobbesian framing to the point where they believe people in power are the most genuine when they are inconsistent and liars but shamelessly so. The average voter is upset, on the other hand, when a leader pretends to be coming from a place of principle, but really isn’t.
That last descriptor is something like Harris’s very essence. Her own father, a Marxist scholar, rebuked her on the campaign trail when she turned the family’s ethnic heritage into a “travesty.” Harris’s lean into identity politics was revealed as incredibly hollow when ex-congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard obliterated her on the debate stage. Gabbard exposed the hypocrisy of a supposedly race-conscious warrior presiding over the incarceration of marijuana users and laughing about it, the hypocrisy of (allegedly) jailing offenders for extra time to extract more value from their cheap prison labor. But Harris had committed so thoroughly to her woke identity that she criticized Biden’s racism and produced T-shirts to commodify her critique and her own racial identity. How can anyone who isn’t a hypocrite do all of this and then become vice president to this very same man, Joe Biden, someone who admitted he wouldn’t want his children to grow up around too many people with Harris’s skin color?
All of this should be obvious. Instead, coverage of Harris has been abysmal. But beyond this, it has to be. It is constrained by important functions of the liberal press — beyond blind obsequiousness to power, many sites profit from selling liberals on their own narcissism. When it comes to Harris, these sites must deny not only political weaknesses but basic psychology, such that many liberals are unable or refuse to understand these factors.
But this lack of understanding is dangerous: it is part of why the Democrats lost to Trump once, came within 45,000 votes of doing it again, and still might do so another time. One can only hope that the failing credibility of these outlets provokes a change — before they enable something, or someone, even worse than Trump.