The closing weeks of a campaign are when opinions start to harden. Candidates and their surrogates make the last-minute cases for themselves. They narrow their focus to the issues that motivate their own voters the most. At this point, campaigns usually stop thinking about undecided voters and shift their focus to motivating the ones they’ve got to actually show up and cast their ballots.
The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris is not doing this. Instead, it is spending all its time attacking Donald Trump. And that’s telling.
When you ask Harris a question, even one scripted and screened by her campaign, the old Joe Biden saying from 2007 comes to pass: You get a noun, a verb, and Donald Trump.
Every time, it is an argument against Trump. You will not get an argument for Kamala Harris.
This is a testament to just how bad voters believe the economy is under Bidenomics. Were there a positive case for Harris, surely she herself would make it. That she cannot — that she isn’t even trying to — is probably the greatest “tell” as to where this election is headed.
Bear in mind that Harris could get away with saying almost anything she wanted in making this case for herself. No one in the left-wing corporate media who will call her out for even the most egregious lies or distortions. Of the major media companies, all were willing to accept at face value her absurd insistence that she was never “border czar,” despite the piles of video and print stories from their own outlets calling her exactly that. Not one of them has bothered even to ask her for the location of the mystery McDonald’s where she only now claims to have worked, for the first time ever in 30 years of public life. Isn’t it newsworthy for that McDonald’s customers and employees? If she wins, wouldn’t you like to know, if only so you could say, “I ate at the McDonald’s where the first woman president once worked?”
Rather than make a case for herself, knowing it would be echoed by the media without question, Harris is spending all of her time attacking Trump. She says she will be “President for all Americans” even as she smears half the country for supposedly supporting a Nazi.
Harris has sat down for only one mildly adversarial interview, with Brett Baier of Fox News. Her campaign likes to talk about how strong a leader she is, yet the entire left-media industrial complex had to feign outrage over how disrespectful Baier was for interrupting her — even though he also repeatedly interrupted Donald Trump. And never mind Baier, because Harris can’t even handle a softball question from Sonny Hostin without self-destructing.
Harris is “historic” because of her innate characteristics, not because of anything she’s actually accomplished. She is “brilliant” because people with television shows and newspaper columns declare her to be. She is a principled leader, despite having renounced pretty much every position she ever held until six weeks ago. And when asked to explain why, instead of giving an answer, she insults the intelligence of everyone within earshot by simply retorting that she has not changed her values.
If she had a record worth touting, Harris would run on it. But there was a reason Biden was on the path to defeat even before the debate of June 27. Prices had risen so fast under the Biden-Harris administration that people were angry, and even the subsequent fall in inflation hasn’t made prices go back down. Food and energy costs, which don’t show up in the inflation numbers, continue to spiral. Under Trump, it was nearly impossible to fit $100 worth of groceries into three plastic bags, whereas now they fit nicely into one, with room to spare.
The border is also out of control, thanks to the Biden-Harris administration has been doing all it could to process as many migrants as quickly as possible and release them into the interior of the U.S. These migrants are contributing to high housing prices. And that is to say nothing of the spike in violent crime — and as we all learned just recently, everyone who noticed it had been right about it all along.
There’s no lie that can make your neighborhood safer. There’s no rhetorical trick that can make that bag of groceries bigger or that tank of gas cheaper. There is therefore no magic trick that can make four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris seem like an argument in her favor.
So the only thing left is to call Donald Trump Hitler — or “weird,” or “weak and unstable,” or “exhausted.” (Even so, can you guess who has been taking time off from the campaign trail?)
The only problem for Harris is Trump has already been president, and it turns out he wasn’t Hitler. He wasn’t even just a disaster. He also doesn’t look exhausted. He isn’t any weirder now than he ever was before, and most people think his four years were better than her four years.
Neither Harris nor her media supporters have a case to make for her, so they have given up trying. And in going negative on Trump instead, she may be exposing her biggest problem of all: Voters know that she is not Trump, and they want back what they had during his administration. That is something Harris cannot give them.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).