editorials

So, Kamala Harris is the new Democratic candidate for president.

And, we’ve been told, she is incredible. Not merely serviceable, a middle innings relief pitcher brought in when your starter suddenly implodes in the third inning. She is the Mariano Rivera of politics. She’s lights-out. She’s charismatic, fascinating, quick on her feet, charming. She is, in the words of the legacy media, a historic candidate — not just because she’s a Black woman, a fact that explains her lightning-fast political ascent but that only Democrats are allowed to mention, and only then in the context of explaining why America requires a Black female president — but because she is, apparently, so good at this. 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)?

Joe Biden dropped out. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. When Biden dropped out, the legacy media could finally end the rock-in-the-shoe discomfort of cognitive dissonance from which they had been suffering since Biden’s brain-dead debate with Trump. They had been forced by circumstance into doing something they despise: objective journalism, in which Democrats are treated as normal figures subject to cross-examination. Since Barack Obama’s ascent nearly 20 years ago, the media have avoided just this sort of thing. Biden’s collapse onstage compelled them to do some journalism, just to cover their asses — otherwise, they would have been implicated in his health coverup.

So they did. But they didn’t like it. Now, Biden is gone. They can declare victory. And they can go right back to bathing in the warm, urine-filled kiddie pool of Democrat-media coordination they so enjoy. They’ve eaten their vegetables. Now it’s time for dessert: a heavy helping of Kamala cake. And they’re going to enjoy it.

The only question is whether the American people will fall for this quite obvious and heavy-handed routine. So far, some have. But presidential campaigns have a way of sanding off the varnish lacquered on by the friendly media. After all, at one point, the legacy media gave Hillary Clinton the same treatment. It didn’t work out well.

In the end, politicians tend to stand or fall on their own merit. Which is terrible news for Kamala Harris, since she has none.

Ben Shapiro’s new collection, “Facts and Furious: The Facts About America and Why They Make Leftists Furious,” is available now. Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators. com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM