How desperate is the Harris campaign? The desperation meter is clearly in the red zone, and there are still nearly three weeks to go before the election.
The Kamala Harris campaign is clearly worried that men in general, and particularly black men, are planning on deserting the Democrat candidate in record numbers. The Democrats are making increasingly desperate and ludicrous attempts to win men over: Tim Walz is running around in a lumberjack shirt and pretending he knows how to hunt, Harris is offering black men massive payouts in exchange for their vote, and Harris supporters released the most ridiculous appeal to men ever, a self-conscious group of half-men proclaiming that they’re men (if you really are, you don’t have to announce it) and stating that they’re so unafraid of women that they’re going to dare to vote for Kamala Harris.
All that, however, manifests a desperation that looks like calm, assured confidence compared to the campaign’s latest attempt to win men over: on Sunday, Barack Obama just randomly decided that now was the perfect time to grace the world with a video in which he explains which NBA players he would name to his all-time starting five. Why, men will be lining up in droves to vote for Harris now.
From one basketball fan to the next, I hope you enjoy @HGMedia's docuseries – Starting 5 – which is streaming now on @Netflix.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 13, 2024
And if you were ever wondering which players I'd have in my starting five – take a look! pic.twitter.com/Vet3Zz68Fr
Obama’s dream team, as he explained in a post on X, was nominally an ad for “@HGMedia's docuseries – Starting 5 – which is streaming now on @Netflix.” Nonetheless, it was hard not to notice that it came just a day before Harris unveiled her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” about which she unctuously declared, “Black men deserve a president who cares about making their lives better.” Obama’s hoop picks also followed two days after the silliest political ad of all time, in which non-men pretended to be men in order to shame men who support Trump into voting instead for Harris.
Of course, it’s inconceivable to imagine that Barack Obama is coordinating efforts with the Harris campaign, right? He just spontaneously decided that this would be a perfect time for him to inform the world of his boundless admiration for LeBron James and Steph Curry.
The Democrats clearly have a testosterone deficit, and it is worrying them. Obama, however, has never exactly been known as a particularly masculine man, and so the whole effort once again has the air of leftists trying too hard to convince ordinary people that they’re just like them, instead of the rogues’ gallery or Marxists, lunatics, psychopaths and fantasists that they actually are. When you have to keep telling ordinary folks that you’re just more ordinary folks, maybe you aren’t.
One encouraging sign, however, is that all this clumsy, sweaty pandering from the Democrats suggests that they don’t believe they have the election in the bag, non-citizen voting, mail-in ballots, and all the rest notwithstanding. If they’re hauling out the sainted Obama in mid-October to rebrand himself as “basketball fan Barack Obama” and talk over hoops with the fellas, maybe everything isn’t going according to plan in Harris World.
Also, all this silly courting of the male vote shows up once again the immense cultural divide in America today. Donald Trump and JD Vance don’t have to run around larping as hunters or tell us about their favorite basketball players in order to show that they’re men; it’s just obvious. The election of 2024 is shaping up to be a contest between ordinary, normal Americans and a massive number of people who would have been considered mentally ill not too very long ago.
Related: Harris Campaign Actually Accomplishes Something: It Gives Us 'The Gayest Political Ad of All Time'
It is also true, however, that the Democrats’ pandering is a welcome indication that somewhere in their twisted little hearts, they realize they’ve gone way too far: the party of FDR and JFK has become the party of Rachel Levine and Sam Brinton, and most Americans are a bit too sane and decent to play along willingly. Leftists know that they can’t let their freak flag fly as high as they want, at least in Oct. 2024, without alienating a huge segment of the electorate. They certainly can’t and won’t come clean about their authoritarian agenda, but it’s clear enough. So also is their never-ending determination to embrace every delusion and deviation and declare it normal.
If Harris wins, don’t expect any further basketball observations from Barack Obama or hunting from Tim Walz. Instead, the freak flag will be flying higher than ever.
