"Kamala Harris is now the presidential frontrunner," my Townhall colleague Guy Benson warned on Monday, and "though many caveats apply," I'm here to tell you how we win.
The Harris we used to know was so beatable that her 2020 bid for the Democrat presidential nomination didn't even make it to 2020. She ended her hapless and unloved campaign towards the end of 2019, weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
But that Harris isn't who Trump is running against now. In the last two weeks, Harris has been allowed to recreate herself, to change her image from the far-left unaccomplished tosser of word salads into "the joy candidate."
How did we get here? How do we fight back?
This bit from Glenn Thrush's 2012 book, "Obama's Last Stand," has stuck with me for a dozen years:
In 2008, Obama cloaked his killer instinct in the more attractive vestments of his inspiring personal narrative. Phil Singer, one of the tough New York-bred operatives who surrounded Hillary Clinton that year, still suspects his boss could have beaten the real Obama, the hard-edged politician.
Yet she didn't stand a chance against Obama the Book.
"We were running against a biography, not a politician... We were screwed," says Singer. [Emphasis added]
David Plouffe masterminded that 2008 campaign. With help from the mainstream media, Plouffe cemented the illusory version of Obama — the Hopenchange guy, not the hard-edged politician — in the public's mind so firmly that, nearly 20 years later, that's still how the public largely imagines him.
Plouffe is back. He took a senior position in the Harris campaign at the start of August, and he's attempting to work the same magic for her that he did for Obama in 2008.
Harris is "the joy candidate."
She isn't running on her record because it sucks. She isn't running on her platform because she can't admit to her real agenda. She's running on vibes, the social-media-friendly version of Obama's first winning bid. We run against vibes, we lose.
The movement towards Harris in the polls is partly due to what Benson called her "unprecedented media propaganda, as well as her team's calculated decision to bubble-wrap her appearances and control her public utterances to an extraordinary degree." But some of that is on Trump, who did what he sometimes does and went on forrays into irrelevancies instead of hammering her record.
That allowed Harris (and the willing media) almost two weeks to redefine herself as the content-free "joy candidate."
Don't tell me that kind of thing doesn't work because it can, and it does. It worked for Obama in 2008, and it worked against Mike Dukakis in 1988.
Dukakis exited the Democratic National Convention with a 17-point lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush, running not on ideology but on vaguely defined "competence." But by the time Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater's ad campaign (along with an independent PAC's Willie Horton ad) had redefined Dukakis as a hapless criminal-coddling leftist, the race was all but over.
I'm not saying this race is over — far from it. But I did warn you that August would be gut-check time.
Fortunately, the Donald Trump we saw on X last night was back to hitting Harris where it hurts. Plouffe's magic worked for Obama because Obama had almost very little record and a winning personality (at least on TV). Harris has a terrible record and a yuge likability deficit. If Trump can keep hitting her on the former, there will be no covering up the latter.
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