Why is Kamala Harris fading?
In National Review John McCormack tackles the question of why Harris’s poll numbers have been falling after an early rise. His answer involves her back-and-forth waffling on busing and Medicare for All, as well as her record as a prosecutor. He concludes:
So Harris’s problems go deeper than the fact that she had one good debate followed by one bad debate on matters of style. Both debates revealed she has serious weaknesses on matters of substance. And the hits keep coming on Medicare for All: On Monday, she was savaged by Bernie Sanders after it was reported that Harris told wealthy donors in the Hamptons that she was not “comfortable” with Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill, which she co-sponsored and supported until a few weeks ago. There are still five months left until the Iowa caucuses, but the past two months have demonstrated that Harris has deep problems that she can’t paper over with some well-rehearsed, well-delivered lines in subsequent debates.
All of that is true, and it probably matters. But I have a different take on it. Have you ever noticed how voters can forgive a candidate almost anything if they like that person? One of Hillary’s big problems, for example—one Obama correctly sensed in the 2008 race, when she was his main rival—is that she’s “unlikable.”
So is Kamala Harris, IMHO.
Likability isn’t what I tend to look for in candidates, although it’s a plus because any president is someone we’re going to hear a lot and see a lot for quite a few years, and it helps if we like that person. And of course different people have different criteria for who’s “likable.” For example, I never really felt Obama’s likability; for me his policies got in the way. But I could see that he had a kind of smooth, polished charm that would appeal to a lot of people.
I don’t know what it is about Harris—I’d describe it as a certain harsh quality—but she just isn’t especially likeable. A lot of things about a candidate can be changed, but not that.
In contrast, one of the reasons Biden’s numbers are still up despite everything, is that he’s widely perceived as likable, affable, convivial. I seem to be tone deaf to Biden’s personal appeal as well, but I recognize that he’s apparently got some.
Harris? Not so much.
For some strange unknown reasons of all the presidential candidates from the democratic party I find Elizabeth Warren to be the least intolerable among them. Despite her leftist stance on every issue that I don’t agree with at least she comes off as someone genuinely believes what she is advocating politically and is the least corrupted in comparison to other contenders with any real chances of winning. regarding to her masquerading as a native american to fraudulently obtain opportunities preserved for minorities, I find that its more likely that she sincerely took her grandma’s bedtime stories a bit too seriously and wholeheartedly believed everything about the origin of her family.
Lets face it, Trump has a real chance of losing, we can all sit in our echo chambers making excuses for all of his missteps and blaming everything on the lying media and deep state the truth is Trump is very hated among a very large percentage of the population due to many reasons. At this point if we are going to lose just hope we can at least keep the senate and Warren winning instead of corrupted beyond salvation China Joe who is going to surrender our country on a silver platter to China.
Well put. Have you noticed how first Hillary developed that strained cackling laugh, and later we have Harris incessantly smiling and laughing? My guess is that their media handlers have realized Neo’s point and trained their clients on how to fake cool and casual.
I find Hillary’s “performances” to be cringeworthy, while Harris’ attempts are much smoother; but not quite believable. In one of Harris’ attempts to be cool she laughed and joked about her pot smoking Jamaican heritage, which backfired when her Jamaican professor father took umbrage.
If then Harris is unlikeable (a perfectly acceptable supposition to me) I note we have in English many useful terms for these various sorts of such women. Since I simply haven’t watched her closely enough to identify her specific type with any confidence, I wonder which you good folk think she best resembles?
The battle-ax?; the shrew?; the termagant?; the harpy?; the fishwife?; the nag?; the scold?; or some other, milder sort not captured here (i.e., the homewrecker, the gossip, the golddigger, the yenta, the busybody, etc.)?
A hypothesis:
She’s a moderately handsome woman at age 55, so most women despise her as they would another woman in their office who has better natural assets than they do. Warren is fairly plain and looks like a goofball elementary school principal, so doesn’t provoke this reaction. Some portion of the distaff electorate might react congenially to Harris if they understood her to be like women in their social circle (I think Sarah Palin has some of this appeal), but Harris is a childless professional-managerial class wench; she’s not a scrupulous lawyer and she traded sex for personal advancement. For most women, Kamala Harris is their boss’s boss’s boss: remote, unpleasant, and unconcerned with the welfare of the workforce. She’s not someone you’d ever want to spend an afternoon with shopping. She’s an ebony Marcia Clark.
I think Hillary’s natural constituency has always been women whose default disposition to the world is one of hostility. She’s their id.
I’ve never figured out why people find Biden or Obama appealing.
Biden is such a fraud he appropriated Neil Kinnock’s biography lock, stock, and barrel. His mother and father were still alive at the time; no clue how they must have reacted to that. Biden’s intellectual mediocrity is at least as manifest as Dan Quayle’s; it’s just that the press never harped on it once he was out of the way in 1987; cud chewing Delaware voters re-elected him in 1990. His surviving son is a frankly gruesome character, and he and his wife just blithely pretend nothing is a miss about him.
As for Obama, you want to hack-off a partisan Democrat, simply offer a plain summary of his work history, editorializing only when you say ‘ran the Chicago Annenberg Challenge into the ground’. You’d really have to scrounge to find an occasion when one of the major parties nominated such an empty suit, much less an occasion when the general electorate put him in office.
Is Liz Warren any more “likable” than Harris? We all thought her candidacy was DOA after the 1/1024 debacle but she has kept going and is still one of the leading contenders along with Biden and Sanders. May even start to pull ahead of Sanders.
She’s an ebony Marcia Clark.
That’s actually a weakness. She is Indian and Jamaican and, like Obama, she isn’t a legitimate black. Ironically, if Ben Carson was a Democrat, he would be a genuine black but he is a Republican and therefore out of bounds. Obama was not that popular with blacks until he was seen as a winner. Also, Harris is NEVER seen with her white husband.
I had a black dental hygienist when I lived in California. She is Ethiopian and Jewish, one of the black Jews rescued by Israel as a child. She grew up there. She is married to a white Jewish man and they visit Israel every year. She told me she gets “hate stares” from black women when she is out with her husband. They live in Irvine, a very prosperous suburb in Orange County.
She told me she gets “hate stares” from black women when she is out with her husband.
My sister had a friend who was beaten up in the bathrooms at Monroe High School in Rochester by irate black girls for this reason. That was in 1972 or thereabouts.
I think a great many black women have a visceral distaste for miscengenation because it doesn’t work in their favor. There’s always fewer black men with solid earnings than there are black women looking for men with solid earnings, so an available man being captured by a white woman bothers them. Miscegenation as a social phenomenon tends to be asymmetric, with black man / white woman pairings far more common than white man / black woman pairings. Also, some black women find a manifestation of black men taking an interest in a white woman to be vaguely insulting given the number of unattached black women around.
I’ve heard stories of black women who dislike exogamy among black women because they find it a species of social climbing.
I meet Kamala’s husband in Iowa. Lucky guy. She looks fabulous!
She’s another Hillary Clinton, made from the same flawed mold.
Art Deco’s summary of Kamala is priceless. Can’t add a thing to it. Well done.
Art Deco did indeed nail it.
Female candidates are HARD to get right. Women tend to viscerally detest other women much more easily than they do men – this despite all the rhetoric about muh patriarchy.
All a man has to do to not be actively despised by the middle of the Overton Window female voter is to display some actual symptoms of manliness and not be an apologetic wimp.
She’s not pleasant, as Neo says. Neither is Warren. Imagine four years of that voice screeching on all the airwaves. That problem also includes crazy Bernie. I think they’re stuck with Joe, with all his shortcomings and gaffes.
I have thought of hrc as the Shrew Queen.
Kamal Harris showed herself during the Kavanaugh hearings to be rude, abusive of power, and shrewish. What’s not to dislike?
And now the DNC is rigging the next debate to keep Tulsi Gabbard out…hmmm…Seems the powers that be want Willie’s woman in the race & woe betide the one who tugged on SuperKamala’s cape.
Wait & see…she’ll still be there at the Convention.
And now the DNC is rigging the next debate to keep Tulsi Gabbard out…hmmm…Seems the powers that be want Willie’s woman in the race & woe betide the one who tugged on SuperKamala’s cape.
Wait & see…she’ll still be there at the Convention.
Yeah, Kamala’s an a$$hole but Liz Warren gives me the literal creeps. That weepy sounding high pitched voice spewing non-stop stupid brazen lies is fingernails down the chalkboard for me. Especially combined with the spastic “energetic” flailing.
Not sure who it was,but someone said that Kamala would either be the female Obama or black hillary
Fine. Def get rid of the authentically likeable candidate. Keep the walking veneer that is Joe BiDon’t. ?
I haven’t looked but it would be interesting to see a male/female breakout of Harris’s poll numbers.
There is a dishonesty about Harris that resembles Hillary’s. The polite term for it is disingenuous – she is pretending to be something she is not and which she has determined voters want her to be, she is a fake. Warren is unlikable to me too, but for a different reason: she is a schoolmarm, always lecturing and instructing and correcting and obsessing about the things we should know better to do. Leave me alone Professor! Stop yelling at me!
Note that I have never, and am likely to never, vote for a Democrat for any office, so perhaps my assessment is inherently biased against.
Harris is about the acquisition of power.
Warren is an example of those whom C.S. Lewis spoke; a moral busybody who will torment us for our own good and will do so without end for she does so with the approval of her own conscience.
Of the two, Warren is the far more insidious threat.
I’ve not watched any videos of Harris in action, but have to say I did find a piece she wrote a few months ago about her stepchildren, well, sweet. So shoot me. The link: https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a27422434/kamala-harris-stepmom-mothers-day/
Like John Guilfoyle alluded to, I think.
Tulsi Gabbard took her down and she hasn’t recovered.
Ann’s always looking for a Democratic sweet spot, however small and immaterial it may be.
#MeToo #HerToo #SheProgressed is probably a disqualification for women in the workplace who are not as socially liberal.
Geoffrey B: “Warren is an example of those whom C.S. Lewis spoke; a moral busybody who will torment us for our own good and will do so without end for she does so with the approval of her own conscience.”
So true. Of all the Dem candidates, she is the most frightening.
Mayor Buddha-judge could be more electable because he has a more persuasive style, but is also a moral busybody of the same kind.
They all scare me. 🙁
Warren is an example of those whom C.S. Lewis spoke; a moral busybody who will torment us for our own good and will do so without end for she does so with the approval of her own conscience. –Geoffrey Britain
Once upon a time these were the women who launched the Woman’s [sic] Christian Temperance Union or trained as missionaries to Africa and Asia, though without the commitment to Marxism in its various disguises.
I liked the old Katherine Hepburn versions a la “The African Queen” better. Hepburn came to see the worth in poor old Charlie Allnut (Bogie and what a great surname!) I doubt today’s missionary women have the capacity.
I agree that Kamala Harris seems hard to like. About Joe Biden, he gets mentioned in Emma Sky’s excellent book The Unraveling, which covers what happened in Iraq after the success of the Surge. Sky was a British civil service worker, highly antiwar, who’d earlier worked with Palestinians and spoke fluent Arabic. She went to Iraq to work in Mosul even she reflexively disliked and distrusted the US military. But she was so effective dealing with tribal leaders that she eventually rose to become, of all things, General Odierno’s “right hand man.” All this background seems necessary to foreground how she felt about Biden. She despised him. She said that he’d enter with a big smile on his face, but as soon as anyone said anything he didn’t want to hear the smile would disappear and he’d turn into the most nasty and unpleasant powerful politician they ever had to be around.
I can quite picture this.
IMO, only Tulsi Gabard is likeable as a human being. For that reason, she will never be the nominee. Not wacko enough.
Do I want her as POTUS? No, definitely not.
“Warren is the far more insidious threat.”
Definitely agreed, Geoffrey. Harris is a shallow climber and did not even have to work too hard to climb (Willie Brown). She is now in over her head. But Warren is scary for reasons beyond herself. She is no more likable than Harris and should have been buried by the fiasco about her heritage. But she is a leftist true believer which is exactly where the Democrat party is now. And even lying about her background doesn’t hurt her with Dems because it also reflects what they are – completely unscrupulous about using identity politics to gain power.
I found Mr. Obama to be oily, rather than polished. But then, he is a Chicago Machine politician, the platinum standard for evil.
Too bad that Trump’s actual campaign wouldn’t dare run a campaign add like this one that some joker put together–
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=64&v=Htc3tXYncXQ
I think Liz Warren will be the nominee. I cannot help seeing Warren as a Salmon to Trump’s Grizzly bear.
https://youtu.be/TSSPDwAQLXs
Nature is grand.
I found Mr. Obama to be oily, rather than polished. But then, he is a Chicago Machine politician, the platinum standard for evil.
I have some online correspondence with Elaine Krewer, once a reporter in Illinois and now a state employee in Springfield. She’s at pains to put that idea to rest. A Chicago alderman stands at an apex of a body of precinct captains. Once upon a time a precinct captain had a function akin to social work, traveling his precinct several nights a week and talking with his neighbors about their various problems. To be an alderman is a labor intensive activity which requires attending an endless round of events (especially funerals) and interacting with people all the time, as well as making all manner of arrangements regarding mundane brass tacks issues. Obama’s never done this sort of work and lacks the personality, diligence, and nexus of interests to do that sort of work. A precinct captain once said of Mayor Daley, “He met you once, he remember you forever”. That’s not Barack Obama. At all.
The Democrats have as of now five candidates who one might wager will be competitive next year: Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Booty-gig. Biden and Warren are innocent of any executive experience and have a history of gross biographical fabrications (quite consequential in Warren’s case). Biden in addition has intellectual deficits and the son he raised is one of the world’s grotesques. Booty-gig is another generator of biographical fabrications, albeit less brazen ones. He, like Cory Booker, has a history as a business-as-usual mayor of a city of modest dimensions. He makes a great public point of his sexual deviance, and, like every liberal in American for the last 30 years, is perfectly obtuse in his utterance on that subject. Harris is one of the world’s unscrupulous people, full stop. Their best candidate is a 78 year old quondam Trotskyist (and abiding economic illiterate). Wunnerful wunnerful.
I cannot help seeing Warren as a Salmon to Trump’s Grizzly bear.
I’d like to see that. The thing of it is, north of 40% of the electorate loathe the President and will never vote for him. It’s not a rational loathing, either, and you cannot reason someone out of a position they were never reasoned into. Trump’s got a loyal base, but he’s having trouble cracking the swing voters. James Neuchterlein’s description of swing voters was thus: “They’ll vote against a candidate for a reason like ‘she reminds me of my first wife'”.
Snow on Pine:
George W. Bush’s campaign wouldn’t dare run that ad (or rather the equivalent thereof, for their own candidate). Likewise McCain’s or Romney’s.
Part of that was because the campaigners themselves were too genteel; but part of it was because such an ad wouldn’t remotely fit the projected personae of their candidates. The idea of Romney, in particular, being associated with such an ad is so incongruous one imagines him spontaneously abandoning his run should it happen to become popular.
But Trump?
Actually, it kinda fits for Trump, doesn’t it?
And as for Trump’s campaign team? Well, I don’t know who that is, really. Maybe they wouldn’t dirty themselves with such a video, but I dunno. And even if they didn’t, the President could just tweet his approval of the ad a thousand times between now and the election, and it would de facto become “his” ad.
To be perfectly honest, I just went and checked his Twitter feed, real quick, to make sure he hadn’t done exactly that.
And I wouldn’t be confident that he won’t.
Warren is an example of those whom C.S. Lewis spoke; a moral busybody who will torment us for our own good and will do so without end for she does so with the approval of her own conscience.
“If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. “
It’s odd that while both Harris and Pocahontas have shrill unlikeable personalities and have both culturally appropriated false ethnicities only Harris is hurting
Maybe Pocahontas’s base is more tolerant of cultural appropriation than Harris’s?
Avi:
See my new post on Warren.
Kamala’s #MeToo prostitution sex-for-advancement with Willie Brown is something Dem women do NOT want to be defending. Or even hearing about.
“Fauxcahantas” doesn’t bother them as much.
The Dem primaries are a search for the most likely winner, as well as lots of applications for a VP spot on the ticket. It’s likely still too soon to really know who the Dems will choose, in this never ending campaign.