Wave Kamala goodbye
Remember when Kamala Harris was the It girl who would lead the Democrats to victory in 2020?
Well, not so much:
Kamala Harris dropped her presidential campaign on Tuesday after months of failing to lift her candidacy from the bottom of the field — a premature ending for a California senator once heralded as a top-tier contender for the nomination.
While Harris had qualified for the December debate in her home state, she was running dangerously low on cash — lacking the resources to air TV ads in Iowa — and her staff was gripped by long-running internal turmoil.
I think what went wrong was quite simple. Harris seems to be the sort of person who doesn’t grow on people. The more exposure she got the worse she did. As I wrote back in August in a post entitled “Why is Kamala Harris fading?”:
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.
Yesterday, you wrote about people who lack a sense of humor. Prescient, that was.
Plus, she slept her way to the top.
Personality is a real big factor with most all of us. Especially with TV over the past 60 years, remember when a lot of people listening to radio thought Nixon was doing a great job going against JFK but those who watched TV saw JFK’s charm and that was that. Lots of marketing and Trump knows how to do it with a broad audience, Biden might be the best of those left standing because Warren comes across like an ex-wife. All the ad money in the world will not make a candidate more likable, kind of like when Ford did all of the market research and came up with the perfect car, the Edsel. I suspect Bloomberg will be another Edsel.
A hallowed tradition from our sports arenas:
“Na Na Na Na Hey Hey-ey Goodbye”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoyvvEWHodk
She was the darling of WaPo and the NYT at the outset. And had she been gay, she would have hit the identity politics trifecta. She was polling fairly well in July, at around 15%. But once she started trending downward, she never recovered.
Charles Cooke at NRO provides a more substantive critique:
[Harris is] a would-be tyrant whose primary contribution to American life thus far has been to fight “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors”; who has openly promised to act without Congress; and who showed us exactly who she is during the Kavanaugh hearings, at which she implied that she knew something terrible about the nominee for the sole purpose of sharing the insinuation on her Twitter feed. Harris is a woman who, if successful (“successful”), would have overseen the mass confiscation of millions of firearms, the seizing of patents, the federalization of abortion law, and, depending on the polling, the elimination of (her word) the private health insurance plans of 180 million people.
Everything that is wrong with American politics is summed up in Kamala Harris. She’s a weather vane. She’s dishonest. She’s a coward. She’s condescending. And she’s a phony. She’s the answer to no useful or virtuous question. Nothing good has come from her election. She has nothing of value to offer America. Goodbye. Bad luck. That’s all, folks.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/good-riddance-to-kamala-harris/
thank you Tulsi
+1, Avi!
Kamala Harris not likeable?
Gosh, what’s not to like?
https://www.jamaicaglobalonline.com/donald-harris-slams-his-daughter-senator-kamala-harris-for-fraudulently-stereotyping-jamaicans-and-accusing-her-of-playing-identity-politics/
(…wherein one sees in the first picture pure earnestness and in the second pure joy….)
One should add that Willie Brown, that exemplary judge of character, must have seen—there can be no doubt—something of value….
Avi’s got it.
Tulsi stuck a pin Kamala’s balloon, and now we all can stick a fork in her campaign.
Inauthentic is how I would characterize Kamala. She didn’t strike me as particularly unlikeable, but in her strained attempt to come off as more likeable or jovial, she only succeeded in making herself seem phony. Supposedly, millennials are hyper attuned to the “authenticity” of everything in their lives, or so they believe.
The MSM liked her and set about annointing her. So, they led the charge and then discovered, to their chagrin, that no one was following.
This is what happens when the press decides to MAKE the news instead of REPORT the news.
Harris is a reiteration of Laventri Beria. In an occasional skirt.
She had a lot of stuff handed to her, or earned it on her knees.
Women don’t like that.
She came across as Tilly the Tyrant, who was going to sieze guns, patents, and anything else she wanted. Men, who know the value of the work, didn’t like that.
huxley,
I can think of no better method for creating armed resistance than for a democrat President to attempt the mass confiscation of millions of firearms from law abiding citizens. Dissolution of the 2nd Amendment is the ‘trigger wire’ for Civil War. As, dissolution of the 1st amendment rests upon first eliminating the 2nd Amendment.
Well…I was wrong.
I figured she ticked enough of the boxes to get at least as far as the convention, but by the time she actually started appearing in public against in-coming fire from the other candidates…(“thank you Tulsi” is right) she had nothing but the angry fascist in waiting. Who wants that? Apparently not even her own team.
“Don’t let the back door hit ya where the good Lord split ya honey.”
Maybe someone threatened to throw a bucket of water on her?
Apparently Harris wasn’t liked by her staff either:
“This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” wrote state operations director Kelly Mehlenbacher in the Nov. 11 letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.
“While I still believe that Senator Harris is the strongest candidate to win in the General Election in 2020, I no longer have confidence in our campaign or its leadership,” she added.
She wrote that “the treatment of our staff over the last two weeks was the final straw in this very difficult decision.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/472455-kamala-harris-aide-says-in-resignation-letter-ive-never-seen-staff-treated
I’m too far away to tell where the problems were, but it seems Harris didn’t run her campaign well or find the right people. I never got the impression Harris was as smart as she needed to be.
Many American blacks finally realized, after eight years of Obama, that he had nothing to do with their culture and history. His ancestors weren’t slaves, they didn’t live through Jim Crow, he didn’t grow up in a black family, never lived in a black neighborhood, never attended a predominantly black school, didn’t go to a historically black college, never had anything to do with black people until someone whispered in his ear (at ultra-white, ultra-liberal Occidental College, natch) “If you play this right, you could be the first black President.” They realized that much earlier about Harris. She’s not “African-American,” she’s upper-class Jamaican, from a completely different experience. Plus, every one knows how she got to where she is — “She went horizontal to go vertical.” That doesn’t rate highly in the black community.
Neo, you called it right years ago.
Again.
SHE was the “Other Woman” for Willie Brown’s wife. How can #MeToo women get behind that?
She wasn’t so popular among blacks, either.
Funny to think that part of what TrumpHaters hate is that Trump actually seems very likable by the responses of those dealing with him, and in his own humorous ways.
Did Harris ever show any sense of humor?
Man, I only read the Gabbard debate attack on Harris. Watching it, as I did today, was so painful, I felt bad for Harris.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/tulsi-gabbard-knifed-kamala-harris-in-july-four-months-later-she-has-died-from-the-wounds
I’ve seen touche debate moments and those are great, but Gabbard gutted Harris. Harris made it worse with all the blinking, looking down, acting petulant and not offering a direct response to Gabbard’s accusations.
Of course, Gabbard is now persona non grata in the Democratic Party for that and other things.
I believe Kamala Harris was supposed to be The One. Black, female, young enough, attractive, firm, progressive, but not too radical. This is a serious setback for Democrats, a proof that things have gone very wrong this cycle.
And now only whites are currently qualified for the next debate. Que lastima!
Heartfelt thanks to Tulsi !
what if Biden choses her as a running mate?
On the Losers-Lose ticket?
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Harris teamed up with Biden. I can hear the political consultants pitching it now, from within the bubble — the money is still rolling in for Biden, and he is still up in the polls, so all we need to add is some pizzazz; this gal has a lot of sex appeal and energy, so that puts air in the Biden balloon, and our focus groups show there are plenty of people who want a woman in the White House but are a little but unsure about her as commander-in-chief, so this way we get both, the experienced leader and the good-looking gal, great package, sign her up…
It’s very peculiar to watch the Dems throw SO much money down the drain while talking endlessly about how great things would be if we let them spend lots more of our money.