Kamala Harris was a bad candidate

“I am just in a panic about the outcome of the election,” said my good friend, a fellow Republican woman who is over 40 years my senior, when we spoke on Monday evening.

It was less than 12 hours before each of us were to report to our respective posts as election officials, making our quick phone call the last conversation of a political nature either of us would have until late the following night.

“Look at it this way,” I replied. “You’re 82 years old, so you’ve already got one foot in the grave. You might not even be around to have to suffer a full Kamala Harris presidency.”

In my defense, my Sophia Petrillo-esque comment did exactly what it was intended to do: it elicited a scream of laughter and a well-deserved exclamatory retort. Panic: dissipated. Huzzah.

Obviously, no one is coming to your friendly neighborhood opinion columnist (that’s me) for words of comfort to soothe the sting of election losses. It’s OK. I understand.

But I learned long ago that it’s just not worth it to fret over an upcoming election or let feelings of devastation creep in after my candidate loses. Losing is just as much a part of politics as winning is. One had best learn to cope if one is going to invest so much physical and emotional energy into it.

Rather than lament, I analyze. I have no problem articulating the reasons when a candidate loses, even when I support the candidate and hope they win. Especially when that candidate is Donald Trump.

Had Tuesday’s election gone the other way, I’d be dedicating this column to hashing all of the reasons Trump lost.

I’d discuss how that volatile personality made him his own worst enemy on too many occasions and rubbed too many voters in the wrong way. I’d argue that while the hatred for Trump from those who opposed his candidacy had been nothing short of irrational from the get-go, Republican voters should look next time for someone who doesn’t routinely give their detractors ammunition they crave.

Some of the mean tweets were/are funny — if calling Congressman Adam Schiff “Little Adam Schitt” is wrong, I don’t want to be right. But if Trump had lost, I’d surmise that the mean tweets irritated more than they amused.

I would rip that last debate performance to shreds — the one during which I resisted the urge to scream, “STOP TALKING ABOUT MIGRANTS EATING PEOPLES’ PETS, YOU JACKASS!”

(Fun fact: This is not actually the first time I’ve called Donald Trump a jackass in a respected newspaper.)

And though I will never dismiss the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 as anything short of disgraceful on the part of those who stormed the building, I do not believe that Trump’s conduct that day meets the definition of “insurrection” or the incitement thereof. But I also would have suggested that the guy should have shut his yap instead of repeatedly claiming the 2020 election was stolen.

Even in the context of a hypothetical loss, there’s plenty of Trump-induced cringe to go around. How, then, did he not lose the most contentious election of our lifetimes to date?

In short, Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate — terrible enough to be bested by a deeply flawed character like Donald Trump.

Her entrance into the race was under the most pathetic circumstances imaginable. Harris was thrust into the role of presumed Democratic nominee to succeed the fast-fading Biden only days after insisting, as she had for months, that the President was cognitively capable of running for a second term as leader of the free world.

After leaving the race, the obviously declining Biden could have resigned from office, bidding a wistful, Reagan-esque farewell to enter the “sunset of [his] life.” Doing so would have guaranteed that Harris made history as the first female American president, while giving her a much stronger position for election as the de facto incumbent.

Biden didn’t resign. Harris was instead left to pick up the baton from one of the weakest presidents in American history, whose selfishness she shielded from the nation and whose confidence in her ability to fill the role was anything but apparent.

Why did he endorse her to succeed him, then? Because Joe Biden’s legacy is now inherently linked to that of Kamala Harris. To overlook her as his successor would be a glaring admission of his own failure of leadership for keeping an incompetent person in such an important position for three and a half years. Best to just clumsily step aside and let Harris ride in on a wave of joy with the fundraising spigot turned back on.

It was painfully obvious that Harris was lacking in substance. What little she had to offer was not in the form of concrete policies, and what policy insight she offered was in stark contrast to the same positions she offered during her ill-fated run in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Five years ago, Harris supported banning fracking and called Trump’s border wall “stupid,” and “wasteful,” a “vanity project.” In her desperate shift to the middle to appeal to moderate voters, she insisted in August that she would not ban fracking and expressed support for continuing a border wall.

Harris never explained her shift to the middle — not that the media had much chance to ask her. Her first solo media interview was, inexplicably, with a local news station in Philadelphia, more than six weeks after she replaced Biden as the party standard-bearer.

Interviews with alternative media sources got complicated. Top-ranked podcaster Joe Rogan was told if he wanted to interview her as he had Trump, he would need to fly to her location and be time-limited. The interview never happened.

One social media interview was so disastrous that the influencer decided not to air it. The Harris campaign had demanded in advance that the host not ask any questions about Gaza. During the interview, Harris reportedly switched her take and launched into talking about cooking with “bacon as a spice,” to the shock and non-amusement of her devout Muslim host. When the host asked to return to the original topic of airplane conduct, Harris, acting on campaign staff advice, started bloviating about anchovies on pizza.

Harris’ first network interview on CNN required a wingman — her vice presidential sidekick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

The selection of Tiananmen Tim over a more moderate (and far more appealing) running mate like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear was itself a major Harris campaign blunder. Beneath the veneer of joy and confidence, Harris obviously harbored insecurities about being upstaged by a vice presidential nominee clearly better-suited for the presidency than she.

The self-described “knucklehead” Walz didn’t pose that threat. Walz was a charming addition to the ticket until the public began to realize that he had evidently attended the Joe Biden School of Telling Tales About Things that Never Happened, at which his dissertation was a made-up story of his being at Tiananmen Square during the pro-democracy protests in China in 1989. In reality, Walz was still home in Nebraska during the protests.

As Trump showed us in 2016 and again last week, even the most ridiculous characters can earn the trust of voters if they connect with them on the issues that matter. In all fairness, plenty of Harris/Walz supporters — the ones that came included in the presidential nominee handoff package as ones who would vote for anybody in order to defeat Trump — cited anger over abortion law changes and fears about democracy as their top issues.

But it turns out that the American electorate is more likely to need groceries they can afford than they are to need abortions. And they’re more likely to fear the consequences of the 10 million people who have entered our country by crossing the southern border illegally — including over 390 on the terror watchlist — than they are concerned that Trump might be the next Hitler.

Trump and Vance, meanwhile, each seemed to understand that most Americans listed the economy and immigration as their top two issues, and that the issue extended to pretty much every demographic in the country. They didn’t need to win every category of voter, necessarily — they just needed to make inroads with various groups and outperform the Trump totals from 2020.

They did, significantly cutting into Biden’s 2020 lead with voter groups such as Latino men. In Starr County, Texas, which is 97% Latino, Trump was the first Republican to earn a majority in almost 130 years.

At the end of the day, voters will vote for who they feel understands them best. This year, the candidate that best demonstrated to voters that their frustrations have been heard was Donald Trump. Fewer could say the same about Kamala Harris.

My much-older friend and I understand each other pretty well. After the polls closed on Tuesday night, we bounced around town partying with other Republican election nerds, watching the returns come in and staying up until the wee hours to see it live when the race for president was called. We were both 40, young and carefree that night.

We spent the next day crashed on couches, both of us feeling like we were 82.

Comments: Call or text 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com