Friday, August 16, 2024

Whose Idea Was Kamala?

Chris Queen asks at PJ Media this morning:

Is it just me, or is Kamala Harris acting like she doesn't want to win the presidential election? Nothing her campaign has done comes across as the tactics of a team that wants to get across the finish line.

He cites yesterday's case of the video she made with Walz that consists entirely of giggly small talk about white guy tacos and such, and he links to Matt Margolis:

As Vance has said, "Kamala Harris isn't running a presidential campaign, she's producing a movie."

But let's go to her choice of Walz as her running mate. What's peculiar is that one of Trump's senior campaign advisers, Chris LaCivita, who is a longtime Republican operative, in 2004 engineered the Bush campaign's use of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry, which proved to be highly effective. Walz, as it turned out, had misstated his military record much as Kerry had, and LaCivita was already in place to dust off the swift boat strategy. Matt Margoolis notes at PJ Media,

Tim Walz hasn't exactly had the best introduction to the nation. Despite the best efforts of the campaign and the mainstream media to brand him as a midwestern centrist and "America's dad," among other things, it's hard not to wonder if Walz will be the next candidate the campaign will force off the ticket to make for someone less controversial and with less baggage.

. . . We all know that the mainstream media is in the tank for the Democrats, but sometimes stories are so big that the press can't ignore them. Just like Joe Biden's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan or his disastrous debate performance with Donald Trump, Walz's stolen valor, his past DUI arrest, and even his praise of an antisemitic Muslim cleric have seen coverage in the liberal media.

Walz may be the presumptive nominee, but if the Democratic Party was willing to throw an incumbent president under the bus, it would swap him out just as easily. Many on social media are speculating that it could happen.

In fact, he's letting himself be turned into a clown opposite Kamala. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Tim Walz has been accused of peddling racial stereotypes after telling Kamala Harris he cannot handle anything hotter than a 'white guy taco'.

The Democrat's VP pick made the startling claim in a ten-minute chat between the pair posted to Harris's YouTube channel.

'Here's the deal,' the told [sic] Minnesota Governor told her. 'They said to be careful and let her know this, that black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota, you know?'

The Vice-President peeled away laughing from the exchange, but the deprecatory remarks left a nasty taste in some viewers' mouths.

'This isn't cute,' tweeted David Marcus of Fox News. 'Walz is being used as a clown to mock white people.'

. . . 'It's like a minstrel show lampooning white, Midwest stereotypes,' tweeted DC radio host Larry O'Connor.

. . . 'It's political theater,' sighed Danny Hellman. 'Tim Walz has to take a submissive role as the flavor-challenged boring White man next to Kamala Harris's spicy, pepper-growing multicultural girl boss.'

I've already said here that the subliminal image of Walz as a submissive clown isn't playing well, but this seems to be part of Kamala's campaign strategy. And this takes us back to why Walz was shortlisted as a vice presidential candidate:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was one of former President Barack Obama’s closest confidantes, led the vetting for Harris for her running mate selection process. Asked if Holder and other Democrats, like those who might want to seek the Democrat nomination for president such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and more, purposefully saddled Harris with a weak running mate in the hopes she loses this year thereby clearing the way for them in 2028 so they would have a shot at the nomination in four years, Trump said he did not know.

Indeed, as I've noted here, the whole vetting team were all Obama alumni, including Jen O'Malley Dillon and former White House Counsel Dana Remus. Somehow they either completely overlooked Walz's National Guard controversy, even though it had come up in his earlier campaigns, and his DUI, or they deliberately put him on the short list perhaps knowing that Kamala wouldn't want someone smarter or more alpha like Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro.

It's simply hard to avoid the conclusion that if Kamala really wanted to win the election, she would have chosen either Mark Kelly, who might have helped her carry Arizona, or Josh Shapiro, ditto for even more important Pennsylvania, as against Walz, who doesn't help her with anyone but submissive white dudes. A week ago, I quoted Mark Halperin, who provided about tne only possible explanation, "On deadline, one guy's easy, one guy's hard."

One guy's submissive and won't challenge her; the other choices are too smart and too alpha. Easy! But all this does is beg the question of why Obama and Pelosi, who were behind the coup, so quickly chose Kamala, when they could have chosen literally any natural-born US citizen over 35. Remember, they had already bypassed the primary process, and Joe's delegates at the convention would go to whomever they told Joe to support -- but they chose Kamala.

So far, I think J D Vance has the right of it: she's starring in her own movie. How much of this did Obama and Pelosi knowingly plan?