Kamala Harris: No Essential Mission

Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a statement to press at FEMA Headquarters about the impact and recovery efforts from Hurricane Helene, Monday, September 30, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Polly Irungu)

In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan offers a blistering takedown of Kamala Harris’s “politics of joy” at a time in which so many Americans are suffering the consequences of the Biden/Harris administration’s mismanagement of the country. Noonan wonders, “What is her essential mission?” What does Kamala Harris stand for? Noonan writes:

Were I a Harris supporter I would be concerned about these things:

The first is so obvious it barely needs saying, but with a month to go should be said again. She still hasn’t given voters a satisfying sense of what she is about, what the purpose of her political career is. She hasn’t fleshed out her political intent—what she stands for, what she won’t abide, what she means to establish, what she won’t let happen.

What is her essential mission? Is it national “repair,” is it to “stabilize” an uncertain country, is it “relaunch”? Is it “more from the top for the bottom, period”? Is it “America as defender of democracy in the world”? Is it about focusing—now, first, and until something works—on the high daily cost of living? When things can’t be reduced to their essentials it’s because they’re not real, there’s nothing to reduce. She so far hasn’t conveyed a sense of intellectual grasp.

Her campaign has placed too many chips on the idea of the mood, the vibe, the picture. “She’s bringing us a politics of joy,” Gov. Tim Walz said, again, in his summation the other night in the vice-presidential debate. But look, “the politics of joy” didn’t help Hubert Humphrey when he used exactly those words in his announcement for the presidency in April 1968. The country was becoming undone by Vietnam and he was talking about . . . joy? It made no one smile or feel inspired except his opponent, Richard Nixon.

It didn’t do Mayor John Lindsay any good in 1966, in the middle of a transit strike and other municipal strikes, with crime starting to creep up, when he called New York “fun city.”

He meant to sound upbeat. It came across as cheery mindlessness, a deep cluelessness. New Yorkers resented it. Doesn’t this guy know what time it is?

Americans feel surrounded by crises—inflation, the Mideast, Vladimir Putin, AI’s gonna eat your brain and no one’s gonna stop it, China. You can see this in the right track/wrong track numbers, which continue underwater—the whole country fears we’re on a losing slide in a dangerous world.

They feel like Brad Pitt as Billy Beane in the movie “Moneyball.” The Oakland A’s have lost another one, and the manager, Beane, walks by the locker room and hears music. He walks in, the players are dancing and joking, and he slams a bat against the wall to silence them. “Is losing fun?” he asks them.

They shake their heads. “What are you having fun for?”

That’s more like how people feel. Is losing fun? Then why are you proclaiming joy and having fun?

Action Line: America has been losing for nearly four years. Are Americans having fun yet? Doubtful. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.