They Have Met the Enemy, and It Is Them: Harris Campaign Flails

As a former resident of Minnesota, this writer cannot say he has ever been simpatico with Governor Tim Walz. Until now. Over the weekend in Pennsylvania, Walz inveighed against the evils of American life, including the “fear” that Republicans are instilling, that the “joy” of Kamala Harris would conquer. Apparently forgetting that Harris, his running mate, is the Vice President in the current United States government, he declared with his standard theater-kid arm motions: “She simply has said it doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can’t afford, we can’t afford four more years of this. And I’ve been saying it.”

Us, too, Timmy. Us too!

Yes, we all understand that Walz probably didn’t mean to slam the current administration. He is more fluent in English than Harris, though that’s not saying much. But it’s hard to hear “another four years of this” and not think of those four-year presidential terms. And, given the inflation that has bedeviled the United States economy over the last few years, it was pretty funny to hear him talking about being able to “afford” things.

Walz’s Freudian slip was showing. And no wonder. The problems of people struggling with the economy were front and center in Kamala’s latest attempt to manage her image with friendly figures.

She sat down with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday night for a town hall and pep rally, and, without having little speeches to give as she did in the debate earlier in the month, sounded like she usually does: a teenage girl giving a book report on a book she hasn’t read and spouting platitudes about “lifting you up” and “caring.” “We believe in what is possible,” she intoned. “We believe in what can be, and we believe in fighting for that. That’s how we came into being because the people before us understood that one of the greatest expressions for the love of our country—one of the greatest expressions of patriotism—is to fight for the ideals of who we are….” Those ideals, as she continued, turned out to be a series of talking points about abortion, guns, and gender ideology. Even Newsweek chose to run a “Republicans pounce” article titled “Kamala Harris’ Oprah Interview Mocked by MAGA: ‘Word Salad,’” which, despite giving the usual signals about how the right are untouchables, seemed to acknowledge the fact that she is indeed a purveyor of word salads.

But, however, ill-spoken she was, she and those gathered to speak for her notably chose rhetoric promising change. Like Barack Obama, she would bring back “hope” and add to it “joy” as she helped the country “turn the page.” She had a plan, she told the audience, that would make things better for Americans who are struggling.

If that were true, why haven’t she and Joe Biden already enacted it?

But the line that got the most attention was her declaration that not only is she a gun owner, “but somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot. Sorry, probably shouldn’t have said that! But my staff will deal with that later.” Oprah’s face looked slightly pained as Harris said this, with her requisite weird laughing between sentences.

The whole thing was about as authentic as the ads featuring Tim Walz in his camouflaged hat and t-shirts doing things like pretending to fix an old car that wouldn’t be allowed to be produced under his own policies or posing with a rifle and looking like Elmer Fudd.

After all, Kamala Harris is about as anti-gun as they come. In fact, as Attorney General of California, she decided to enforce a law that outlawed the sale of any new handguns made after 2013 that did not have a technology that did not even exist outside of a laboratory. Running in 2019 for President, she supported a “mandatory buyback” program for “assault weapons.” And earlier this week she discussed an “assault weapons” ban (with the usual lack of any definition of an assault weapon). But her new rootin’ tootin’ shoot-em-up bravado, like Walz’s attempt at folksy manliness, shows a certain sort of desperation.

After all, the Democrats have long enjoyed the monolithic support of unions (apart from some fire and police unions). Yet this week, the Teamsters announced that they would not be endorsing Kamala Harris or Trump. Most mainstream media sources (including the AP piece linked) hid the story of internal polling showing roughly 59% of the Teamsters supporting Trump. So, too, there was little coverage of the Steamfitters Union reporting that 70% of their members support Trump.

While Democrats have been livid about these defections, ranting that Kamala Harris played a role in the passage of the Butch Lewis Act, which helped shore up union pensions, the AP acknowledges that many union members are much more concerned about “gun control, abortion and border security.” Apparently, they don’t believe in the legend of Shoot-em-up Harris. And they probably also remember that one of the first acts of the Biden Administration was the killing of the Keystone Pipeline on behalf of the climate activists, a decision which even CBS acknowledged caused a loss of at least a thousand jobs.

Pensions are indeed good things, but you gotta have a job to collect them. That’s why Pennsylvania energy workers who have been interviewed don’t trust Harris, even if she claims to have changed her position on fracking. The regulations under the Biden-Harris Administration have made things much more difficult. “It’s much easier to work under a Trump administration than this administration by far,” said Mark Marmo, CEO of Deep Well Services.

No, there’s a panic on the side of the Democrats these days. More people are catching on to the fact that Harris rallies seem to have an unusually large number of people who are bused in and far fewer locals. The coveted Taylor Swift endorsement seems to have pushed more people to not support Harris than to support her. And the battleground states are showing that “joy” and “hope” are not being sought in Harris and Walz.

The Oprah event was held in Michigan, where Trump is currently leading due to very high black support for him. Even before Kamala Harris came out during the Thursday event, Oprah herself recounted meeting a black man in the airport in Michigan who stopped to talk to her but said he was voting for Trump. Minnesota itself is now showing support for Trump that puts that state in play, a phenomenon that only happened after Walz was named the veep nominee. (Take it from a former Minnesotan: this makes sense.) And this weekend, new polling shows that Virginia is a dead heat.

In its short existence, the Harris-Walz strategy has pivoted from stealing everything Trump says he will do to running against their own positions and asking, if inadvertently, whether Americans can take another four years like the last four. Harris and Walz have met the enemy. It is them.

The difficulty is that most Americans can tell that Harris and Walz aren’t really for border security or fracking. Nor are they against gun control. Indeed, it’s an open question as to whether Harris even owns a gun. CNN’s Jim Acosta asked one of the staffers who was supposed to “deal with that later” what kind of gun Shoot-em-up Harris owns. The staffer doesn’t answer that question, a good sign that this gun is as mythical as the McDonald’s at which she supposedly worked.

A house divided against itself, a first-century rabbi once said, cannot stand. So it is that the “energy” so many Harris surrogates claim they are feeling in this race may not be a good thing. It might be the tremors of a campaign that will collapse if it can’t straighten out its story.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.