Much in the manner of the most famous modern crash-and-burn campaigns – George McGovern in 1972 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 – the signs are there that voters are starting to ask about Kamala Harris the political “toast” or “doom” question from which no presidential campaign can recover: “If she can’t even run a campaign, how can she run the country?”
The steady pattern since early September of questionable decisions, sudden turnabouts and self-induced controversies that have plagued the Harris campaign reached last week exactly the sort of crescendo seen at a similar point in the McGovern and Dukakis efforts: A stream of negative headlines from continuing revelations about the past record of the candidate and her running mate, attempts at clever tactical moves that become strategic debacles, the release of TV ads or videos that anyone outside the campaign finds incomprehensible or even mildly ridiculous, public appearances by the candidate and the campaign’s most prominent surrogates that draw backlash and worsen the problem they are supposed to fix, growing complaints by party professionals and operatives about campaign oversight or ineptitude, down-ballot candidates out abandoning the national ticket, and a campaign structure struggling to process disturbing developments or disappointing news but even when it does coming up with solutions that seem more improvised exercises in self-therapy than effective political fixes.
This sort of thing has been seen before and with serious consequences. Here is the history:
Like Harris, McGovern had an embarrassing vice presidential pick in Thomas Eagleton (he was eventually forced to ask Eagleton to withdraw after pledging to back him “1,000 percent”) and then got attacked over and over on his far-left record while his reckless changes on policy positions made him subject to devastating Nixon attack ad depicting the South Dakota senator as a political weathervane. So too, Dukakis had his share of recurring problems and self-inflicted wounds driven by a staff that had no strategy to counter charges that he was hopelessly liberal and then showed itself capable onlyof trying to fix that problem with hard-to-understand tv spots as well as mystifying media events that included the infamous and rather comic moment when in answer to criticisms of his national security bona fides he appeared riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting tank commander’s helmet.
Anyone searching for parallels to the Harris campaign need only look at two key events last week: the New York Al Smith Dinner that Harris had declined to attend and an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier that she did attend – or sort of.
At the Al Smith dinner, Trump left the audience laughing with jokes about the missing Harris and Democrats that got wide and favorable coverage. But Harris, who became the first presidential candidate to skip the famed Catholic charity event since 1984, only appeared “virtually,” sending in a strained pre-recorded video that seemed to have been cooked up by SNL writers having an off day and very badly in need of a review by a political professional or even just an adult.
The importance of the moment lay, however, in the chain of events that had led to the Harris campaign’s hasty “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” decision weeks ago to simply decline the invitation to the iconic dinner. At the time, media attention was growing from a series of two minute long super PAC ads in English and Spanish against Senate Democrats in Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico (subsequently expanded into Ohio and Pennsylvania) that were detailing multiple instances of anti-Catholic bigotry by the Democrat Party. Spooked by the image of Harris facing the never-timid Donald Trump bringing up such a bill of particulars in her presence, the campaign showed, as one article noted and predicted at the time, not only disarray but the kind of overreaction certain to stir the very controversy it was trying to avoid.
That article proved prophetic as the announcement of her Al Smith bug-out triggered coverage of charges that Harris was “the most anti-Catholic candidate in the last 150 years” by Newt Gingrich on Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business show, a Trump Truth Social post citing many of the instances of Harris’s anti-Catholic bias seen in the two-minute Senate ads, and then JD Vance raising the issues of Democrat Party persecution of the Little Sister of the Poor as well as Catholic doctors and hospitals during his vice presidential debate with Tim Walz. Accordingly, with the “anti-Catholic bigotry genie” out of the bottle, articles soon appeared about Harris’s Catholic problem even in news outlets friendly to her such as Politico and the news section of The Wall Street Journal.
But if the contrast between Trump drawing cheers at the Al Smith dinner and Harris drawing boos (and in no small part due to that video’s apparent mocking of Catholics) was putting on full display the weakness of the Harris campaign’s decision making, equally astonishing were events surrounding its push to do an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. A decision beyond puzzling really since Harris operatives had to know that while Baier was going to be polite he had to ask some of the questions that Harris had already struggled with in various interviews. After Baier played Harris an ad, for example, exposing her prior support for taxpayer-funded sex change operations for prisoners, Harris responded by complaining about how much Trump spent on the ad while failing to denounce the policy. On the economy, Harris had failed to provide any specifics about her plan to bring down inflation. But, perhaps most damningly, Harris again reiterated her stance that she would have done nothing differently from Joe Biden over the past four years, repeating comments made on The View a week prior. After all this, the campaign staff turned a bad moment into a fiasco as handwaving Harris aides – who had deliberately gotten her late to the Fox studio – tried to shut the interview down.
In any case, Harris’s Fox appearance was ultimately deemed so bad that some outlets even suggested it may have been just as disastrous for her candidacy as Joe Biden’s June debate with Donald Trump was for his. All of this, of course, raising again the fatal competency question in voters’ minds.
The very fact, however, the Harris campaign decided to do the interview in the first place can be seen as a final playing out of the sort of disarray and incompetence seen in Harris’s media tour of the week when she faced supposedly friendly interviewers on 60 Minutes, The View and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Despite receiving mostly softball questions from the sympathetic journalists and commentators, every appearance seemed to surface a Harris misstatement or contradiction or evasion that led to a week’s worth of bad headlines. And then a controversy over 60 Minutes doctoring of her interview to make her look better added more damage. And this is not to mention a kind of ultimate moment in political ham-handedness that saw the Vice President of the United States drinking beer on a late night comedy show while Southeastern states struggled with the death and devastation of a historically destructive hurricane.
As in the case of the McGovern and Dukakis campaigns, all of this amounted to a case study in the history of political staffs that can’t handle the stress and pressure of a faltering campaign – a dynamic of oscillation between complete paralysis and then hasty overreaction. And so the evidence is there this dynamic has taken full hold as Harris, after becoming the nominee back in July, steadfastly avoided any situation that would require her to speak off-script, suddenly decided to avoid an important political event at which she might have shown some grace or steadiness with a prepared statement but then did do a string of interviews that all ended terribly for her.
A more disciplined campaign would likely have eased off the media moments, maybe done some long format speeches, and allowed Harris’s surrogates to make her case for her. But instead, what we’ve seen is a campaign and candidate that think they can “fix” everything by doing more of what isn’t working.
Thus do instances of a campaign that can’t recover abound. The Harris campaign still has, for instance, no real answers as Harris has also been dealing with a plagiarism scandal following revelations that she lifted large parts of a co-authored 2009 book from other sources, including Wikipedia, without crediting them. In addition, the campaign’s response to polling that showed the vice president deep underwater with male voters, in particular black and Hispanic men, put on a display its habit of making every problem worse. Instead of some introspection on why Harris might be alienating men, her campaign resorted to more quick fixes dispatching Barack Obama to lecture black men in his best Parson Grim manner about why they’re sexist if they don’t vote for Harris and then cutting a bizarre ad challenging men to be “man enough” to vote for her. Similarly, in trying to deal with criticism of Harris as the administration’s “border czar” the campaign not only scheduled a photo op at the border that drew a spectacular amount of attention to possibly her weakest issue but sent to the rescue Bill Clinton , who promptly made things worse by noting that murdered coed Laken Riley would still be alive if the illegal alien who killed her had been “properly vetted.”
So too, the campaign had shown the fatal fault of downplaying warnings as early as weeks ago from Democrats with a firmer grasp on reality. Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Elissa Slotkin had sounded the alarm that Harris is “underwater” in the state and Pennsylvania Democrats started criticizing the organizational effort in their state. To add to all of this, Axios was reporting “increasingly fraught” tensions between Kamala Harris’s team and Joe Biden’s White House staff.
And then came last week that final sign of a failing presidential effort as down-ballot Democrats declined to appear with Harris and asked the Harris campaign to stay away from their districts. As The Daily Caller recently reported, “Battleground Democrats are avoiding Kamala Harris like the plague as Election Day nears.” Even worse, Democrat candidates like Bob Casey are actually putting Donald Trump, not Harris, in their ads.
So for Harris, the danger isn’t just an ineffective campaign, but a campaign whose dysfunction is now moved beyond just murmurs or comments in Washington circles but into the public consciousness. This, combined with the rolling cascade of unforced errors, may lead many voters to the obvious conclusion and the answer that is always fatal to any presidential candidate – how can they possibly vote for a candidate who can’t even get her own campaign in order?
In hindsight, that Harris’s campaign would devolve into chaos and disorder may always have been a matter of when, not if. Her short-lived 2020 run was slammed by insiders as having “no discipline, no plan, no strategy.” Harris’s vice presidential tenure has been similarly chaotic, with an astonishing 92 percent staff turnover rate and myriad reports that Harris mistreats those under her. And no one should forget that as early as one of her first real interviews, a comment she made pandering to gun owners – her “I own a Glock” claim – led to comparisons to Dukakis’s “look at me I can drive a tank” moment.
Harris still has a huge money advantage and her campaign is hoping that a blizzard of TV spots and a sizable ground game will make a difference in what it sees as a still close race. Moreover, it hopes that Trump’s rise in the polls will tempt overconfident Republicans or Republican-leaning voters into turning up at the polls.
But such hopes are hard to keep alive with the competency question – one that Harris has struggled on every time she has been in the spotlight— taking on the force and power it has in recent days. Ultimately, it might be what sinks her bid for the White House as her campaign joins that of McGovern and Dukakis in the annals of imploded presidential aspirations.
Because to voters it’s just common sense – if you can’t run a campaign, you can’t run a country.
B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with previous experience in the legislative and executive branches.
