H.L. Mencken apparently never quite said that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” He said lots of similar things, however, and I like to think he would have been proud of being the sort of chap to whom people attributed such astringent mots.
He would also, I feel sure, regard the theater surrounding the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign as a test case of the proposition.
Last week in this space, I pointed out the irony of the Sudden Harris Ascendancy Syndrome. Here she was, one of the least popular figures on the American scene—someone, moreover, whom everyone, no matter their political coloration, regarded primarily as political life insurance for Joe Biden—and yet, Wham!, the very moment Biden resigns, her media reconstruction begins in earnest.
I almost wrote “media rehabilitation,” but that would not have been quite right. We say that someone is rehabilitated when he has fallen from a previous state of health, competence, or popularity.
Kamala Harris has never been competent or popular. So what the media has done to or with her these last couple of weeks is more of an outright fabrication project. In part, as I wrote last week, it is a product of “magical thinking,” the belief, or at least the hope or pretense, that by saying something is so, you magically make it so.
The primary aim of this bit of theatrical slight-of-hand is positive. It is to make people believe, for as long as they inhabit this theater of the absurd (the show runs, by the way, until November 5) that the person answering to the name “Kamala Harris” is not against fracking, though her doppelgänger, who existed until July 21 when Joe Biden dropped out of the race, was adamantly against fracking.
They remind me of Punch and Judy, but not in a good way, especially knowing who’s doing the puppeteering.