Rich Lowry
Syndicated columnist
The basement campaign has been updated. Kamala Harris isn’t in the cellar of the Naval Observatory campaigning via Zoom calls a la Joe Biden in 2020.
No, she’s speaking to adoring crowds fired up by pop stars. She’s identifying herself with the latest trends (she’s “brat’” now). She’s clapping back against Donald Trump with panache.
In one of the great political transformations of our time, she’s gone from a subpar vice president to the second coming of Barack Obama in the space of about two weeks.
Except Obama was a genuine political talent who was glib enough to handle almost anything. He wasn’t an intellectual but was a writer with intellectual interests — in another life, he could have been a staffer at The New Yorker instead of president (would that it had been so).
The people most aware that Kamala isn’t truly a new version of Obama are the people around her, who clearly fear putting her in any setting where she isn’t reading from a script.
Biden’s basement campaign in 2020 kept him from having to go out and build a crowd, but he did interviews.
Kamala’s teleprompter campaign in 2024 is meant to limit her exposure to keep her from inadvertently bursting the media bubble that’s been created around her.
In that, her campaign may resemble the pre-debate Biden approach this year more than his limited stumping in 2020. Biden’s operation feared putting him out in any setting where he’d be challenged, and when his abysmal debate performance forced them to do so anyway (to prove he’d just had “a bad night”), the additional exposure resulted in predictable disaster.
Kamala’s problem isn’t messing up names or dates or losing her train of thought — hallmarks of aging. Rather, she often ends up repeating the same (usually banal) thought in slightly different words, so she expresses herself in an endless loop of vacuity.
In one of her few off-script comments since her ascension, she explained last Friday why Biden should get credit for the prisoner swap with Russia: “This is just extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy and strengthening alliances.”
For those keeping track, that’s three “understands,” two “diplomacys” and two “strengths” in one sentence. All that she said is that it’s important that Biden understands diplomacy, but she didn’t know how to land the plane after stating this simple idea in a brief sentence.
Because Kamala hasn’t been out there, we don’t know in her own words how she feels about the amazing turn of events over the last two weeks, how she plans to lead, or — and this is important — how she explains her multiple changes in position since she last ran for president.
If a presidential candidate flipflops on one thing during a campaign, it’s usually a focus of discussion for weeks. She’s done it on about eight things with no explanation whatsoever and without generating any significant media static. If you were them, wouldn’t you want to keep it that way?
The campaign will eventually need to do some interviews. Perhaps they will schedule some appearances on MSNBC and with sympathetic influencers. Then, they can address the criticism that Kamala is only talking to partisan outlets with a sit-down with a relatively safe journalist who has credibility in the broader media, say, Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes.” Besides that, back to the teleprompter!
It’s extraordinary that the Democrats had one presidential candidate whom they didn’t trust with interviews and have replaced him with another, fresh and younger candidate whom they also don’t trust with interviews.
This is why Trump has to debate Harris. Given the way Harris has been hiding from the media, a debate (or debates) may have to be one of the main means of trying to expose her.
She’s out of the basement, but she’s never off-script.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.