Understanding Kamala Harris’s Cynicism

By Jacob Weindling  |  August 30, 2024 | 11:40am
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Elections Kamala Harris
Understanding Kamala Harris’s Cynicism

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz sat down for their first interview with CNN yesterday, and the entire thing is instructive as to how the presidential race is likely to unfold.

First, the interviewer choice says a lot about who the Harris-Walz campaign is trying to reach with this effort to introduce themselves, and as Dave Levitan detailed earlier today with her braindead fracking questions, Dana Bash is not exactly mankind’s greatest practitioner of journalism. I have taken her to task before for producing straight up regime propaganda, and she proved yet again how she is constitutionally incapable of practicing the tenets of journalism when horse-race politics enters her brain, which seemingly is all the time. That she is CNN’s top anchor alongside Jake Tapper says a lot about CNN’s coverage of politics.

Imagine getting a chance to ask anything of someone who may be the most powerful person in the world in five months and going with this bullshit. Does Dana Bash think that Donald Trump’s racist attack against Kamala Harris has legitimacy? Because asking it absolutely indicates she believes it rises to the level of journalistic inquiry. Harris knew what she was doing when she chose Bash anyway, which provides a window into how Kamala Harris views her campaign, and it’s difficult to blame her for being a cynic given the dynamics underlying this race. Where my sensibilities get offended is the degree of cynicism on display.

As much as us lefties wish that supporting a genocide in Gaza was the catalyst for Biden’s polling collapse, it very clearly is not, and all you need to do is look at his FiveThirtyEight average to see every single poll turn against him after his calamitous Afghanistan withdrawal that sent the media into a frenzy. One of the main reasons Joe Biden was so stubborn about leaving the race were fake news polls he hated like NYT/Siena which consistently showed him winning 2020 voters and those likelier to vote. The reason Biden passed a point of no return was that he lost low-propensity voters—those who may or may not vote and tangentially pay attention to politics at best—and when they do, might just flip on CNN to watch Dana Bash and Jake Tapper tell them about the world.

If Joe Biden was still holding on to likely voters to the bitter end, then Kamala Harris can assume she will pick those voters up too. Where she has improved in the polls is with less sticky low-propensity voters, and they have a big hand in creating Harris’s momentum and pushing this race back into coin flip territory.

Which unfortunately means that this will likely be a vacuous, superficial campaign geared towards the imperial media structures which inform low-propensity voters. There’s a lot of knee-jerk instincts in politics to shame people less engaged in it than brain poisoned folks like me, but we are all products of our environment, and it is not the fault of people with a handful of choices to get their information from that those choices pump out a lot of bad information. Fake news isn’t the problem, TV news is.

Polling has long suggested that the platonic ideal for a politician in our vapid political system is to be perceived as a generic Democrat. Voters indicate time and time again that they adore politicians who genuflect left and right while providing little substance for them to critique (without doing it in a way that foments distrust), allowing voters to project their own values on to a politician they believe sympathizes with them. This is Barack Obama’s political genius, and Harris’s campaign is practicing something similar. This is in part due to the truncated campaign schedule of this unprecedented moment, which further incentivizes her to run as a generic Democrat while only providing the detail she wants voters to hear, like her plan to help people buy their first house with a $25,000 boost from the government.

It’s not a low-propensity voter’s fault if they think that “a lot of people on the progressive left” are the only ones who believe that we should stop shipping weapons to Israel when the only information provided by CNN is a baseless assertion by their idiotic anchor ignoring consistent polling like this YouGov/CBS News poll from June indicating that 79 percent of liberals, 63 percent of moderates and 61 percent of all Americans believe the U.S. “should not” “send weapons and supplies to Israel.” Dana Bash put on a classic display of manufacturing consent through her biased line of questioning last night, which is her real job that she is good at.

Which brings me to the final bit of Harris’s cynicism: her answer to Bash’s wrongheaded question designed to drive a wedge between Harris and most of her party. Harris firmly stated that she will not deviate from the Biden administration’s stance of eschewing longstanding U.S. policies that presidents like Ronald Reagan pursued, like withholding arms and supplies to stop what Reagan called a “holocaust,” in order to continue the Biden-Harris administration’s unabashed tangible support for a genocide. Her “Palestinian right of self-determination” line that got a bunch of applause at the DNC even matches Donald Trump’s language on his White House website. Nothing has changed or indicated it will change. This shit is beyond bleak.

But there is a logic to what she’s doing, even if it does include a conscious decision to downplay a genocide. All this talk of transformative change and a robust domestic policy will just be talk unless the Democrats win both the House and Senate. AIPAC is the big boogeyman who haunts the dreams of Democrats, as the DNC has let the fox into the henhouse and now allows Republican donors to set the agenda in the Democratic Party through Israel’s pro-genocide lobbying arm. The Senate map this year is incredibly tough, and according to Cook Political, the only way the Democrats can win the Senate is if they hold on to all the seats they are expected to, while winning every single race in the seven states considered a toss-up or lean D (Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Montana, Ohio), and also winning the presidency to give Tim Walz the tiebreaking vote.

Pissing off AIPAC ensures that a lot more money will oppose their candidates in the House and Senate, which has a greater effect on muddying the waters among low-propensity voters listening to people like Dana Bash push bad information. It is beyond depraved to look the other way on a genocide to back down from a fight against the people perpetrating that genocide when all polling indicates that public opinion is on your side to do something other than getting consistently played by Benjamin Netanyahu, but such is the illogic of the American political system and the Democratic Party. Money is more valuable than you and I combined, and this is just yet another example of that maxim.

It’s difficult to trust Harris on the subject of Israel’s genocide of Gaza because she hasn’t given any indication her policies would be any different than what has led us to a world where polio is making a comeback thanks to the efforts of Israel and the United States. However, I do think that people engaged in politics should not put too much stock in what she says to cynical interviewers like Dana Bash because she’s not primarily talking to us when she’s speaking to people like that, she’s fighting the war for low-propensity voters that Trump must win if he wants to get back to the White House. If she wanted to do an interview detailing the policy engaged political folks have been asking for, she would have scheduled it with someone capable of asking those kinds of informed and thoughtful questions, not the “what’s your response to unrepentant racism?” lady.

Muslim Women for Harris-Walz, which issued a statement saying that they would disband their efforts after the DNC made it clear that Palestinians are not welcome in their vision of the party, still urged their members this week to vote for Kamala Harris in November. There is a level of realpolitik here that we all must practice in a world where everyone agrees that a Republican would worsen a genocide aided and abetted by the Democratic Party. The best that those of us opposed to continued American support for Israel’s genocide of Gaza can hope for is that Kamala Harris is playing some group of voters for fools with this generic vibes-based campaign, and it’s not the majority of rank and file in her party.

 
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