Kamala Harris and the papier-mâché coronation

How aristocratic it all sounds, if only in a playground, papier-mâché sort of way. The language of the landed gentry, the “crowning”, the “coronation” — words repurposed for republican politics — is much in evidence with Kamala Harris, who is all but guaranteed the formal nomination as US presidential candidate at the Democratic Party Convention. She has now secured the necessary votes from Democratic delegates, without running a single primary, let alone engaging any rival contenders in her party. She has also garnered support despite her abysmal efforts to secure the presidential nomination in 2020.

Her tenure as Vice President has been far from glorious, a point for which she is not entirely blameworthy given the generally titular nature of the role. “It is not worth,” John Nance Garner famously opined, “a bucket of warm pi*s.” While muddled and vapid musings at the high end of US politics is nothing new – George W. Bush demonstrated that becoming president is not contingent on lexical accuracy let alone rhetorical fluency – Harris has proffered a fair share of awful, and repetitive musings. “We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen,” for example. And the banal platoons duly cheered.

Harris is certainly the donors’ newly-minted candidate, which does much to suggest how anti-democratic the whole process has been.

Not that the process of selecting the Democratic nominee for the White House is particularly democratic in any case, given that voters in the primaries do not select the candidate directly so much as select delegates who will cast their votes for the relevant person at the National Convention. Having switched their favours from the ageing and increasingly frail Joe Biden, the monetary approval of the donor base was signalled adequately by the speedy addition to the election coffers of $81 million in less than 24 hours. Last month, the Harris campaign raised a total of $310m.

The idea of a valid contest within the party has withered on the vine, adding even more succour to the authoritarian varnish that Harris’s critics identify as critical. The sycophantic celebration of her presumptive nominee status, offering nothing by way of sustained critique of this pseudo-coronation process, adds even more of a gloss in that regard. The National Review’s Dan McLaughlin was unsparing on this point. As California Attorney General, he said, Harris “was a dangerous authoritarian with an unlimited appetite for power who displayed contempt for the Constitution and no regard for the rights, dignity, faith or reputations of anyone in her way.”

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In her failed attempt to secure the 2020 Democratic nomination, she threatened a range of executive orders that would most likely have been felled by the justices of the Supreme Court. However appealing that it would have been to the gun control lobby in terms of logic and sense, a ban on assault weapons was top of the list. Harris also proposed removing Congressional scrutiny of immigration through a generous use of executive orders, hardly in keeping with the spirit of the elected chamber. For someone keen to mark out the illiberal tendencies of Donald Trump and his imperial inclinations, her resume in this regard is conspicuously streaky.

Such a patchy record, notably during her vice-presidential stint, would certainly explain the initial reluctance — and reticence — of former President Barack Obama to buy tickets for the Harris love train. While any unattributed sources run in the New York Post should be treated with the kind of caution that demands the wearing of rubber gloves and use of garden tongs, aired suspicions can still be useful. According to the Post’s source, Obama was “very upset” by Biden’s immediate endorsement of Harris “because he knows she can’t win.” He knew “she’s just incompetent — the border czar who never visited the border, saying that all migrants should have health insurance. She cannot navigate the landmines that are ahead of her.”

This “source” certainly sounds conveniently primed and rehearsed on various talking points that will chime with the MAGA crowd. Obama, thus ventriloquised, is supposed to have said that Harris “can’t debate. She’s going to put her foot in her mouth about Israel, Palestine, Ukraine. She’s going to say something really stupid.”

Even if half-true, the comments would point to the need to have some form of contest, one possible were the Democratic Convention to be an open one. In such circumstances, the challenging candidate would require the signatures of 300 delegates to get their name included in a roll-call vote. The candidate winning the majority of the votes of all available delegates would thereby secure the nomination. As things stand, Harris has already reached the 2,350 delegate threshold of the 4,000 available via a virtual roll call.

Without delving too much into inscrutable tea leaves, this might have appeared on Obama’s political radar as a possibility, opening the prospects for any number of candidates who are now shaping up to become a running mate for Harris. An open nomination process is also reported to have interested former House speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

The New York Times, that reliable organ of establishment politics and anti-Trump mania, has also aired the view that the Democratic Party, in not endorsing a competitive process, had adopted “the playbook of ruling parties in authoritarian states.”

The choice has been dictated from the top; accordingly, the rank and file had to “fall in line and clap enthusiastically.”

The “manifest weaknesses” of Harris — her unpopularity, her poor campaigning, her abysmal management and tendency towards favouritism, her “penchant for excruciating banality,” and her Bay Area standing — were to be religiously ignored.

Whatever his reservations were, the Democratic Party machine eventually proved powerful enough to sway Obama and his wife, Michelle. In an emetic video posted on 26 July, Harris is shown accepting a joint phone call from the former first couple at a suitably choreographed point as she walks backstage at an event. “We called to say Michelle and I couldn’t be prouder to endorse you and do everything we can to get you through this election and into the Oval Office.” The Harris papier-mâché coronation for the Democratic National Convention starting on 19 August duly gathers pace.

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