The Road to Kamalot

The times they are a crazy-ee. One candidate is shot but the other is the one felled. After the prolonged despondency over Joe Biden as their 2024 champion, in a burst of celebratory relief, newly-energised Democrats are rallying behind Kamala Harris as his replacement who represents the future to Trump’s disreputable past. Not so fast. The Democratic liberal elite march to the battle hymn “I am victim, hear me whine”, even from a child of privilege. The handover from Joe from Scranton to Kamala from California symbolises not just the baton passing to the next generation, but also a Democratic party more concerned today with environmental and social justice activism than its historic mission to protect the jobs and raise the living standards of workers.

I’ve been speculating since January that the Democrats would wait until after the Republican convention had confirmed Trump before forcing out a clearly impaired Biden. This would allow the party powerbrokers to nominate the candidate of their choice without the messy untidiness of a contested primary. The strategy owes much to Harris’s flawed candidacy as an electoral liability with a record of failing upwards. She was elected Attorney General of California, a deep blue state, in 2010 with less than 1% margin when other candidates won landslide victories. Her 2020 primary run collapsed with spectacular swiftness. In 2020 and 2024 combined she won exactly zero delegates in two runs to be the Democratic presidential nominee. She wasn’t chosen as Biden’s running mate based on past achievements and known potential, but because she ticked all the identity boxes. Kamala Devi Harris is a diversity pick thrice over: a woman, a black and a South Asian. The very same traits bullet-proofed her against being passed over in 2024. Yet the multitude of security failures that gave an amateur assassin multiple shots at Trump show the deadly consequences of elevating diversity criteria above merits and competence.

Not only does Harris present as a diversity candidate in violation of the merit principle, she is the candidate anointed by the D.C. elite backed by the Democratic-adjacent media, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy donors, rather than chosen by voters as the party’s standard-bearer. Saving democracy means protecting the Democratic party’s right to rule. Democratic voters who have been gaslit for years and were given an unqualified candidate, are now assigned a candidate they didn’t rightfully elect in a primary and told to laud Biden’s selfless gesture in stepping aside. Trump noted at a campaign rally on July 24th that the 14 million primary votes for Biden have been transferred to Harris without voter consent. Biden’s withdrawal was not a noble act of sacrifice but a brutal palace coup against a stubborn and delusional President. The announcement was made not from the Oval Office but on X from Biden’s personal account during a period of zero public appearances following an unspecified medical emergency. The Harris coronation was orchestrated by a ruling elite, terrified of losing the holy trinity of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives due to the belated public exposure of Biden’s decline. Yet we are told that Trump is the great white threat to American democracy.

Both parties are busy trying to define Harris with respect to her organising principle of politics and who she is as a person. Trump will paint her as a failed and unpopular Vice President who knifed her boss to steal a nomination she could not win in an open primary. As possibly the Democrats’ weakest and wokest candidate, she offers a target-rich record along four attack lines.

1. She is a California progressive-radical Leftist who supports slavery reparations, racial and gender identity, elimination of private health insurance, cuts to police budgets, BLM rioters, decriminalisation of illegal immigration and health insurance coverage for the border-crossers (powerful ‘root causes’ of the problem), sweeping state diktats on what to drive and eat in pursuit of Net Zero, and federally legislated abortion almost to full term. How does she reconcile her passionate support for women’s choice and opposition to end Hamas’s hold over Gaza?
2. Her transactional record as a San Francisco and California prosecutor who opposed criminal justice reform, cut corners in disclosure requirements that led to over 1,000 cases being dismissed, flipped and flopped between tough on law and order who was harsh on blacks committing drug crimes and wanted to punish parents for their kids’ truancy, and a soft-on-crime persona. Like Groucho Marx, Harris has her foundational principles and if voters don’t like them, why she has many others in her ethics cupboard.
3. She cannot disown the administration’s policy failures: the porous southern border under ‘border czar’ Harris, inflation, student debt cancellation, the shambolic Afghanistan withdrawal, heightened geopolitical tensions in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, and, as someone who interacted with Biden on a regular basis, the insistence that his visibly fading health and cognition were A-okay until suddenly they weren’t. Biden can’t even manage reading from a teleprompter without gaffes and stumbles including reading aloud the prompts to pause, repeat a word, etc. He mumbled and stumbled in his address to the nation to explain why he withdrew. Matt Orfalea has posted a six-minute ‘sharp as a tack’ compilation on X. What did Harris know about Biden’s failing health and when did she know he was no longer fit to serve? Can she explain why Trump’s age is a problem in the context of her continuing support for Biden even though he is a few years older and clearly less physically fit and mentally agile?
4. Her addiction to word salads, speaking mannerisms and condescending speeches. While Biden is famous for gaffes, fabulism, mental blackouts and physical stumbles, Harris matches him for inauthenticity, kookaburra cackles, babbling word salads and kindergarten teacher homilies. Her abrasive management style caused a high staff turnover in her 2020 primary run and then again in the Vice President’s office.

Gerard Baker wrote in the Times that Harris “is the product of the modern elite” who “deploys her status as a woman and an ethnic minority to portray herself… as a victim of structural racism and sexism. Which makes her, in fact, the perfect Democratic candidate”. As the Democrats become the party of elites, the “deplorables” are drifting to the Republicans. The Harris honeymoon based on sharp age, gender and race product differentiation from Trump could have a short shelf life. The Democrats’ switcheroo changes the election dynamics but not the candidates’ relative strengths and shortcomings. The road to Kamalot has many a pothole to upset the apple-cart. In the first set of Trump-Harris head-to-head RealClear Politics poll averages on July 25th, Trump was ahead by 1.7% nationally, 3.8% in five battleground states, 23 points in the betting odds and 312 to 226 in electoral college delegates. The election is still Trump’s to lose – not that he can’t.

Ramesh Thakur is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, the Australian National University. This article was first published by Spectator Australia.