Nothing Woman: Rise of Kamala Harris

The wisest words in the long histories of heavyweight boxing and presidential politics in America were spoken 124 years ago on June 17, 1900 by Nicholas Murray Butler, the eminent President of Columbia University to New York Senator Mark Hanna, then trying desperately and vainly to prevent the selection of Theodore Roosevelt as vice president of the United States.

“You Cannot Beat Something with Nothing.”

Right now, Vice President Kamala Harris is riding an extraordinary wave of liberal public hysteria across the United States eagerly fanned by the monolithic American and British liberal internationalist mainstream Media – more relentless, intolerant and absurd than anything that Pravda or Izvestiya ever stooped down to in the darkest days of the Cold War. (And I was around then: I remember.)

Eminent and successful figures in business, journalism and legal affairs have gushed to me how wonderful the emergence of Harris as the Democratic standard bearer by (apparent) acclamation in this year’s presidential race is. She is already mindlessly worshipped as a dream DEI (Diversity-Equity-Inclusion) choice of Joe Biden’s relentlessly mediocre gang of nonentities. Therefore, she is now the essential hope for the regeneration of the Entire Human Race.

The US media has already been flooded with reports that Donald Trump and his campaign were astonished by Harris’s rapid emergence as President Joe Biden’s designated successor and that they have been blindsided by her wonderful, charismatic popularity and fresh dynamic approach.

In reality, this is such a bare faced lie Josef Goebbels would have been ashamed of it.

All the Trump insiders I have spoken to over the past week cannot – and do not want to – conceal their glee at Harris’s emergence. Their nightmare was that the Democrats might actually pick an intelligent, charismatic, dynamic candidate like former First Lady Michelle Obama as their presidential standard bearer.

Far from being a breath of fresh air, all Trump’s advisers and strategists see Harris as their dream candidate – tied to all of Biden’s catastrophic policies with zero credibility: she is a leading figure in the old tepid, corrupt swamp, not a bright new beginning.

As a very old hand in watching these things, I am reminded of the sneering, arrogant condescension that senile old wealthy liberal Democrats in Bethesda bestowed upon me back in 2016 when I failed to share their whimpering adulation for former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as their standard bearer against Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.

“She has the experience, you know!”

To which I invariably replied: “Yes: experience at total failure in every post she ever held.”

The same is true of Harris.

She rose as the favored girlfriend of the Mighty Willie Brown, political boss of Northern California from 1980 to 2004 (first as long-reigning Speaker of the California State Assembly and then for another eight years as Mayor of San Francisco) to become first state attorney general, then elected senator and finally a presidential candidate in 2019 for the elections in 2020.

But throughout this rise, Harris proved lighter and less substantial than the gigantic 1930 British airship, the R101.

Like the R101, she was the subject of years of adulation by a worthless, ignorant, corrupt national press. Like the R101 she was built by an incompetent, scientifically illiterate bumbling state bureaucracy. And like the R101, her actual performance in every job she ever had was appalling. F-minus grade.

Like the R101, Harris could not handle criticism or open debate at all. And like the R101, she could not even be steered – and has always carried ludicrous amounts of (in her case political) baggage.

The R101 was supposed to fly 12,000 miles from southern England to Karachi in modern Pakistan on her maiden voyage. She couldn’t even make it over a low hill 240 miles away in Northern France and crashed killing her designers, the idiot socialist Air Minister Lord Christopher Thomson who had demanded all his favored courtiers on board.

Their fiery deaths were a godsend for Britain and Western civilization. Had they lived, they would certainly have scrapped the Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricane monoplane combat fighters that saved their country and the world in the 1940 Battle of Britain. Those little aircraft were small and not imposing like the R101. They had far shorter ranges and were loud and undignified. Worst of all, they were designed, originally financed and built by private enterprise companies.

In Harris’s case, the career records and catastrophic crashes of the R101 and Hillary Clinton are extremely relevant. Like Clinton and the airship, she rose on empty speeches and hot gas, but was dangerously underpowered with an abysmal record of public achievement.

Harris was never even a true liberal or progressive and never had any popular power base of her own. She was a nonentity produced by Willie Brown’s Northern California Political Machine and that was it.

Harris’s record as a state attorney general was cowardly and contemptible. She mindlessly prosecuted the poor and cut deals with the rich and that was it. She was very assiduous at attending wealthy liberal fundraising parties.

In the United States, Harris was The Invisible Woman. But unlike the original Invisible Woman, the fictional Sue Storm created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four, she had no force field to project or real brains or force of personality. She was simply there.

When Harris ran for president in 2019 (for the elections in 2020), the result was a humiliating fiasco. No African American voters supported her. Far more flocked to Republican candidate Donald Trump. She had to drop out of the race in December 2019 before a single primary vote had even been cast.

As NBC News put it on July 21, 2024, by the time she quit, Harris lacked money, a message and a cohesive campaign operation – all ingredients of a successful candidacy.

She was at the bottom of the pack.

As vice president for the past three and a half years, it was the same story.

Harris was routinely sent out to preach the virtues of abortion on demand – still the only supposedly potent policy plank the Democrats can credibly project – and she has proclaimed economically and scientifically illiterate nonsense about the purely fictional wonders of the Green Revolution. But outside her most limited base, that was it.

Vice presidents more often than not are meant to appear loyal and mindless, even when they are neither. This model worked very well for Joe Biden under President Barack Obama and Mike Pence under President Donald Trump. But even by these standards, Harris has been risible.

Nevertheless, of course, she could yet become president. Her entire career has been a matter of brainlessly but ambitiously moving by instinct into positions where she can please her puppeteers. But of leadership, charisma or real brains there has always been none.

She could nevertheless still win. As well as Trump, she will be up against Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. But Vance is a newcomer at even state, let alone national politics. He has a background of real achievement in writing a best-selling and acclaimed book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” made into a respected movie. He has had a successful career in high tech business. And worst of all, he is used to speaking his mind. All of these are going to be crippling handicaps if he comes up in direct debate against Harris.

In a country where at least 60 million people are eager to vote for anyone black, Asian and female – especially simultaneously, and the more mindless the better – Harris starts with enormous advantages.

The real question therefore is going to be, will she throw them all away in good time to lose in November.

Indeed, she may well win. Because as long as she keeps her mouth shut, she is safe.

And she enjoys yet another crushing advantage. She is not Joe Biden. Compared to him, the Dumb and Dumbest look and sound like Albert Einstein.

Harris will also benefit from what former National Review editor John O’Sullivan, in his day a senior political adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, described to me 24 years ago as the “feel good” effect.

O’Sullivan was referring to the huge and lasting boost in the opinion polls that 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Al Gore got from selecting Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate.

The American people, O’Sullivan candidly explained, loved to think of themselves as virtuous and above all racist and religious prejudice so they rejoiced in the selection of Lieberman, a devout Orthodox Jew, for the number two office in the land, regardless of his conformist, pro-Deep State, war hawk record.

Even with that boost, Gore contrived to lose to, of all people, dim Texas Governor George W. Bush. Bush’s gubernatorial record in the largest continental US state was indeed comparable to Harris’s as senator and vice president. It was nonexistent.

However, inept and inarticulate as Bush certainly was, enough of the American public preferred him to the obviously more brainy and aggressive Gore. That same dynamic could propel Harris into a four-year term in the Oval Office in November.

However, there is one enormous caveat to this upward and onward trajectory. Harris must not have to confront any real war, law and order, border security, financial or other crisis before the November election. For she will not have a clue what to do about any of them.

Also, Harris will not be able to hide her ignorance and incompetence behind bluster and fake macho bluff (the George W. Bush solution), high-minded but empty fake intellectual arrogance (Barack Obama) or senile incoherence (Joe Biden’s long-practiced specialty).

And against an angry but very coherent Donald Trump and a focused, relentless and definitely articulate J.D. Vance, Harris will have to convince key independents and swing voters that she actually has a brain and can use it. And that has always been Mission Impossible for her.

It must above all be remembered that this is a nonentity of a machine politician so despised that virtually all African American Democratic Party voters rejected her to support Joe Biden instead in 2020.

This reflected their rock hard, solid good judgment and common sense, at least relative to Harris’s alternative. For Biden had by then a 48-year record of consistent support on what had always been the core issues of economic opportunity, social justice, federal support and voting rights for the African American community.

Yet Harris can still win in a policy and event vacuum, even though she is and has Nothing.

However, should any kind of crisis that demands real thought and leadership, let alone brains, come up in the next three months, she will be toast in November.

Do not believe the empty hot air of mindless enthusiasm currently pouring out of the Mainstream Media’s air vents for Harris. Nicholas Murray Butler had it right 124 years ago. She cannot help remaining a “Nothing.” And the first “Something” that comes along will blow her away.