Nothing Woman Triumphant: Kamala on the Road to Victory Out of Chicago

Some things clearly have been learned in the 56 years since the wild riots and nationally televised police repression at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

Outgoing President “Waxworks Joe” Biden and his hastily rushed into place potential successor Vice President Kamala Harris both read speeches from teleprompters so full of lies that if Joe and Kamala were Pinocchio’s, their wooden noses would now reach out to the orbit of Mars.

No one in the mainstream media coverage of the events called them to town on it.

ABC, CBS and NBC, along with PBS – the Public Broadcasting Service – as always politely held their tongues – and their noses.

Eighty-four-year-old former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, whose Northern California Political Machine, fueled by Silicon Valley billionaires, continues to destroy what is left of the United States in a grip of iron, gave a podcast for Politico. That esteemed publication’s “Chief Political Correspondent” (translation – tamed, drooling poodle) sycophantically laughed and agreed with her every egregious slander, stupidity and lie. (They are well trained, these Politico hacks.)

What was the result of all that farcical prancing in Chicago’s Union Center that made even rodeo clowns look funny? Viewing figures on average were at least two full Nielsen points up on the Republican Convention in Milwaukee in July. More than 26 million viewers tuned in on the first night of the convention alone, Nielsen said.

That marks a devastating advantage for the Democrats. It means that the core constituency ready now to swallow everything Harris and her party machine say is at least 11 to 12 million higher than the core constituency for former president Donald Trump and his woeful running mate J.D. Vance.

The pattern of this campaign is now set as is usually the case in long-running US presidential contests. And it is very clear.

As I write this, on August 25, post-convention opinion polls give Harris a four-to-seven-point clear lead over Trump. Robert F. Kennedy’s withdrawal from the race and endorsement of Trump will not help him at all.

In fact, RFK is universally recognized – except on the Alice in Wonderland Far Right – as such a useless and contemptible sleaze that his endorsement of Trump will probably sway far more voters to Harris.

Trump and Vance came out of Milwaukee looking good against obviously senile Joe Biden. Trump exposed Biden’s utter worthlessness as a chief executive – and functioning human being. And Trump did so in such powerful ways that even the American people could recognize it in their one presidential debate on June 27.

But all that has been erased now, while Trump and Vance have compounded their own problems.

Ironically Trump’s record as president on creating jobs, keeping energy prices low, raising the standard of living of the middle class and the poor – and most of all avoiding getting the United States caught up in any new useless wars – was much more impressive than Biden’s – or Barack Obama’s either.

Trump did continue to vastly increase the federal deficit, but all presidents of all parties regularly do that.

By contrast, Biden bungled the US withdrawal from Afghanistan – the most humiliating event for the US government and armed forces since the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. He failed to deter Hamas from massacring 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 – the most catastrophic event in the Jewish state’s history.

Since then, Biden has totally failed to prevent or even end the massacre of at least 40,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza by Israeli bombing and retaliatory attacks too.

Houthi rebels continue to humiliate and defy the super-mighty US Navy in the Red Sea. Yet Biden routinely courts war with China in the Western Pacific. And he and his administration remain obsessed with manipulating scores of thousands more brave and helpless Ukrainian young men to be slaughtered needlessly in another endless war that Russia actually wants to end.

Also, the US border remains wide open. All the supposed extra border officials Biden and Harris boasted of recruiting are sent safely inland to shuffle papers in remote offices.

Yet none of this shameful, humiliating, appalling record of course was remotely acknowledged in all the partying and self-congratulatory speeches (a central pillar of American Civilization – as Alexis de Tocqueville repeatedly observed nearly 200 years ago).

However, the outcome of the Chicago convention is already clear: barring a global or national earthquake, Harris is going to trounce Trump in November.

Why?

First, as I noted above, the most important indicator of all, the Nielsen ratings of basic viewing figures across the United States, recorded the Democratic Convention proceedings were vastly more popular than their Republican counterpart in Milwaukee a month earlier.

Second, as Gerald Celente of Trends Journal has consistently predicted for the past two years, the horror of women across the United States at the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Supreme Court decision erasing the Roe v Wade 1972 constitutional right to abortion continues to resonate very strongly.

Trump now stands for the rights of states individually to decide their own rights to abortion and laws governing it. But all of that is drowned out by the tsunami of resentment still building over the abolition of Roe v Wade after 50 years.

Third, and hugely crucial: Vice President Kamala Harris is relatively young, still extremely attractive and she knows how to smile a lot. Trump is 78 and he has focused his campaign on anger and rage. So does his running mate J.D. Vance.

Both Trump and Vance had long, extremely successful and impressive careers before entering politics. Both of them advocate sensible, articulate, responsible, coherent and integrated policies. But none of that now matters.

When John F. Kennedy debated Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign – the first time such an event ever took place – polls showed that for those who listened on radio, Nixon won by a wide margin.

But for those who actually watched the debate on television, the cool, sexy, classically handsome, composed and charming Kennedy was judged the overwhelming winner over the sweating, shifty looking, apparently unshaven (he had five o’clock shadow) Nixon.

I observed a similar dynamic in 2000. Sitting Vice President Al Gore was obviously bigger, smarter, more masculine and macho than his insecure – and rumored to be dyslexic – Republican opponent, dim George W. Bush.

Yet precisely because Gore could not refrain from showing his (true) intellectual and physical superiority over Bush, the debates tilted more votes to Bush. For Gore always had an amazing way of supposedly doing the most high-minded things and generating the most ludicrous and catastrophic results across the world as a result.

With those precedents in hand, the outcome of a Kamala Harris – Donald Trump contest is clear. It will be 1932 all over again.

Trump is old, the public are tired of him, he is “The Past” and worst of all, he is always angry. And he shouts and gesticulates a lot.

Harris by contrast is lousy at everything else, but she is a lifelong professional politician. And she has learned, as even George W. Bush did in 2000, to let her speechwriters and puppet masters manipulate her photo-opportunities and look good. She can read from her teleprompter quite well. And most important of all, she smiles a lot.

In other words, Kamala Harris is Franklin Roosevelt compared to Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s campaign song was “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” FDR went with “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Now in 1932, FDR was actually already an outstanding twice-elected governor of New York, the most populous state in the Union. He had effectively run the shipbuilding program of the United States Navy through World War I, making it one of the two most powerful maritime forces on earth and had administered it even through the world war.

By contrast, Harris has never given any evidence she could run a country convenience store. But she smiles – a lot. The media is on her side, and at 59 she is almost two decades younger than Trump.

Most of all, Harris and her otherwise risible vice-presidential candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are both professional politicians. Even after four years in the White House and now on his third consecutive presidential campaign, Trump is still an amateur. And Vance, for all his personally impressive record of achievement, hasn’t a clue.

Trump desperately needs to drop Vance and replace him with preferably former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii or at least Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. Scott especially would give Trump what Indiana Governor Mike Pence so crucially gave him in 2016 – the reassurance of an able, loyal, experienced and above all disciplined successful political veteran.

But of course, Trump won’t pick either of them. In the suicidally self-defeating fake-macho mindset of America’s Old Reactionary Right, changing direction in midstream always connotes weakness, not an adult admission of inevitable error and the rational, competent decision to correct it.

I take back none of my previous highly negative assessments of Harris: but the outcome of the Chicago convention is clear. She is on the high road to decisive victory on November 5. Donald Trump could recognize his major mistakes and correct them. There is still time to act decisively and do so. But he won’t.