Last week, Politico ran a headline. Once upon a time, it would have been tempting to attach some superlative to said headline, such as “astonishing,” “remarkable,” or “crazy.” Now such headlines are commonplace and illustrative of the information warfare that defines American politics. Anyway, here it is:
One of the biggest political problems in America is the complete disconnect between what passes for “conventional wisdom” inside the beltway and how most Americans’ perception of reality affects how they vote. Roughly half the country identifies as politically conservative, and beyond that, there are supermajorities involving good chunks of the Democrat party that think that elite opinion has gone too far left on several key issues.
And yet, nearly all discussions that take place context of our “media-run state” basically start from the premise that radicalism on the right is a clear and present threat to the republic, whereas radicalism on the left is never threatening to prosperity and our way of life. Rather, it’s just a messaging problem, where the establishment left must be given broad latitude to say whatever it needs to say to get elected and stave off the absurdly broad category of candidates labeled dangerous right-wing extremists. And it doesn’t matter if what is said is fundamentally dishonest because the threat justifies the deception.
This is why an army of fact-checkers, misinformation experts, censors, and journalists — and good luck telling the difference between those four ostensible vocations, as they are frequently rolled into one indistinguishable blob — exists to create the illusion of retroactive continuity between what’s being said now and what we all know actually happened.
And so we have the headlines such as the one above. In the real world, we’ve had record inflation, and anyone looking to buy a house or car has taken note of the fact interest rates are about three times higher than they were before Harris and Biden took office. But it’s not enough to say that the economy is good; before you can even choke down that obvious falsehood, we’ve moved from an incorrect cause to an offensive effect. The real problem isn’t that people can’t afford groceries; no, the real problem is the voters themselves, who are presumed ignorant for not believing a lie. Without even getting past the headline, you’re experiencing more gaslighting than a winter solstice in Victorian London.
Which brings me to another Politico headline, which even ran on the same day, natch. This time it’s a column by Jonathan Martin, a former New York Times political reporter, who is currently Politico’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. Martin is here to tell us “Here’s What Harris Must Do to Seal the Deal.” To that end, he’s hatched a plan where Harris can “prove to skeptics that she’s committed to bipartisan government” by, among other things, preemptively announcing Mitt Romney is going to be her Secretary of State.
Of course, the idea that Mitt Romney, who for years now has been a professional malcontent who’s entire public persona revolves around attacking nearly all of his senate GOP colleagues, has bipartisan cred is wishful thinking. And that’s without even going into how spectacularly Martin’s proposal validates the concern that ideological extremism is forever a one-way street. In 2012, when Mitt Romney was running for president against Obama, he was a racist, gay-bullying, dog-abusing, extremist who gave his employees cancer. Without exhuming what Martin himself said during Romney’s failed presidential bid, it sure says something that many of his peers who dutifully smeared Romney for threatening a Democratic president’s hold on power have no problems with now soliciting the guy that did all these terrible things to help elect a Democrat president.
Regardless, the whole point of Martin’s cockamamie scheme to retrofit Harris as a bipartisan moderate ultimately boils down to this assessment: “These voters don’t want white papers, they just crave reassurance Harris isn’t a lefty.”
Well, Martin has correctly identified the problem, and he’s even come up with a plan to remedy it — even if an unconvincing, last-minute feint at bipartisanship is unlikely to sway voters. But before we get on with hatching a plan to reassure voters “Harris isn’t a lefty,” Martin is skipping a pretty crucial question that anyone concerned with truth-telling would probably try and address.
Is Harris, in fact, a lefty?
The answer is unequivocally yes. She’s a creature of San Francisco politics, and she had the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate. One of the most effective ads Trump has run so far involves video footage of Kamala Harris saying, in her own words, that taxpayers should pay for the sex change operations of prisoners. Because she’s running away from her liberal record, she’s flip-flopped on several major issues since she was installed as the Democrat presidential candidate because her previously articulated positions were electorally damaging. She’s even now committed to building a border wall, for crying out loud.
Unsurprisingly, Martin and his peers have put precious little pressure on Harris to explain how and why her sudden attempt to hot swap radical leftist policies with more moderate policies is remotely sincere.
To the extent that Martin even deigns to acknowledge this might be an issue, his response is something: “I know from having covered her for a decade that she’s no faculty club progressive, much more comfortable dropping a ‘motherf–ka’ than taking care to say ‘Latinx.’”
I don’t know what world Martin is envisioning where people that swear are somehow so transgressive they’re anathema to people that police gender neutrality. Speaking of gender cops, it’s probably worth mentioning Harris, who I am assured is no “faculty club progressive,” currently has her pronouns listed in her Twitter bio. Regardless, it’s more likely that those that insist neutering the lexicon are very much the same people who consider objecting to use of the word “motherf–ka” a matter of kink shaming.
In case you were wondering, though, the word “Latinx” is used in Harris’ 2019 campaign book, The Truth We Hold, seven times — it’s eight times, if you count the fact the word has its own entry in the index. (It must be said that this is a different book than the one Harris now stands accused of plagiarizing; the book where she stole other people’s ideas amusingly titled Smart On Crime.) Anyway, maybe this is all pedantic. I’m just a guy who CTRL-F’d her book, and Martin probably knows her well enough to have her cell number. As such, I’m sure Martin would advise me to take Harris seriously, not literally.
In any event, I don’t think Martin is intentionally deceiving anyone or endorsing the idea that Kamala should openly deceive people by telling her to present herself as moderate. Alas, he’s not a cartoon villain, and if he was, that would be an easier problem to address. Unfortunately, the fact remains that deception is the logical outcome when journalists’ default assumption is that radicalism among Democrats is something to be massaged and contextualized, not called out for what it is.
As it is, Kamala Harris is pretty radical. If voters are concluding that the supposed mango monster opposing her, who thinks taxpayer-funded sex changes are bad and has long opposed letting millions of largely unvetted illegal immigrants into the country, might be the more moderate choice, well, it’s not an occasion to assail them for noticing the wrong things. It’s an invitation to state the facts fairly for once, and get out of way and let democracy take its course.
