Harris’ Weird Speech Had No Substance | Opinion

In a weird, platitude-drenched speech last night, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination as the America’s first diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) candidate for president. That’s an unpopular opinion. Democrats inherently reject any mention of the centrality of DEI to Harris’ life and career as “racist,” while scarcely hiding that it is also a highly effective means of muting any discussion of her competence, experience, and qualifications. Too many Republicans fall for that cheap ploy and avoid the subject for fear of being called “racists” by Democrats. But the fact remains that in 2020, President Joe Biden chose Harris as his running mate solely because she is a woman of color.
It did not matter that Harris’ own campaign for that year’s Democratic nomination was a miserable failure that polled in the low single digits and that she ended it before any primary due to a lack of funds. It did not matter that her four years as California’s junior senator were utterly unremarkable apart from championing DEI initiatives and viewpoints. It did not matter that her tenure as attorney general, in which, she told her listeners, she always represented “the people,” resulted in hundreds of convictions, mostly of poor minorities, that were later overturned due to evidence withheld by her office. It did not matter that her start in public life was given to her during her affair with former California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. What mattered was that Biden, with his own campaign struggling, badly needed Black support in the 2020 South Carolina primary, and cut a sleazy backroom deal to place a Black woman on the ticket in exchange for that support.
Until just over a month ago, Kamala Harris was a bad joke—unpopular even among Democrats, with a favorability rating and polling numbers lower than Biden’s, and a reputation among senior and junior administration staffers alike as a deeply insecure woman who lashed out so acerbically that her vice presidential office had a 92 percent turnover rate.
Harris’ only major assignment, as “border czar,” was an unmitigated disaster that allowed over 7.2 million illegal migrants to come into the United States after she forcefully told them on television, “Do not come.”
Harris reportedly complained that she was kept out of the limelight, not given significant responsibilities, and generally treated by Biden as an insurance policy—the chaotic, cackling alternative America would suffer if anyone ever dared try to push him out. Only when the incumbent president—whose continuing presence in office remains glaringly unexplained—proved to be so far gone that he could not possibly continue without a catastrophic loss to Republican nominee Donald J. Trump did Harris get her chance at the top job, without a single vote cast in her favor.
Democrats assembled in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention clearly did not mind being disenfranchised by this palace coup. As Harris’ increasingly nasally HR voice unrolled the speech, they clapped and cheered and chanted like trained seals at every vapid line, maudlin sob story, vague promise, and “daughter of the people” pose that emerged from the podium.
Harris consigned Biden—who was given a bum rush in a late-night spot on the convention’s low-profile first evening—to a perfunctory “thanks and I love you” and only mentioned him once after that. At times, especially when she talked about the 2024 election as a “fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past—a chance to chart a new way forward” it sounded like she was running against Biden, who, with Harris as his No. 2, has been in office for the last three and a half years. There was no sign of any critical listener on the convention floor, but voters should ask exactly where she was and what she was doing when the home, fuel, and grocery prices that she promised in her speech to reduce so drastically increased.
While Harris talked at length about her divorced parents and squalid upbringing, she uttered hardly a word about her tenure as vice president, what she has done in that role, or how she would use the presidency to keep her promises to create opportunity, enlarge the middle class, and unite the country.
She scare-mongered on abortion, falsely stating that Trump will seek a national abortion ban, and on guns, pledging to restrict their use and availability despite the horrific gun crime rates in Democratic-run cities, especially in her native California.
Despite her atrocious record as border czar, Harris pledged—once elected and not now or at any other time during her vice presidency—to bring the migrant crisis under control. She pledged to use lethal military force to stand up to our enemies, something the Biden administration, of which she was admittedly never a very valued part, has yet to do and certainly did not do in early 2022, when the addled president remarked that he would not react too strongly if Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, or earlier, when it tried its best to pay billions in tribute to Iran in exchange for empty promises not to complete its nuclear weapons program too soon.
With her party beset by division over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Harris promised security to Israelis and statehood to the Palestinians, again without any plan to achieve this virtually impossible goal, and claimed to be “working around the clock” on a ceasefire deal just days after the Biden-Harris foreign policy team yet again returned home empty-handed.
“Never let anyone tell you who you are,” Harris boasted as advice from her late mother. American voters need to ask themselves whether they really know who she is, or if she even knows.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.