Is Kamala Harris charismatic and razzle-dazzly enough to serve as the nation’s 47th president? She doesn’t need to be. What matters is that she’s a decent, ethically grounded, steady-as-she-goes and obviously intelligent politician.

Harris can memorize and repeat the necessary talking points and can project sincerity and conviction as far as it goes, but she isn’t much for thinking on her feet and verbally tap-dancing like some wowser wordsmith…she’s no Bill Clinton, no improvisational dynamo…generating occasional breakthrough moments and special political poetry seems to elude her for the most part.

Harris was pretty good during tonight’s CNN Town Hall but she’ll never be gifted at this stuff. We all understand this, I think. But you know what else?

Within the personality and basic approach of a hard-working, carefully constructed operator, she comes off as a serious, sensible, focused, practical–minded and fundamentally moral person who isn’t into fooling around or playing games or lowering the colloquial so the rubes can have a little fun…she is who she is, and Lord knows she’s a much better human being than Donald Trump, who is clearly dangerous and insane.

I’m going to repeat this: Harris is a much better person than Trump — more sensible, more mature, a believer in regulated thought. The woke thing burns within her and that’s unfortunate, but at heart she sees life in steady, practical terms. She’s no Gavin Newsom-level orator, but she won’t generate storms of madness and chaos.

“It doesn’t cost $60,000 to bury a fucking Mexican…don’t pay it!”

Posted on 9.14.24: If Kamala Harris wants to expand her lead (and why wouldn’t she?), she needs to do three things right away.


One, make clear through surrogates what too few people seem to understand, which is that she had/has no real agency as vice-president under Joe Biden — vps are ceremonial stooges who parrot what the president wants or says — the term is “strictly backup” as no vice-president except Dick Cheney has ever significantly influenced any president’s policy or decisions.


Two, admit that the Biden administration made a few mistakes (i.e., Afghanistan withdrawal, overly liberal immigration policy, too accommodating to crazy wokesters on gender stuff and pregnant men) but that she’s learned from these errors and here’s how she feels now.


Three, in line with admitting these mistakes she needs to do what vice-president Hubert Humphrey did during his 1968 presidential campaign, and that’s break with the president on this or that matter of policy. Announce that when she becomes president she’ll be going her own way and calling her own shots. Humphrey didn’t rise in the polls until he broke with LBJ over the Vietnam War. If he’d announced his differences with LBJ earlier in the campaign HHH might have prevailed over Richard Nixon.

Bill Maher last Friday night: “Kamala’s big challenge [as far as] winning over the undecided voters, is to convince them that she’s not what they suspect she might be, [which is] sort or a stealth version of the worst excesses of the left. I’ve said there’s a coalition of Trump voters…the ones that really like him, and those that don’t like him that much but still think he’s less crazy than [woke] stuff that strikes them as aggressively anti-common sense.”