Kamala Harris is Not Running for President
The 2024 election will not take place.
Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign is odd because it is not a campaign at all. Kamala Harris is not running for President. She is producing a TV show.
The 2024 election cycle has been abnormal. President Joe Biden was hailed as youthful and full of vigor at every turn, and then he debated Donald Trump. The most dishonest among us thought it was a tie. Those with any sense recognized that it was pretty much elder abuse. Not by Trump, but by Biden’s handlers. Then, Trump was shot. Then, Biden quit. Then, he endorsed VP Kamala Harris, likely to the dismay of the Obamas. Kamala has since been nominated as the Democratic contender for the Presidency, despite not winning a single primary. This week, she selected Tim Walz as her running mate.
As soon as Biden dropped out and Harris emerged as the likely candidate, I could not help but reflect on how strange it is going to be to fit the entire arc of a Presidential campaign into a few short months. These campaigns have a natural life cycle. If you are not the incumbent, the energy slowly builds up over time as you win primaries, overcome colleagues, receive your party’s nomination, and then run head-to-head against your opponent in the general.
Think about Presidential elections in your lifetime. They are always a journey from one media event to another. The candidate holds rallies, does interviews, has press conferences, and over time feeds the electorate their general vibe. A Presidential campaign is a series of media events.
Under this definition, Kamala Harris is not running a Presidential campaign. A Presidential campaign is a series of media events. Harris’s campaign is a media event.
Sure, she is the Democratic nominee for President, but she is so under incredibly unique circumstances. There is a necessary temporal compression that must occur to run a Presidential campaign, which is about a 1.5-year event, in a mere 4 months.
Let’s look at some history to illustrate this point.
Donald Trump selected his 2024 running mate 722 days after his Presidential campaign started.
Joe Biden selected his 2020 running mate 474 days after his Presidential campaign started.
Hillary Clinton selected her 2016 running mate 467 days after her Presidential campaign started.
Donald Trump selected his 2016 running mate 395 days after his Presidential campaign started.
This puts into perspective how long a Presidential campaign is. Kamala Harris started her 2024 Presidential campaign on July 21, 2024, and selected her running mate 16 days later. It is an accelerated campaign.
The electorate has barely had time to consider the candidate alone before considering the candidate with a running mate. That is not bad or good, it is just different.
The temporal compression of the Harris campaign seems to have squeezed out all of the interviews and press conferences so far. As of the start of the DNC, she has fielded very very few questions from reporters, and she has yet to even do a softball MSNBC 10-minute interview.
This strange compression works because the VP’s Presidential campaign is not a Presidential campaign at all. It is a complete and utter pseudo-event. It is a reality TV show because TEEVEE is all Americans can comprehend. She has no policies listed on the Harris-Walz campaign website. She does not feel the need to explain her out-of-touch and would-be disastrous economic proposals, because that’s boring!
It is not a Presidential campaign, it’s a bonus season of The Office.
“Hey, did you see that clip of Kamala and Governor Walz talking about how Walz doesn’t like spicy food? So funny! Because white people don’t like spicy food!”
“Oh my goodness, did you see Tim Walz handing Kamala that bag of Doritos in the convenience store? They make such a great team!”
These bizarro clips of obviously scripted and extremely unnatural interactions between Harris and Walz are the real project. Politics is spectacle. It’s a goofy TV show. It’s a Marvel movie. And the good guys do the comedy routine, and then they win!
This is what the Harris campaign is banking on is that this astroturfed media blitz will get enough Americans to the ballot box to install her for a live-action reenactment of [bland generic hit TV comedy show #241].
Baudrillard says in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that in warfare, the hostage has replaced the warrior.
Taking the place of the warrior's challenge, hostage value has become synonymous with the debility of war. We are all hostages of media intoxication, induced to believe in the war just as we were once led to believe in the revolution in Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as though confined to quarters. We are already all strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day, even while serving as exchange value. (Page 25)
The Harris campaign might be right because we are all hostages to the media apparatuses.
Baudrillard states that there is no strategy in media-age warfare. Blackmail takes the place of strategy, and meaning is hollowed out of everything. Saddam has vulgarized everything, and the religious motivations are completely fake. Meaning is dress-up for real action.
The DNC speakers talk ad nauseam about “defending our democracy” - a religious incantation. Land speaks about this. There is no content to this religious incantation. It is a Halloween costume where one puts the sheet over their head in the form of a ghost, but as it turns out, there is nobody underneath! The ghost-sheet moves forward anyway.
This hollow religious incantation allows for deterrence to grow. Deterrence is the new form of violence, Baudrillard says. You are stopped before you can even sin and be punished. The new religion causes everyone to quickly fall in line with the updates to dogma, even if there is no enforcer around. It isn’t monkeypox anymore, it’s mpox!
“We should have been suspicious about the disappearance of the declaration of war, the disappearance of the symbolic passage to the act,” Baudrillard says (page 26). I say we should be suspicious about the disappearance of the declaration of policy preferences, the disappearance of the nomination ritual!
The Harris campaign is disconnected from reality, but that works today because we have lost touch with reality. We live in a world of symbolic exchange. Props to the Harris campaign for recognizing it. Let’s see if it produces the desired outcome.
Whats more important here is the fact she’s even the nominee in the first place. It represents the final hollowing out of the presidential position. Reminds me of how the roman senate continued to function and seem important long after Caesar was knifed. The elected officals of national govt are all jokes. The only one of the three branches that still nominally functions as explained in school textbooks is the supreme court (tellingly not full of elected officials) and it is seen as a threat and is also at risk of being fully hollowed out via stuffing more judges into it.
Who exactly runs the government again? Managerialism hates having “the dude” in charge.
I.e. “the dude” in russia or china is patently obvious as a comparison. Who is “The dude” in the united states? Don’t know? Uh oh!
Do not engage with journalists, do not detail proposals, do not answer questions.
If you are correct Harris will NOT debate Trump.
It is going to be super interesting to see if your take on it is correct.