MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Why Kamala Harris May Be Her Own Worst Enemy. The trouble with coming up in a one-party state is that one-party states make you stupid. Plus:

On February 11, Harris appeared on The Breakfast Club podcast. One of the hosts wanted to know if she was against legalizing marijuana. “That’s not true,” she said. “Look, I joke about it, I have joked about it. Half my family is from Jamaica, are you kidding me?” She’s smoked weed herself. “I have. And I inhaled. I did inhale. It was a long time ago, but yes. I just broke news.” She went on to explain that she smoked a joint, not a blunt. And that marijuana “gives people joy.” Her father felt no joy, however, at Harris’s answer.

In a statement released to the website Jamaica Global Online, Donald Harris, an economist, wrote: “My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to their family’s name, reputation, and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this controversy.” Father’s Day should be interesting.

What trips up Kamala Harris is an evident desire to please her audience. She wants no enemies to her left, no identity politics left untouched. She can’t run as a prosecutor—crime fighting is so 1990s—but she can run as brash, bold, and woke. Her verbal miscues are possible evidence that this latest political fashion doesn’t quite fit. She has made a habit of making unforced errors, and the game is only in its first month. Harris’s Democratic opponents may be too blinkered or bashful to exploit this weakness. That will not be a problem for her Republican opponent.

Nope. And California politics doesn’t prepare you for that.