BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: “Kamala Harris Needs to Get Serious,” says Peggy Noonan:
The Washington insider path is closed to Ms. Harris because she’s relatively new to town and her president’s experience dwarfs hers.
But here’s something she could do for Mr. Biden to be useful to his larger project. She could lend what skills she has to the public presentation of the administration’s stands. Mr. Biden isn’t strong there; he’s uneven in his attempts to explain and advance policy thinking.
To do this Ms. Harris would have to decide to become serious—to inform and immerse herself, meet with party thinkers, study her briefing books. Her current strategy, to the extent it exists, appears to rely on her sense of her own personal charisma—delighted laughter, attempts to connect personally, to convey zest.
She should speak instead with sincerity and depth. She shouldn’t confuse Happy Warrior with Hungry Operative.
Ms. Harris has never seemed especially earnest. This would be a good time for earnestness.
Would a new and serious Kamala Harris be spoofed? Yes, but it would be a better kind of spoofing. Let them say you look chastened: People would be relieved to see you look chastened. Let them snidely suggest you had previously hidden your serious side. You did. Let them say you’ve been humbled. You should be. So far you’ve got a lot to be humble about.
Get your mind off yourself, give America a break, get this thing turned around.
Good luck with that happening by the Klain administration. As Scott Johnson writes at Power Line, in “High Noonan: Return to Kamala edition,” “Noonan is pathetic. Noonan’s popularity as a Journal columnist may justify the editors’ persistence in turning over the paper’s valuable editorial page real estate to her on a weekly basis, but I trust they are embarrassed by it.”