SHARK SANDWICH: Nancy Rommelmann: When Is a Tuna Sandwich Not a Tuna Sandwich? When it’s the press asking us to see Kamala Harris as the second coming of Julia Child.
If I try very hard, I can squeeze out a drop of admiration for the White House staff. They stayed at their posts, and if this meant feeding the public a steady diet of bullshit sandwiches with the intent of keeping Biden in office, no less sentient, then so be it. But I cannot summon that drop for the journalists conscripted to distribute the sandwiches. They had one job, to be the eyes and ears for the public, and in this they failed. Some of the failure can be traced to a susceptibility to a brain fever inspired by Donald Trump, a fever that told some reporters it was not only okay to act on a set of alt-journalistic principles, it was noble, and if this meant squinting hard enough to see a visibly failing 81-year-old man as the most capable person to lead the nation, they would do it. They had to. Animus for Trump was the power-pack they and the administration had counted on riding to 2028 and, as stinky and rickety as it might be, they could let go only at their own peril.
And then on Sunday, in flew a deus ex machina. You can nearly hear the communal heave of relief from those on the political beat. No more proppin’ up ol’ Joe; with Harris, they had a fresh candidate to spit-shine, and I imagine the country’s editors working double-time, trawling for stories that made the vice-president look, if not cuddly, then at least relatable, and didn’t she do some cooking thing a few years ago?
Which is how we wound up with multiple national reporters snorting up what crumbs they could from a short-lived “Cooking With Kamala” series on YouTube, in which — spoiler alert — the only item Harris herself cooks to completion is a tuna sandwich.
“All hail Kamala the Great!,” Neo writes:
The Democrats and the MSM have figured out a way to handle all of this. It involves three steps. The first is to re-invent Kamala as the ENERGIZED! EXCITING! FRESH! candidate, as though she just dropped in from planet Xenon and has no history. Her remarkably undistinguished record (and that’s being kind) as part of the Biden administration’s failures will be ignored, in hopes of Kamala 2.0 catching on with the public. Step 2 will be to hammer home the idea that Republicans threaten women’s “reproductive rights” and Kamala and the Democrats will protect them. Step 3 involves choosing a more moderate running mate in order to preserve the fiction that Kamala will not govern from the far left.
No doubt, as Charles Cooke writes, Kamala can win. But unlike Obama, (Bill) Clinton, and Jimmy Carter when they debuted upon the national scene, she’s not, to borrow from Obama’s description of himself from The Audacity of Hope, “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes [can] project their own views.” And she lacks Obama and Bill Clinton’s rock star personalities and undeniable skill at retail politics:
This isn't going to be like Obama for the media. She has a very public record of comments, a prior presidential run, and in administration policy positions like put in charge of the border. This is going to be a heavy lift for them. https://t.co/YlAuH2dv1W
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 25, 2024
Classical reference in headline: