August 29, 2024

COMRADE OGILVY RECEIVES FRESH AIRBRUSHING:

Out: Kamala Scrubs Berkeley and Canada Out of Her Life Story.

On the front page of The New York Times on August 26 is a story explaining that the Harris campaign has an allergy to noting their candidate was born in the radical tumult of Berkeley in the 1960s. Instead, a convention video listed her childhood home as located in “East Bay.” It can’t be “The People’s Republic of Berkeley” in anyone’s reintroduction to moderate voters.

Reporters Heather Knight and Alexandra Berzon acknowledged Kamala’s mother Shyamala was “steeped in the social activism vibrant in both Berkeley and Oakland.” They told readers that the word “Berkeley” went missing early in her career, when Harris ran for Attorney General of California in 2008.

But in other places, it’s more explicit. On their podcast The Daily — broadcast across the country on taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio — Times reporter Astead Herndon underlined that activism was prominent in her upbringing.

“This is someone who is growing up really around not only just a Black community, but a very prideful, rich history of Blackness…The Black Panthers’ headquarters was blocks from her house.” Her parents made “a very intentional effort to place their children in Black affirmation spaces,” teaching black history in a radical activist way.

The “reintroduction” shapers also left out Kamala’s teenage years in Canada. From 1976 to 1982 (from roughly 12 to 18), she lived in Montreal, where her mother worked at McGill University. The Times noted Montreal “fared even worse than Berkeley” at the convention. “The city’s name was completely excised from Ms. Harris’s re-telling of her childhood.”

In: ‘I Did Fries:’ Kamala Harris Claims She Worked at McDonald’s, but She Never Mentioned It Until She Ran for President. Did She Really Toil Beneath the Golden Arches?

Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she “was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s.”

McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has been using her fast food job to portray what the Washington Post, in a credulous piece this month on the Harris-McDonald’s connection, described as “her humble background.” (Harris is the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher, whom her campaign calls “a working mother,” and a tenured Stanford economist, who split when Harris and her sister were children.)

Early this month, Harris’s campaign said she used her McDonald’s wages to pay for college. “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college,” campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she “work[ed] her way through school at McDonald’s.” And former president Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, joked that “she’ll break my record as president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s.”

At the same time, however, Harris’s image makers tweaked the story ever so slightly. According to an August 14 item in Politico, an early cut of a Harris campaign ad said she worked at McDonald’s to “pay her way” through college. Aides changed the script to reflect that “she really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money,” as Politico put it.

The Politico story, which was published just hours after the Washington Free Beacon reached out to the Harris campaign with a series of detailed questions about Harris’s claims regarding her job at McDonald’s, didn’t say when exactly—or where—Harris worked at the restaurant. The campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon’s inquiries.

It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s. But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign’s coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions about what is now a foundational narrative.

Ed Morrissey asks, “So … is Harris faking the fryer? Flipping us the Filet-O-Fish? Giving us a bad shake for the sake of humble apple pie?”

I have a very hard time seeing why anyone would fake this kind of claim, because there’s really no upside to it. No one puts “McDonald’s fryer chef” on a professional resumé, after all, so a lack of track record on this before her first presidential run is at least explicable. I’d bet that this turns into a “Corn Pop” story — presumed fabulism that suddenly gets confirmed by witnesses, to everyone’s surprise. At some point, her fellow fryers and flippers will come forward with “My Summer With Kamala” stories, and this will all be a trivia point.

But if it is fake … don’t count on the media to cover it. Call it professional courtesy from the Fake News industry.

Finally of course, there’s Kamala’s real airbrushing, which Steve wrote about yesterday: Kamala Harris Goes Full MAGA, Endorses This Signature Trump Policy.

All of us had some fun at Harris’ expense on Monday, thanks to a little satire I wrote for you about her pathetic attempts to distance herself from the Biden-Harris record of “achievements” while also blaming Donald Trump for them. If you read Harris’ quotes — which I did not make up for Monday’s column — you’d think Trump had been president for the last four years.

Inflation? Trump’s fault. Record house prices? Trump’s fault. Slouching towards World War III? Trump’s fault. Border chaos? Trump’s fault.

And that brings us to today’s flip-flop, coming close on the heels of Harris doing the Triple Lindy on banning fracking, gun confiscation, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, decreasing funding for the Border Patrol, eliminating private health insurance, Medicare for All, court-packing SCOTUS, defunding police, Green New Deal, EV mandates, and (I’m running out of breath here) a federal jobs guarantee.

Harris wants to build the wall.

Somebody get her a red MAGA hat, won’t you?

No, wait — the New York Post already did that for us.

You’d think I’ve got to be making this one up, but no: Harris flip-flops on building the border wall.

As Ann Coulter wrote way back in 2004, “both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.”

Classical reference in headline:

UPDATE: Stolen McValor!

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll